Or just play it safe and check the "Post Anonymously" box, OK?
Re:I hate cheaters!
by
misterhaan
·
· Score: 4, Informative
even better is to set up your computer to route requests that are trying to go to www.nytimes.com to the archive instead. the ip of archive.nytimes.com is 199.239.136.212
windows users can find a file named hosts (no extension) under system32/drivers/etc and add the following line to automatically go to archive.nytimes.com instead of www.nytimes.com:
199.239.136.212 www.nytimes.com
Bah, bad moderator, bad. This post was clearly on topic.
-- "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Re:I hate cheaters!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
I dont see the harm in making up a bogus nick every time I inadvertently delete my nytimes cookie. Anyone putting in bona fide information on one of those forms needs a head-check anyway, and the NY Times ought to realize not that many 79-year-old Estonian Women are reading their news pages.
The problem with your method is six months from the Times will change their article~server structure around, my redirect link won't work, and I won't remember what goddamn windows file got modifed.
Yeah, a fellow gamer has boasted (and also shown pictures) of his new truck that he bought through selling MMORPG items on ebay (and through private transactions).
I have no problem when he makes money through hard work and dedication to playing the game, but the items that he was selling on ebay were duplicated through the use of a client-server exploit of the game. The 'dupe' allowed him to get multiple copies of some of the rarest (and unique!) items in the game that he could sell for hundreds of dollars each.
Now, in that sense cheating does prosper the same way that the parent post assumes that the ebay sales of the individual mentioned are all duped items.
If you can dupe virtual items and sell the use of them on a server you do not even own to unsuspecting individuals to make thousands of dollars, would you?
read it here
by
SiggyRadiation
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Do Cheaters Ever Prosper? Just Ask Them By PETER WAYNER
HE Sims Online is a clean, well-lighted corner of the Internet where people work to build an elaborately decorated, chat-filled virtual world. But if playing by the rules in this realm isn't entertaining enough, there are after-hours joints where rogues and grifters gather to swap schemes for gaming the game and growing rich.
The chatter at TSOExtreme.com, for example, is a mix of simple tips for guiding the characters known as Sims and elaborate strategies for earning millions of the online currency known as simoleans. Recently much of the talk has centered on using extra software, known as a bot, to automate the most tiresome clicking so players can rack up hundreds of thousands of simoleans in their sleep.
One of the players engaging in this automated counterfeiting, a 29-year-old financial planner from Texas, said he did so without apology (although he did not want to be identified by name). "I think the bots actually level the playing field for people who have day jobs," he said. "When I play an online game, I can't be the best because there are some college kids out there spending 14 hours a day."
Web sites like TSOExtreme.com are a challenge for the rapidly growing world of interactive games. While breaking the rules or using secret "cheat codes" has always been an accepted, even treasured part of single-player games, new online games match competitors, often strangers, remotely, which changes the dynamic. No one likes to lose unfairly, and those who play by the rules often struggle against schemers who believe that all is fair in love and simulated war.
For their part, many of the cheats say that bending the game's rules is part of the fun. It is only a game, and when it becomes boring it is time to turn to the greater game of beating the system, they argue.
Brian Reynolds, a designer of a new online game, Rise of Nations, likes to joke that he was "the guy who put 'Cheat' on the main menu" when he developed games like Civilization II. A player could use the menu at any time to create new assets like warriors or defenses for a city.
In his new game, however, in which players meet and battle for ratings over the Internet, that option is gone. Mr. Reynolds and his team try to ensure that people who buy the game have a pleasant and balanced experience when battling others to dominate a virtual world. They fear that people would stop playing if those who cheated held all the power.
Haden Blackman, the producer at LucasArts responsible for Star Wars Galaxies, an online game now being tested by 5,000 users, said that preventing cheating was one of the biggest challenges of creating a virtual world.
One lesson the game industry learned the hard way is that dedicated cheats will rewrite software to give themselves an advantage. "There are a lot of great ideas we come up with and skip because there's going to be 1 percent who will abuse them," Mr. Blackman said.
Designers of the new Star Wars game initially planned to let players communicate in strange languages that would be translated by other players' computers, he said. But the developers soon realized that cheats would find a way to break into the hidden dictionary, gaining the ability to speak the various languages and negotiate with aliens from other planets - a skill that would normally develop only over time.
Bots like the ones discussed on TSOExtreme.com are just the beginning. Some players of games with a shooter, like Quake or Counter-Strike, have automated aiming tools that target an opponent more rapidly than the quickest of fingers.
Others reprogram their video cards to hide the elaborate textured walls in a game. All that is left is a wire-frame outline, allowing a player to see through walls and track those hiding behind them.
All of these techniques depend on users' having full control of the software running on their home machines. Adept programmers can rewrite the game or insert new instructi
-- This unique sig is intended to make this user more recognisable.
Re:read it here
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Reposting an article in its entirety does not consititute fair use. The new york times charges NOTHING for access to the article and has a minimal number of reasonable ads. It's possible to register without compromising one's own personal info--they are very liberal about it. The NY times site is slashdot-effect proof.
It's time slashdotters lived up to their own words and started frowning upon article-reposts like this. Otherwise, dont complain when the GPL is likewise ignored.
Re:read it here
by
benjiboo
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Karma whore! The annoying thing is that these posts always go to 5 - informative. The NY Times is unlikely to get slashdotted, and you're just depriving them of ad revenues etc.
-- Vacancy for signature. Apply within.
Re:read it here
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
I appreciated the posting. I resent having demographic information pryed from me, personal information demanded of me, my email address handed out to lord knows who, having to remember yet another password and cope with yet another web designers maddening form verification script, all in exchange for the rare priviledge of reading the news.
They sure don't act like the public has a right to know...
Anyway, I'm sure the guy was just trying to help his fellow slashdotters, so lighten up already.
Just sounds more realistic than they expected the game to be:)
-- Karma Clown
Re:read it here
by
RobotRunAmok
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I resent having demographic information pryed from me, personal information demanded of me, my email address handed out to lord knows who, having to remember yet another password and cope with yet another web designers maddening form verification script, all in exchange for the rare priviledge of reading the news.
