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Game Developers Cracking Down on Cheating
Hector73 writes "ZDNet has an article discussing a growing concern for the makers of on-line video games. Cheaters and trolls are making it harder for casual users and newbies to get hooked on the on-line versions of games. Considering that on-line gaming may become the major revenue source for game makers over the few years, maybe they will actually do something about it."
How long would Tiger Woods put up with the PGA if people took a mulligan any time they wanted?
When I buy a game, I'm purchasing the entertainment. If you're on there with autoaimers or speed-up cheats, you're taking my entertainment away.
I'm all for people having the right to cheat as long as they're clearly labeled as such. Heck, that might be interesting to have an all-cheaters league. Let the best cheater win. Keep them out of the other normal games.
The fact is that games can not simply act as a glorified frame buffer and transmit keystrokes and mouse movements to a centralized server and then display the results with minimal computation on the client side.
To get around the limits of network connectivity available to vast majority of people developers have to allow the client to render the graphics and interpret the input and then send back the minimum that is needed.
While we all know that open source generally increases security, when you're dealing with people who are trying to abuse features you can't let them know all your secrets. Open source security assumes that the people working together want access to each other, but want to keep others out. The game security model assumes you want to let anyone in, but keep them from doing bad things.
Thus unless you move all potentially abusable functionality to the server side, open source gaming will be limited except for games which tolerate low bandwidth and slow ping times.
Nascantur in Admiratione. (Let them be born in Wonder)
Well, we have seen valve put in code with Counterstrike 1.4 that checks to see if your opengl.dll is correct, to stop people with cheats like OGC. However, this sucks for all those using wine, becuase wine uses a hacked version of opengl to run windows games in linux. I've been cs free for about a month now, as a result.
The real irony is, wine will not load cheats (as far as I can tell), so people using wine cannot cheat. I had a similar issue with Cheating-Death.
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Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
I've played my share of online games, from the simple telnets to the varied mmorpgs. Technological and admin based solutions never seems to adequately solve any real poroblem.
You can boot players, ban IPs, reprimand, close servers, but the miscreants always find a way back in, because its an enjoyable game to them... annoying others.
The only viable solution I've ever come across is the social stigma. This method of self-regulations fails if the game doesn't implement a system of reliance on other players though. As long as several players are needed to band together to achieve certain goals, social stigma works.
Picture a mmorpg where you need 3 other players to help you defeat a certain barrier. There's no other way, its part of the game structure. If you're a cheater, others won't help and you're limited in your game play. Where's the fun now?
Game builders have to be aware that cheaters exist and really strive to construct game play in such a manner where players can self-regulate like that. Admins and code-limitations never seem to solve the real problem.
I can see you you can crack down on cheating, most people don't like it, and would support that kind of action, but Trolls? How could you ever crack down on that without censureing(sp?)? I personaly like the /. method of moderation, because all the posts still show up, but we can choose how much crap we want to see. But how can you implement that in a real-time senerio? I don't see how without using server-side filters which people will object to, or client-side filters which has already been done before.
Sigs are out of style, so I'm not going to use one...oh wait..
I know lots of Counterstrike players who are constantly banned from servers for winning too much: unless the other players are at the same level, they assume the better players must be cheating.
(of course, this never happens to me; nobody could cheat and still suck so badly)
Perhaps a ranking system. Players of approximately equal skill are pooled together by the server automatically after a certain minimum number of games. Cheaters can then play to their heart's content, but will end up with other cheaters and those who are so good that they can take on cheaters and still live.
Games with huge numbers of people like EverQuest will suffer from a certain number of bad apples, just like the real world. They're ultimately going to need to rely on policing, technology can't solve everything.
Fortunately, many games don't have huge numbers of players. Quake games peak at a few dozen. Even as small scale games grow, there are practical limits that will keep size down.
There is a partial solution I haven't seen implemented yet: trust networks. To play, you generate a public key and share it with all of the other players. As you play, you mark other players as being friends. (You can also blacklist them, but it's easy for the other person to create a new identity, so it's only a very small part of the solution.) When you mark another player as a friend, your client provides them with a signature proving that you marked them as such. Then based on these networks of trust you can make judgements about who to play with. When you create a game, you might limit it to "my friends, my friends' friends, and 3rd generation friends if they have at least three references from 2nd generation friends." Maybe you leave a spot or two open for anyone to hop in on as a way to make new friends (and if they're a punk, you and your friends can blacklist him quickly).
This will make it harder for truely new people to make initial friends. Many gamers will know at least a few real-life friends who can give them a hand up. For the rest, they'll regrettably have to spend some time learning who they can trust. It's a shame, but it's just like real-life.
