Slashdot Mirror
Deathmatch for Dollars?
quixado writes "You Play Games is an online wager service where you can bet and earn money for each kill or injury to opponents. You can even cap how much money you can lose in a 24 hour period. Return to Castle Wolfenstein is the first title. The press release can be found here. More info here too. And they said that spending days on end playing first person shooters wouldn't pay off..."
NASCAR gamers have been doing this for years at http://www.p-r-o-s.net/.
id Software has always been on the forefront of gaming, ever since the original Castle Wolfenstien. It's no surprise that they now are the first to offer gambling based on this style of gaming. It's also a good idea that they decided to break up the cost per death/frag by skill levelled matches, however I wonder what qualifies a person to compete in a certain skill level?
I only have two questions now:
1) What legal implications will this bring about? Think about it: parents wanted to sue Wizards of the Coast and Nintendo because they thought Pokemon cards were a form of gambling.
2) Approximately how long until I lose (note correct usage of the word) my last $5?
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
Should it be a viable profession?
I don't see why not. If big dumb dudes can make millions by tossing a ball around a few hours a week, I don't see why a gamer shouldn't be able to make at least a few dollars by using his skills. 3D accelerator card makers may even pick a few of the best players to help promote their products.
Probably through some statistical analysis of your game-play. I had a co-worker who used to play 'minesweeper' on-line. He was *damn* good, and the site accused him of cheating and disabled his account (thinking no-one was *that* good).
Not always perfect, but cheaters *do* tend to be greedy, and would be obvious to spot.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
I've written my own aimbots for unreal tournament. Game servers are great against publically released bots, but if you don't release your bot, they can't prevent it. I sat on my bot for a month before making it public, and if I didn't you would have never seen CSHP (Client side hack protection) in Unreal Tournament.
The problem isn't just Unreal Tournament either, I've used bots in Quake 2, Quake 3, and CounterStrike. The funny part is, CounterStrike probably has some of the best hack protection of any of the games, and it's spawned probably the best bots of all the games. While the Q2 bot I used was the most accurate, the CS bot had a sick amount of features.
This is the main problem with online gaming, and why arcades could make a comeback. There is just no real way to make sure the person on the other side isn't cheating. Plus most games vendors don't put too much effort into protecting and patching cheats. It is usually the community, so it turns into amature hour.
I personally play a lot of online games. I love the idea of winning money for them, but I don't see it lasting very long.
I wonder though, now if I code my own aimbot for a game they "pay you to play" could I be put in jail for fraud?
-NoClanNeeded
I dropped out of pro gaming because i wanted to get through college. But there is GOOD money in it, I won 21k in one year, and I was playing games the whole time.
The game i played got bogged down with cheating so they couldnt run any more for money games because cheating was so bad, but it was fun while it lasted.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
I'm suprised ID let themselves get snared into this.
YPG servers are based out of the Netherlands Antilles, a haven for money laundering, major drug trafficking, and organized crime. A major problem for the Antilles at the moment is illegal internet gambling operations. Hosting servers there should raise suspicion immediately. Hell, doing almost anything in the Antilles should raise suspicion...
Other major problems -- RTCW does not have a FFA game mode, only team oriented game modes. This fits very poorly into a competetion model of you-frag-others-for-money.
Imagine how pissed off you're going to be when an idiot teammate does something stupid and costs you money!
Also, this will totally fuck up objective oriented games since players will be so worried with kill/death ratios (because deaths cost you money), that they will totally ignore teamplay (hell, *I* would!)
Quake3 or UT2k3 would be better choices -- not only do they have MUCH larger audiences, but they fit better into the competetion model they have, because Quake3 and UT2k3 have FFA game modes.
However, cheating is still possible, but it will come from dedicated cheaters, rather like it does in casinos. Casinos have an advantage though, first they are very rich, and can afford all sorts of checks and balances, and second, players/cheaters are physically present, and therefore can be ID'd. In the online world, noone knows you're a dog, so it will be harder to stop a dedicated cheater from coming back. If the dedicated cheater does not reveal his/her method, then it will be up to the PB team to try and stop it. The PB team have an advantage when the cheat is released in the wild, but not when its kept secret.
PB has the great advantage of being able to update everyones code at any point. So if someone does do a major number on the current PB system, they can simply change it and bingo, all legit users are now running the new code.
The big problem is punishment for cheating. How do you stop a cheater? Kick him out? So he comes back with a new account and continues. You need a way to identify a user. The problem is any ID system will be open to comprimise aswell. The big casinos come down to using people to recognise other peoples faces, and you can't do that online.
If this becomes a very big venture, with real (i'm talking $10000+wins), then the big boys will come along and try to cheat, you'll find they will succeed sometimes.
The difference between this and normal casinos is you aren't playing against the house, so it will be difficult to play and win $10000, unless you find some pretty stupid people. However, lesser sums of $100 or so will be possible. I don't think that these stakes are high enough for the big boys to play for.
Where real money will come from will be when they do have a "house". Playing against computers (the house). They'll have to do it so the house wins >50% like they do at casinos, but it could become very interesting.
In all I think this will become interesting, but not interesting enough to the big boys, so go ahead, play for a few dollars, if you don't make it worthwhile a user risk cheating against you, then they won't.
I use to have a funny sig, but slash cut it off, and I forgot what the punchline was.
Remember the game "DOOM"? It was peer to peer. Every (up to all 8 of them!) client talked to every other client, and all of them ran the same numbers. If one of the peers disagreed with the others it was booted.
This model was discarded in favour of the now-popular server-client model because latency (not bandwidth) was too high.
Anyone that played Quake 1.01-1.09 on the 'net over a modem can tell you how horrible latency was even with this 'leap forward' in network gaming.
Nowadays, the client & server use prediction & syncing to give the appearance of smooth play.
Unfortunately, the amount of bandwith won't compensate for the latency, and I doubt that anything short of a direct, raw connection to the 'server' will allow a 'video only' feed.
Desperation is a stinky cologne