Then why don't you drop some change at the news stand and buy yourself a dead-tree copy, Privacy-Boy?
Do you not think that the NYT deserves some form of compensation for publishing a story that drives so much discussion (and pageviews) on this site and elsewhere?
What do you do for a living, by the way? Or is it just that you're sixteen years old, and your perception of the world is that it revolves around you? (If so, my apologies; real life will straighten you out better than I ever could soon enough...)
Then why don't you drop some change at the news stand and buy yourself a dead-tree copy, Privacy-Boy?
What guarantee do I have that this article is in today's newstand version? Also, by the time I have a chance to get a hard copy over say my lunch hour, the/. article would be several stories down, the main discussion over, and few people will respond to anything I say.
Do you not think that the NYT deserves some form of compensation for publishing a story that drives so much discussion (and pageviews) on this site and elsewhere?
Are my banner ad views more valuable if they're associated with my fake identity? I don't think so. And if ad companies do pay more if they think they are more targeted, then they're just wasting their money. Honestly, it's the hassle of filling out forms especially when I deny cookies anyway so I get the registration page every time. If they just served the page with banner ads and no registration, I'd be happy.
Innovative people are able to use fake names. Any web site that demands information of you, only demands a little input. Say your name is Jack Meoff. Only the dumb consumer volunteers his information to anyone. Cheaters sux. I'll frag you all at MCSN. (CS)
Re:read it here
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
You have waffled on but haven't answered any of the questions. The NYTimes lost hits because you took THEIR copy. Do you actually understand the concept of a business?
I think the real answer is that slashdot should stop publishing stories that require "free registration"...
Re:read it here
by
Patrick13
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
my email address handed out to lord knows who
You know I have had a NYT id since 1996, I used "nyt@", and I have never ever gotten a spam from them.
The NYT sets a cookie, so you don't have to constantly relogin, assuming you use the same computer.
Its not difficult. I had more trouble setting up my KDE desktop than I had registering for the times. The Times, by the way is Lynx compatible, which, when I only had dial up, was my preferred way to surf news sites. I also did the entire registration in lynx.
So, WTF are you talking about, exactly? These sound an awful lot like whiney excuses from someone who thinks its cool to bitch about the injustice of the NYT required registration.
I have an idea, go to your local newstand, and just read the entire paper there without paying for it.
Yes, I realize you've posted AC. I suppose this means you didn't register here because that would mean giving Slashdot your email, god knows you wouldn't want them selling your email to lord knows who...
I don't know about Linux, but a lot of its users certainly are.
Re:please do not post NY Times articles
by
koan
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
It took me less than 2 minutes to sign up the first time now i just enter an user name and pass, is that really so hard? I would rather people feel they can post from any site than have to worry about someone "complaining" that they have to log in.
-- "If any question why we died,
Tell them because our fathers lied."
Not sure what you mean. I dont play MMORPGS or RTS.. Im a first person shooter kinda guy.. but when I get on Quake3 server, adn I see one score of 300 and the rest are around 30, its a clue.. and when you see the skin standing in the wide open firing faster than any human could shoot and spin, with rails apparently coming out its ass, you get a clue that this is what is going on.
usually, I suspect those bots are actually _on_ the server. But Punkbuster helps..
Playing UT23K I havent seen much trouble.. the game seems much more even and better than Quake(s) ever were.
But Im sure there are people scripting things for Evercrack, and letting them run overnight. And buying and selling items on Ebay.. or running six player accounts, and then transferring things to each other.. but I guess thats part of the game. There is always some moron who just isnt happy that he isnt as good as the next guy, and feels the need to "even" the playing field for himself.
Maeryk
-- Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
ergo98
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I'm a fan of the game Urban Terror, a mod for Quake 3, and play online a fair bit (I usually run Visual Studio on one monitor, UT on the other: One good thing about being a rambo player in team survivor games is that I'm dead the majority of the time, and hence find it to actually be a remarkably productive time): While recently an anti-cheat tool, PunkBuster was added to Q3 (and it is constantly updated), there is still a serious issue of cheaters, the most common among them being wallhackers. What is a wallhacker? Well it's what was mentioned in the summary: Wire frame worlds, allowing cheating players to view other players whereever they are on the map, obviously giving a pretty clear advantage.
So what does this have to do with the honesty of surveillance? Well in team survivor when you die you can ghost other players as they move around the map, and it tends to be that wallhackers are discovered quite quickly--Their behaviour and actions in the game do not correlate with the information that they should be visually receiving (from what we can see ghosting them). Usually this quickly leads to cries of cheater and a vote to kick the offending player.
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
jdh-22
·
· Score: 1
I usually play CounterStrike. The servers that I will only play are on, are they ones with anti-cheat protection.
Most of them run HLGuard or Cheating Death. Both seem to work for the average cheaters. But once and a while, you get people who get through, that are either increadably good, or cheating. Sometimes it is very hard to tell apart.
The anti-cheat protection software that runs on the client/server will only block script kiddies. What happends when a smart player figures out how to make his own cheat, and keeps it to himself? There is possible no way to tell.
My question is, What motivates cheaters to keep playing? Cheating elimnates the challenges that make the game fun in the first place!
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
modecx
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· Score: 1
Yeah. Iv'e had the same experience, more or less. I play UrT CTF. I used to be a maniac, playing every time I could, but I've slowed down a bunch--mostly playing with the members of various clans that are known for their hardline stance on cheating--largely due to the fact that cheating on CTF is very rampant.
There's noting more fun than running around a corner, have a SR-8 weilding sniper jump up and take your head off...repeatedly. With the possible exception of sneaking around his flank and giving him a good 'ol pistol 'whippin.
Aimbots, wallhacks... It sucks the fun out of any game damn fast.
-- Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 3, Insightful
For some people, the fun is in the acomplishment of cheating itself (you know, essentially hacking the game).
For some people the fun is in "being evil" by cheating and causing others to have less fun.
For some people the fun is in the glory winning, even if it was not fair win (just as long as the others don't find out).
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
u-235-sentinel
·
· Score: 1
Voting to kick the offending player is a great feature. I wish they would add it to Team Fortress Classic. Sure there are mods that allow it however not many servers run them.
Counterstrike on the other hand does have the vote/kick feature thank goodness. Both great games which I've been playing for years. Gets tiresome though when a cheat0r decides to grace us with his/her presence.
One benefit from playing against cheat0rs. You learn to get back up and adapt. I've become a tougher gamer as a result. So now I have people calling me cheat0r as a result. Unreal:-)
BTW, the article mentioned Tony Ray the creator of PUNKBUSTER! A great tool we betatested way back when he was still playing HL/TFC and Counterstrike. I'm pleased to see the product has taken off and is available for SOF II (another game I'm looking at purchasing).
WTG [U-235]KIWWA errrr Tony Ray:-)
-- Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here.
You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
>> For some people, the fun is in the acomplishment of cheating itself (you know, essentially hacking the game).
I agree, but in this case the hacker would also be a constructive one and _probably_ would just want to test the hack and not win the game. The true master would even go unnoticed by other players. Anyway, and again just _supposedly_, interference should be expected to be minimal (e.g., you see the guy go thru a wall... he wants to be seen doing this and killing you is unnecessary).
>> For some people the fun is in "being evil" by cheating and causing others to have less fun.
Yes, regrettably there are such people. It is important to notice that they can do this at a much lower cost, without even using a cheat (like when someone blocks the respawn exit or dismantles other peoples sentries).
>> For some people the fun is in the glory winning, even if it was not fair win (just as long as the others don't find out).
Maybe I'm naïve, but I only suspected this reason... your analisys is more complete.
The issues here might be result and experience. If one values just the final score (or result) then s/he might just play with cheats, since you get most frags this way.
OTOH, someone who likes the experience wouldnt even bother to be killed, provided it happened after a cinematografic duel sequence.
Winning and losing, thus, are different concepts for the two kinds of person.
And, unfortunately, the "for result" kind totally screws the game for the "for experience" one.
MHO.
PS: Also IMHO, snipers are cheaters by definition, even without using any added cheats. There should be two kind of mods: one with snipers and other without.
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
alexandre
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm not a gamer myself but when i do try out a game (in single player mode that is) i dont feel i have tried the game if i havent seen the cheats...
And i'd say that for me, if i wanted to cheat online, it would be for the fact that cheating is actually pushing the possible capabilities of the game to it's limit... Like being Neo eh?;-)
It's not a question of showing off, or being evil or even winning... it's the question of getting all the necessary powers to your character. It's the only way to really get into the games, having everything. The problem lies in the fact that it is there, always a possibility in your mind. And i've never liked to put barriers there;)
Oh well, i don't see how we'll be preventing that beside playing on remote X terminals ehehe (which requires huge bandwith:-)
(P.S. Just a point of view, i never actually tried an online cheat and usually play with friends on local LANs anyway so i'd get my head ripped off hehe:-)
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
Moloch666
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I normally stick to the same servers, usually the crowd on some are better than others. When I get familiar with the other players that are regulars I don't have to worry about playing exceptional. They can tell a cheater, they also have seen me play enough to know I have my good days and bad days.
The other day my favorite servers where full, so I went elsewhere. It was a clan operated server clan name was [CM] I believe. Sadly, people that are in a clan automatically think they are good, these people were not. Their movement was very predictable or nonexistent. Along with another player we were seriously killing these people and they outnumbered us 4:3. It wasn't long before we both were kicked. I immediately reconnected, just to see what the deal was (and make fun of them). They were convinced I was cheating, people act like it is hard to get head shots or something. The damn cheaters out there ruin the game for the good players.
Sorry for my rambling, I just get frustrated. When I come home from work, sometimes I just want to smoke some wacky tobaccy and shoot people in the head.
-- Understanding is a three-edged sword. -- Kosh Naranek
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
dusanv
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· Score: 1
I used to play UT CTF a lot and never once have I used a bot in an online game (I tried a bot in a single player game just to see what I'm up against). I used to get accused of using a variety of bots but most often the radar/wallhacker. Some people just can't accept you are a better player or that they are predictable and are behaving like asses accusing you of cheating. I mean if you took the same route three times I'll bloody well be there waiting for you the fourth time and it doesn't mean I used a bot.
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
ergo98
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· Score: 1
I entirely agree with this, and there are also those who confuse sound with wallhacking (for those who wonder, Q3 has pretty good stereo sound that allows you to audibly detect where people are within a certain range. Actually the sound algorithms are quite weak as they don't take into account sound supression, echos and reflection, etc): There is no doubt that with human egos as the evaluators there are cases where there are false positives.
Having said that, what I'm talking about moreso is incredibly clear: There's one opponent guy and you can see on the radar (which is a part of the game now) where he is, and the guy you are ghosting inexplicably pauses as her turns past where the guy is. When it happens it is absolutely stunningly crystal clear (people also have a tendency to like to look at walls...).
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Yeah - don't forget in CS the ability to shoot through doors... I've lost track of the number of times that I've ghosted and watched players ignore doors with noone behind them, but inexplicably get headshots whenever there just happens to be someone lurking there.
Cheaters are the main reason I quit Counterstrike
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
grumpygrodyguy
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· Score: 0
The last week I've been hacking the WC3 counter-strike servers using the name "George W. Bush". My primary MO for cheating has been:
For some people the fun is in "being evil" by cheating and causing others to have less fun.
Though mostly it's been fueled by a desire for retribution on my part. I'm very fond of reminding the players that I'm their president, and if they want me gone they have to impeach me. Or if I'm feeling extra saucy I tell them it's their turn to play the Iraqis.
I freely admit that I'm cheating in the game, and everyone takes turns trying to insult me or talk me into leaving. This of course just makes me enjoy cheating all the more. The last few days I've perfected my cheating method so that I can usually get 50 kills for every 1 time I die. And when I join a server with 32 people who've been playing for the last hour or so, it fscked up the mix very effectively.
I've been playing counter-strike for over 3 years now, but I've never been really motivated to cheat. What's happening in this world, and in this country, has given my conscience more than enough breathing room to cheat however. This last week or two has been my way of being politically active. I figure if I can get enough people to loath the very sight of the name "George W. Bush"...well...I've done my part. Most of these 14yr old kids I play against are just left of nazis, because their rich white daddies told them that "whiney liberals" are bad. Well, it's been a hell of a lot of fun hearing these conservative trouser stains whining:).
There's nothing more symbolic than a guy named GWB annihilating the other team in less than 30 seconds. If they bitch I just respond by saying that a 400 Billion dollar defense budget buys a hell of a lot of hacks. In all honesty I've found the "virtual battlefield" of cs the perfect place to concretely demonstrate what it is to be in a hopeless conflict. This is an experience that most americans are clueless about, and most iraqis are getting no sympathy for.
(for those "patriots" with the emotional desire to mod me down, I would request that you shirk your duty of silencing me. Instead read my little anecdote as a window into the mind of a "traitor")
-- The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
Darren+Winsper
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· Score: 1
Oh pleas, how can snipers be cheats when they're part of the design of the game? It's like saying skiers are cheats in Tribes 2.
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
you can only shoot through doors if the 'victim' is pressed up against them. How many wooden doors do you know of that would stop a half-dozen.45 slugs?
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
Sunda666
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· Score: 1
>PS: Also IMHO, snipers are cheaters by definition, even without using any added cheats. There should be two kind of mods: >one with snipers and other without.
hey have you ever player DOD? the snipers rifles there are a pain in the butt to use, just like in real life. not much of cheating (and not very popular due to poor fraggin). But I still only play as a sniper for its fun as hell.
Snipers in CS and UrT are a shame tough. Makes everybody play like if they were little rabbits jumping around. Totally unrealistic, when the hell would you see someone jumping around and firing an M4 (and hitting...) bleh.
cheers
--
``If a program can't rewrite its own code, what good is it?'' - Mel
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
pkunzipper
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· Score: 1
I agree. I work too hard to put up with cheaters!
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
operagost
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· Score: 2, Insightful
So are you saying that when you're angry with someone, it's okay to take it out on innocent strangers? And that this should be considered a political protest?
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
grumpygrodyguy
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· Score: 1
When 90% of who I'm abusing are pro-republican and pro-bush, yes. Especially when the remaining 10% are laughing with me because they understand the joke.
-- The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
jedrek
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· Score: 1
See... IT'S A GAME.
If I wanted simulations I'd play AA, but since this is just a game, I want to be able to bunny hop. I want to be able run and shoot. IT'S FUN!
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
Gropo
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· Score: 1
Wow! that "anecdote" was a hilarious read. I myself have been playing TacOps lately as Trent_Lott(Seg)MS - no cheating mind you (not sure there are actually any cheats for the Mac) - so I can fully appreciate your little cultural stunt.
You've also convinced me that not all game hackers are slug-fellating scum;D If I was a CS player and saw you on servers I'd always jump on your team and back your diatribes by declaring the bitch-n-moaners "Unpatriotic Nigger-Lovers" (which is, of course, in direct opposition to my 'meatspace' political and philosophical stances)
-- I hate Grammar Nazi's
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
cjpez
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· Score: 2, Insightful
it's the question of getting all the necessary powers to your character. It's the only way to really get into the games, having everything.
Well, I'd certainly disagree with that. If you're cheating, you're not getting into the game, you're changing how the game works. You're changing the nature of how the game flows, what you can do in it, and all that. You're no longer playing the original game. Yes, I'm still playing a game if I decide that every piece of mine is a Queen, but it's not chess anymore. And if I'm playing Quake and my client automatically locks onto the other players and frags them without my ever having to hit the fire button, then I'm just playing something that happens to talk to Quake servers. When you're playing against a bunch of other people who are expecting you to be playing Quake Proper, they've got every right to be upset if they discover that you're playing something else.
I'm not saying that doing so can't be fun, or that nobody should see what they can do with their software. I've cheated on the single-player modes of just about every game I've played, generally shortly after I've become bored with the basic game itself, and shortly before I decide to just uninstall the thing and go read a book instead. And I agree that it is fun to push the limits of the software, just to see what you can do, but again, you're not really playing that game anymore.
Also, I think that cheating can in fact get in the WAY of getting into the game. Ever play Half-Life? The whole fun of the game is being dropped into this strange, hostile world with nothing but a crowbar and having these terrifying alien creatures leaping out at you. Sure, I can cheat and get all the weapons or make myself invincible, but if I do so all of the suspense goes away. I could noclip and wander around finding things but I'm not getting claustrophobic in air ducts and the like. Do you remember Aliens TC, for Doom (I think)? That was a fantastic mod. And with cheats it became Just Another Shooter.
Anyway, that's a hell of a lot more words than I should have spent on that.:)
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
gleam
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· Score: 1
I'm gleam, I used to be very active in urban terror development, and I'm still something of a lurking presence in the qa/dev channels.
Cheating is a problem in urban terror, and perhaps moreso than in many other games (except maybe CS), but I don't think it's as huge a problem as most people think.
Noskill, the guy who writes the major q3 cheat, has a special version just for urban terror, made to take advantage of some of the features in q3ut like the minimap, grenades, smoke, flashes, etc. As a result, there are probably more cheaters in q3ut than other q3 games.
That being said, I still don't think it's a huge problem--especially not in competitive play. Although it may be seen more on pubs (I don't know, I don't pub much), matches are by and large cheat-free--or at least free of the obvious (and so likely most effective) cheats.
Of course, the more skill a cheater has the better they are at hiding the fact that they're cheating, so a member of a good clan may be able to get away with cheating, simply because they'll know how to make it look like they can't really see through walls/smoke/whatever.
Anyway. Cheating is bad, but it mostly only affects public servers. Matches are, I think, mostly clean. Yet another reason to play competitively.
-gleam
-- this.sig is not a.sig.
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
Surlyboi
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· Score: 1
Hmmm... Almost makes me want to start playing CS again, I'd go on as John Ashcroft and say I was making a list of all the people that complained about your behavior and adding it to the "Unamerican" pile.
-- Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine...
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I believe you. Your online ethics undoubtedly explains the high moderation of your post too.
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
grumpygrodyguy
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· Score: 1
lol
-- The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I play counter-strike a fair amount, and have been accused rather often of wall hacking. But, judging by locations of dead players, footsteps, a little intuition and occasionally a bit of luck, I can know exactly where a particular opposing player is. The predictable nature of many players also plays a big factor.
Visual information isn't the only game in town.
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
the funny thing is, you can bunny hop in AA.. lol
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The only thing with "Ghosting" is if you have more than one computer and say a friend on the other computer, if you or he dies, you can ghost his enemies, and effectivly win the round. Also I can say it is pretty hard to catch. Every once in a while someone might say something, but, usually you can play it cool enough not to get caught. I would let you know my won ID but then I would get banned
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
What fucking age are you? 14?
This isn't a political protest and its not getting back at "the man". Its spoiling other peoples leisure time. And if you haven't learned yet that you have to get on with people of other belief systems then I hope you are still young or otherwise your fucked.
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
Danse
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· Score: 1
Wallhackers tend to favor the AWM sniper rifle in counterstrike. It can shoot through damn near anything, and never takes more than 2 hits for a kill, even through walls/boxes/doors/etc.
-- It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
grumpygrodyguy
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· Score: 1
What fucking age are you? 14?
This isn't a political protest and its not getting back at "the man". Its spoiling other peoples leisure time. And if you haven't learned yet that you have to get on with people of other belief systems then I hope you are still young or otherwise your fucked.
-- The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
hobbesmaster
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· Score: 1
When you say snipers in CS are cheaters by definition; do you mean the AWP people? I enjoy sniping in CS, but only use the man's weapon: the Scout.
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
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ckaminski
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· Score: 1
Because snipers can't see through walls.
I have no issues with snipers. What I have issues with are wallhackers, who think their "virtual selves" have X-Ray vision. ANd I promptly frag them. Over and over and over again, until they give up and run home crying to mommy.
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
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Fesh
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· Score: 1
I'm ok as long as nobody uses "Kofi Annan". I've been playing CS under that tag for over a year... Why, you ask? Linkage
Nothing like a little peacekeeping to reduce stress levels... (Or raise them, depending on how badly I'm getting trounced...)
-- --Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
Darren+Winsper
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· Score: 1
I strongly recommend you read the parent post. He was claiming snipers are cheaters. I questioned that assertion and you just proved my point.
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
janeil
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· Score: 1
You, my friend, have hit it exactly right. Yeah, cheats are fun, but then it's not the game. Might as well just pick up a soccer ball and run with it. Throw a football over the goal line and claim a touchdown.
It is interesting to look at where the line of semi-acceptable cheating exists, between the extreme of a cheat which just skips to "WINNER!", game over immediately, and a subtle editing of a cfg file for say, a wider field of view.
It's also interesting that this is actually a serious issue for some people, wow. Games? Definition? Pointless leisure activity, remember?
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
>> Oh pleas, how can snipers be cheats when they're part of the design of the game?
I'm referring to snipers as in Team Fortress (Quakeworld TF).
I known that's a very strong assertion, but I mantain it.
To illustrate my point:
Once upon a time, people in Quake 1 online deathmatch mode would _voluntarily_ play just using axes (much like when you are choosing maps in TF). The last guy standing with the axe would be the winner. I didn't like this and I didn't do it often. But, once you engaged in one such game, ethics mandated that it's bad behaviour to change to rocket launcher and kill the opponent at distance. This was like admitting the other guy was better: you cannot win, then you drop the rules.
Now, Quake has evolved from individual deathmatch to teamplay in TF. Concepts have changed. "Camping", which was very bad in deathmatch, became a valid play style... because you got to defend your flag while colleagues attack the enemy.
But the game still retains a component of being skilled at aiming, fooling the opponent, taking advantage of the terrain, knowing when to change weapons etc.
Snipers, even when used as designed, ignore all this! You don't have to take damage, distance or walls into consideration. You don't use the terrain, like when throwing the guy into lava. You don't change weapons (at least, when snipers stay put on the top of the fortress). You don't have to outsmart the other player, just wait for him to show his foot... BANG! He's history.
And that's it. The end. No fighting at all.
When I stay near my flag waiting for attackers, nothing happens, because almost no one can pass through the bridge. My fellow snipers won't allow it.
So, I just get idle. Or, I can go to the bridge and get busted by snipers, too.
Nobody plays, just the snipers. If you agree with my observations above, you can conclude that even snipers don't play, as what they do cannot be called "playing".
Ok, skilled players can do rocket jumps, grenade or conc jumps. But requiring this prevents a lot of less skilled guys from playing.
And they'll never get skilled, because snipers will not let them practice by engaging in real duels. It's a vicious circle. (They can learn in special training levels, but is it really a point in that? Wasn't the game supposed to be fun? Why do the professional preparation?)
That's why I say let it be sniper against sniper, but not sniper against other classes.
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
>> hey have you ever player DOD? the snipers rifles there are a pain in the butt to use, just like in real life. not much of cheating (and not very popular due to poor fraggin).
No, I guess I haven't played DOD. BTW, what is DOD?:-)
Seems to be a good game... heh.
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
>> When you say snipers in CS are cheaters by definition; do you mean the AWP people?
I'm sorry I wasn't clear about that: I was talking about Quakeworld Team Fortress, not Counter Strike (which I don't know).
Please read my (long) answer to the guy above who asked the same thing.
And I don't recognize the acronym AWP? What is it supposed to mean?
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I agree with both of you.
My gripe is with the "pointless leisure activity".
It is not pointless. It never is.
Whatever leisure activity one engages, there is a minimum of enjoyment (?sp) expected.
It is not fun when you hear a good CD and your dog starts barking all the time.
In fact, some people take leisure much more seriously than work. Even excellent workers use their weekends to fly scaled toy planes or promote baseball championships in the neighbourhood.
These are fun activities which have a deep impact on the life of youngsters, through the serious way their fathers do it.
Compare this to a kid playing an online game and learning to cheat.
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Uh, snipers don't shoot through walls in Quake TF. Maybe they do in HL, but that's just yet another point against a lame game.
Snipers can be very skilled. I was a kick-ass sniper. I was on a 56k, so my ping was always ~250ms, back when games were about 50/50 LPB-2-HPB. I'd sit my ass in the main area where the two ramps are, monitoring the tunnel entrance and the main entry way. Barely anyone would get through on my watch. And when the teammates would raise the flag alarm, I'd pack up and get my ass to the spiral or elevator to hopefully catch a non-attentive flag carrier.
Ahh, the good old days.
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
Surlyboi
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· Score: 1
Ok, how about Boutros Boutros-Ghali then?
-- Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine...
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
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thynk
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· Score: 1
isn't that the AWP? It's been years since I've played, but I can't seem to remember a AWM.
-- Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
moro_666
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· Score: 0
it's almost impossible for a server to avoid these style of wallhacks, cause if you're using an broken video driver (sis graphics cards for example) you can see thru the walls and the GAME doesn't know about, neither does the server... there's no possible way to 'sense' it... except where people begin to aim thru the walls, shooting at the same sec when the other guy comes out from the defending corner, he won't even have the time to react, but already the other guy is shooting althrough, the games nowadays have pretty good sound effects and so the seeing through walls doesn't mean so much anyway, you can HEAR him coming, so why not shoot him ?
[sigh - i love the 'normal' players] [and i hate the stupids cheaters . they don't win actually] [they just lose].. i'll stick with 'not cheating' for i want to win because of my skill and not because of my cheats
urbanterror & navyseals rock !!!!
http://www.urbanterror.net http://www.ns-co.net
go people go
--
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
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ckaminski
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· Score: 1
Yes, I was having a bout of dyslexia and missed that before going on my rampage.:-)
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
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Danse
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· Score: 1
The term AWP was a mistake that stuck. It stood for Arctic Warfare Police. The actual name of the gun is the Arctic Warfare Magnum. Say it either way in-game and people know what you're talking about.
-- It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
thynk
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· Score: 1
Thanks for the info. I stand corrected. Used to love the AWM/AWP. The idea of sneaking in, taking a shot, getting a kill then sneaking out again with out being seen really was my thing. Course, that only worked about 10% of the time, the rest of the time I was in a shoot out with the most inaccurate weapon (when shot with out the scope) in the game.
I used to play as BOFH and my girlfriend (who was 10 years younger than I) would play as PFY. Those were they days.
-- Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
by
Esoteric+Moniker
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· Score: 1
DoD is Day of Defeat a Half Life mod.
www.dayofdefeatmod.com
--
man RTFM
No manual entry for RTFM.
Re:Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance
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Sunda666
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· Score: 1
actually, the weapon is really called AWM (arctic warfare magnum) rifle. I really dunno why ppl call it AWP in CS. anynone has a clue?
cheers.
--
``If a program can't rewrite its own code, what good is it?'' - Mel
Of course they do...
by
MosesJones
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· Score: 3, Interesting
In terms of being "better" at the game than others, but part of the question should be is it cheating, or just another game.
Someone who buys or downloads a cheat that someone else made is a different deal, and clearly some of those people are pretty sad individuals who just want to say "ha ha fragged you", before never ever having sex with anyone.
However the person who creates the cheat, who engages in what can be described as espionage against the game developer is playing a different game of skill, that person is learning things, developing things and playing their own game with their own rules and "winning" by being able to cheat. The challenge here isn't to be better at Quake, but to be able to cheat the best at Quake, that in itself is a game.
How about an open game in which these developers play their cheats off against each other using the best players without cheats as the players in the game. That way you can find out who developed the best cheat.
-- An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
The challenge here isn't to be better at Quake, but to be able to cheat the best at Quake, that in itself is a game.
Being the best cheater? Sounds an awful like like the Cold War mentality - "We know HOW to build the Bomb, so let's build it before sombody else does." "We have the Bomb, now let's build more of them than anybody else." "We have lots of Bombs now, we better be ready to use it before somebody else does." Or mabye a bit more like professional wrestling. "Rules not winning it for you? Smack the ref upside the head with a folding chair!"
I disagree. I play Diablo II and I used to play honestly, slowly working up experience. But then after playing for so long, it got boring and I wouldn't get any of the neat stuff. So, I started cheating in Single player only. Now I have all the good stuff and ofcourse, it is a little more exciting. Atleast it will be for a little while.
One lesson the game industry learned the hard way is that dedicated cheats will rewrite software to give themselves an advantage. "There are a lot of great ideas we come up with and skip because there's going to be 1 percent who will abuse them," Mr. Blackman said.
next patch=Main Toon Uber Nerfed
Wireframes?
by
Student_Tech
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Wasn't there a driver several years ago for a video card that allowed somehting like this? (Ok found/. story here.)
Why modify the game where they might be able to detect it when you can just play with drivers to do the same thing (assuming the game is sending all that to the video card already)
Re:Wireframes?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Informative
That's why anti-cheat systems like Punkbuster look at more than just the game binaries and additionally allow server-triggered screenshots. The latter is optional, but when the game goes beyond casual deathmatch, ladders may require that it's enabled.
This is exactly how the cheats for Americas Army work, they modify the Direct3D framework to color models, put a crosshair right on the heads of people (which you can see through walls) and more. As far as I can tell it's totally undetectable by the "client" program.
The server could be programmed to only send the client information of what they're supposed to be able to see. This way, wire-frame walls wouldn't matter, because the other player hiding behind the wall is completely invisible to your machine.
Just a thought.
Yes, Chromium would work, but it tends to introduce a noticable decrease in performance. In some cases this may be ok, but since wallhacking doesn't require most of Chromium's features, a more specific OpenGL wrapper would allow for much less of an impact on performance. Chromium has other cool applications to gaming though, watching Quake III run on a screen made up of 3 projectors side-by-side is really cool.
That very much depends on the application. For a well-optimized game, I could see that it might, especially if you're using a packer and network transport. For other things (applications written with VTK, most notably), using Chromium actually increases performance due to the state tracker.
When we designed the SPU chain dispatch mechanism, we really tried hard to optimize how Chromium intercepts and dispatches OpenGL calls. It's the network stuff that slows things down.
You're right about seeing Quake on a bunch of projectors!:-)
We've talked a couple times about having non-planar surfaces in the tilesorter. When that is done (and started - no one's taken it on yet), you'll be able to have projectors pointing in different directions to give you more of an immersive feel to something like Quake, with no code mods to the app itself. Pretty nice!
I agree with you about having a smaller OpenGL wrapper. Chromium is a chainsaw when all you need is a little knife. Sometimes you need a chainsaw, but not in this case.
I'm not sure about how the Xbox handles games (how much does it load on the hard disk?), but wouldn't consoles which run the software off of a non-rewritable medium (PS2/Gamecube) be ideal for online gaming since then the distributor can control what software is on everyone's machine?
--
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
The first problem would be that the loading time of the software would be much larger, because even the fastest CD-ROM drives (which are the fastest non-rewritable-medium readers) are much slower than hard disks. And this slowing would happen every time some part of the software needs to be loaded in memory (also when this happens in the middle of the game). For a game console, this isn't a big problem, because the game is all that is going on on the console, so all resources can be used for the game (specifically all available memory). A PC usually runs several applications at once, all wanting a piece of the memory.
And even if what I just said isn't completely true or will not be true in the future, it still wouldn't help, in my opinion. People will still control what software exists on their computer. Even when the game runs from a non-writable medium, the software can only be executed when loaded in the memory (which is a rewritable medium). What would prevent someone to run a cheat program that changes the interesting part of the game each time it is loaded in memory? It would be a bit harder than just changing it on a hard disk, but technically, it can be done.
Re:Consoles
by
Hakubi_Washu
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· Score: 3, Informative
Possibly not... Many "modern" cheats don't change files on your disk(s) at all, because simple checksums can prevent this. Instead they modify values in your RAM directly, which is more nitty-gritty, but harder to prevent. And: This is possible on consoles too, as they have RAM as well (For the PlayStation there are a lot of "Modules" that are inserted into it's serial port, another way is to load a CD with "malicious" code before loading the game...)
Re:Consoles
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
That sounds all well and good... but then there are still glitches in the game, and now what's worse is that client fixes can't be issued.
On top of that, there are still system modifiers (Gameshark and Codebreaker) that can still affect the gamestate.
That's what SOCOM is going through on the PS2. Rampant Gamesharking and map level glitches like walking through a mountain.
So far as much as I despise MS's control over XBox live, it is working to stop people from cheating. Mod chips prevent people from playing and software fixes can be issued to the user via the hard drive.
Again while it's nice to play the random person on the internet occassionally, it's just generally a better experience if you play people you know.
It would make it a bit more difficult, however, you could for instance use another computer as gateway between the internet and the console and capture/modify the packets that flow between the server and the console, and thus work out somesort of cheat
Well, that is not suffisant. For example, I play DAoC and I have seen some kind of programs that sniff the packets on the network to display an map of all player/monster nearby whith all kind of informations like level, items on them,... There is no modification of the client program, nor soft running on the computer of the player. But on another computer. Some aiming proxy for quake are what they are: proxy on another computer... Then MMORPG are not safe on a game cube either:-/
As others have already mentioned, it's easy to sniff the packets going to/from your console with a PC. From there you can create "radar", maps, translators, etc. Basically any information that's sent and received, whether or not your actual console displays them on screen, can be accessed and even possibly altered. Some companies use some form of encryption to make this more difficult, but since it's at the cost of network performance, it's usually not very sophisticated.
I recently started playing PS2 Online, and was psyched to finally start playing Madden 2003 against other players on the 'net, earning points to my profile, etc. I figured, "how can someone possibly cheat with this game anyway?" In my first game, as the final seconds ticked down, I saw myself as being the victor as my opponent -- who was ranked very highly in the game -- tried to kick a 50+ yard field goal. As the ball soared well short of the goalposts and the whistle blew, I thought for sure I was getting my first win online, and against a high-ranked player no less. Then, suddenly, "CONNECTION TERMINATED". At first I thought it was bad luck, until I experienced this a few more times and learned that cheaters were hitting their console reset button if they were going to lose a game, thereby not having their scores reported. That soured my taste for ranked online console gaming right there.
Another llama tactic that's rampant on stuff like the PS2 is the endless pause.
In this case, the other player just pauses the game, forcing YOU to quit the game. For any game that keeps stats and tries to counter the situation you encountered, it is taken advantage of when the endless pause is used.
Re:Consoles
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
wouldn't consoles which run the software off of a non-rewritable medium (PS2/Gamecube) be ideal for online gaming since then the distributor can control what software is on everyone's machine?
Yes and no.
With the quality of current software, I'm sure XBox and the rest are adding capabilities to distribute patches after release. The XBox hard-drive would be useful for this. Once that is in place, you might use the same mechanism for hacking the game.
With that said, MS's signed code stuff would prevent that. At last, a use for trusted computing.
Also, remember that not all cheats require modifying the code. Packet sniffing can tell you a lot about where your enemies are. Unless the devs go through the trouble of encrypting all network traffic, consoles with ethernet hookups would be just as susceptible as computers.
I believe this is being "fixed" by allowing each side to unpause the game, no matter who paused. Of course, this could be taken advantage of if you want a legitimate pause and your opponent unpauses while you're on the crapper.
Re:Consoles
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
It's no use. I've spent a lot of time--far too much in fact--playing both PC (mostly the original Quake, and Myth I and II) and PS2 console games (Sega's NFL2k3 and NBA2k3) online, and based on my experience, "cheating" is less of a problem with computer games. In the end, I suppose it comes down the vigilance of those maintaining the servers.
I think a lot of this may be due to the relative demographic differences in the two markets. Quake was really the very first viable large-scale TCP/IP game, from what I remember, and there were certainly a good deal of people who used "bots" to enhance targeting efficiency and whatnot. If you were playing on a well-maintained server, it wasn't a problem. I myself ran a popular Q1 and Q2 server at a large midwestern university, and would sometimes see "questionable" behavior or actions. If so, I would tag the individual's IP address (or entire subnet) for future reference. If I received further complaints from credible sources, I would simply make a quick edit to my firewall; problem solved.