There are few details I'm admittedly handwaving (key revokation, special case exceptions), but they're all solvable problems. I'd really like to see a system like them when I play Quake, Half-Life, Diablo II, or Dungeon Siege online.
I play a lot of online MOHAA and trolls are as much of a problem as cheaters.
One of the most realistic ways to play MOHAA is with friendly fire on -- you have to know where you're chucking grenades and so on. However, it's nearly impossible because trolls will kill most of the team right at the spawn point. Some trolls block tight passageways or just play obnoxiously. In a full 8-user server, two trolls on one team can shift the balance of power so far its just not any fun.
Then there are cheat trolls that combine cheats with trolling behavior (noclipping under the road and killing people, for example) to be seriously obnoxious.
I don't know how you combat this, really. I think the best way would be enabling a kickban command that would kick a user from the server and then ban their IP, username, or both for a specified period of time. Banning IP blocks might be an option as well.
I know, I know, NAT, DHCP pools, etc etc will lessen the effectiveness of such techniques, but if you make it just annoying enough to troll people might stop and go back to making prank phonecalls or whatever they did before they messed with games.
The moral of the story? Cheating not only hurts the newbies who want to get into some online games, but also hurts those of us who play often and occasionally show a glimmer of skill.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
I agree. Playing with people you know is probably much more fun too.
The only other solution I see is a -- and you've heard me say this before -- a web of trust. Integrate game-matching / chat and a PKI. Players will sign the keys (this can be abstracted in the GUI of course to make it simple) of players they trust and enjoy playing with.
Then it is up to the players, some may risk it and play with anyone, others might only play with close friends, and the majority might opt for the middle ground and play with any player within some distance of the web of trust.
You could do a lot of things with this. A client could chose to play any other client based on the number of signatures and their age (trusting it even if there is no path to it), etc.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
If you can identify cheaters from the server side, don't kick them off, just dump them into a dungeon. One where they can frag NPCs all day without affecting the other customers. That way, the cheaters keep playing, theyr're happy, and they're diverted from getting a new account and making more trouble.
the topic of this article is cheating, not who is most powerful.
/random, etc.
I'll take EQ as an example too, but tell you it does work to some extent. I've got some basis to go on here since i am a dev on showeq and host the irc server that #showeq and #eqemu live on.
Currently one can cheat in EQ via playing with memory. The effects you can cause are limited to things like turning off fall damage, no lava damage, unlimited underwater breathing, etc. nothing of too much consequence. With a little extra work, one can teleport to an arbitrary location in zone, and move around quite a bit faster than normal (not the generic speedhack, that will get you banned.)
Previous cheats that were out and semi-widespread among a certain crowd allowed you to do things like using arbitrary skills (even accessing those not available to your class), zoning from anywhere in zone to any zone adjecent to it, permanant sow, removing spells like root, making any number you want show up for
There were more, to varying degrees of impact, but as each was made public, VI was pretty quick to fix it (one member of thier dev team alluding to the site promoting the exploits as a fix-it list).
So i would say in this respect, developers can restrict cheating in mmorpgs.
As for showeq, they change up packets and opcodes quite often, but you always run into the basic problem with trying to hide your data: you have to get it to the client somehow. But even here they have made attempts to curb its usefulness. Over time they've reduced what they send, Hit points are now a % rather than absolute numbers, experience likewise is expresses in 1/330th units, rather than absolute numbers. Faction values are now just an index value so the client knows what to print rather than you actual faction. They are a bit more limited in movement update packets.
They can stop it, but they do a decent job at limiting it.
So while the most powerful guild in a server, does run things, that has absolutly nothing to do with cheating in game.
Valve's new anti-cheat seems to be working pretty well. System (the maker of OGC) was saying that it was completely useless, but so far since VAC has been out it has stopped every version of OGC within days. At this rate the cheaters can't possibly keep up, I think that it's only a matter of time before they give up.
With regard to HLGuard and CSGuard, I have found that they are buggy. For example, when attempting to change your name on a server and using a % in order to have spaces (e.g. Counter%Strike%Player), CSGuard will automatically cause your Half Life to quit. And one of the latest revisions of VAC kicks people off with no cheats installed -- this has happened to me. But eventually these bugs will be fixed, and pretty soon admins will find that they no longer need to run HL/CSGuard to reliably catch cheaters.
And the anti-cheating organization? Come on. Don't these people have lives'? Its just a game. Lets not bring this to the level where we destroy the game because we take it so seriously, which sucks the fun out of it (prime example, chess). Also, many non-cheating players have no problem playing with players who use cheats.
When I played Descent 2 on Kali, I used to play against some of the people who had hacks so they could fire two EarthShaker missles at a rate as fast as Gauss cannons. It made me better, and was fun.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen