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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."
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.
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 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.