Obviously, with centralized servers under the control of the distributor or developer, this isn't possible. That said, I never really had many problems with cheating in the Myth games, either.
The WORST, by far, has been the behavior of what I can only assume are maladjusted teenagers on Sega's network. It's got to the point where I simply don't play any longer, after having compiled a record of something like 300-100 in NFL football. Half of those losses, maybe more, came when my opponent would pause the game for hours on end and I would give in and quit. Alternatively, early on in the shelf life of the game, some choad figured out that if player X ejected the tray for ten seconds and then reinserted it, the game would "diverge" and X would not be credited with a loss, even if I was beating his ass 63-3 with the Lions to his Raiders. People figured out other cheap things to do, like illegal substitutions (putting a fast cornerback in for a LB or down lineman on punt coverage so they could fly in and block the punt, sub a punter for a kicker on kickoffs to get cheap onsides recoveries, the list goes on forever), altering the camera during FG attempts, pausing during live play for a second or two repeatedly to disrupt your rhythm, and simply LEAVING the game while on offense and down a lot of points (sure, they'd get a bunch of delay of game calls, but the clock would never run and you as an opponent can't do anything about it). There were perhaps a dozen players who employed a legitimate style, and after a while you figured out what each of their respective games were more or less about. It was no longer any fun. Sega wouldn't intervene to curb the cheating. It became frustrating and annoying, and caused me to wonder why I was banging my head against the wall. So I quit. It's hard to see me coming back again, except to play friends or family.
Many people are lazy. Many lazy people are vain. Many lazy, vain people are loathe to admit they suck and can't stop James Stewart from having a Canton-type day against their top rated defense. Accordingly, they will take the easy way out and cheat. Human nature, sad but true.
Re:Consoles
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
One (two?) word
gameshark
When PSO (phantasy star online) came out for the dreamcast the first few months where ok. Then gameshark codes came out for it, and people started to abuse the crap out of that game.
There is no cheat proof system. Someone will find a way..
On Blizzard's Battle.Net disconnects are recorded along with wins and losses so it will be noticed if someone does that a lot.
-- Centralization breaks the internet.
Re:Consoles
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Easy enough to fix with a time limit on the pause. Treat pauses like 'timeouts'... only a certain number of incidents or length of time allowed per side.
Might be annoying if you have to go take an extra long shit, but really, that's just rude to the other player anyway.
Might be annoying if you have to go take an extra long shit,
You could always run a long cable into the bathroom. Alternatively, get one of those portable camping toilets in the lounge.
-- Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Cheating IS fun....
by
Deth_Master
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· Score: 4, Funny
I remember the good old days of Doom:
iddqd
idkroz
idkfa
That was fun. Load up on the berzerk pak, and god mode. Then run around smooshing imps.
I used to cheat on all my old single-player games, Descent, Duke Nukem, Shadow Warrior. But that was just me, not me vs some other real person, that doesn't like it when I'm invincible, and got the rocketlauncher with unlimited rockets.
Cheats on the internet probably shouldn't be allowed, it'll just piss people off.
-- find ~your -name '*base* | xargs chown:us
Re:Cheating IS fun....
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Gawd, I hated those cheats back when I was in college. I had upgraded my 486 to a DX and maxed out the memory to like 32 megs and somehow my computer was designated as the official gaming station.
One friend would come in and as soon as anyone wasn't looking would pop in the cheat codes and thus he could play for hours (the rule was one you died, you gave up the controls to someone else). It got the the point where my girlfriend would literly pull the pul out of the wall to get him off of the machine so we could 'get some sleep'...being a bud, I never kicked my friends out...just made comments that 'Hey I think its time to go to bed now', in which the dumbfuck would state "Thats cool...I'll turn the lights off after I'm finished".
Using a cheat code once or twice after finishing a level (or when stuck on it for days) is one thing...using it during normal gaming is just fucking pathetic in ANY instance. Hell, I play a few online quake-based games where I end up just not shooting back once I know the other guys are cheating...I got the rest of my team to just walk out into the fire for about an hour til the guy decided it was too easy and quit (like it wasn't too easy when he could make a spinning frag from the otherside of the map and frag ya without breaking a sweat anyways).
Anywho, seeing the frickin Doom cheats just brought back too many bad memories.
clif
Re:Cheating IS fun....
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
id - Smashing Pumpkins Into Small Piles Of Putrid Debris.
Why the hell do I remember that?
Re:Cheating IS fun....
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
idkroz
This doesn't exist in Doom. You're thinking of dnkroz in Duke Nukem 3D.
Re:Cheating IS fun....
by
Deth_Master
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· Score: 1
I can't believe there was actually a way to beat the final stage without cheating. The one with the creepy severed head on the other side of a moth in a huge room with hundreds of re-spawning enemies (was that Doom or Doom II?). At one time or another, I went through the whole game without cheating, but that part just seemed ludicrous.
Cheats on the internet probably shouldn't be allowed, it'll just piss people off.
Very true. However, it depends on how closely you want to mimick real life in a game. In real life a lot of people would love to piss you off. And even more wouldn't care one bit if they pissed you off. Heck, in real world people steal and do all sorts of other bad things - that pisses a lot of people off, yet we just live with that.
If a game is a "virtual world" should it be a "perfect virtual world" or "real virtual world"?
It is easier to pass that level with multiplayer (co-op).
It was in DOOM 2.
-- Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Re:Cheating IS fun....
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I still have a mod for doom2 that gives unlimited ammo, and full auto everything! we still deathmatch with this mod, as well as the simpsons/barney mod, as it is fun as hell! Of course, everyone uses the mods, so it's not a cheat, per se.
Re:Cheating IS fun....
by
damien_kane
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· Score: 1
ahh... good ol' "Smashing Pumpkins Into Small Piles Of Putrid Debris"
It was even more fun when you tried "idkfa" in Mechwarrior 2...
Re:Cheating IS fun....
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
To beat it, you had to keep going up and down on the platform in the middle of the floor (I can't remember exactly, but I think the floor was toxic, so you needed to get the radiation suit from one side of the platforms). You had to fire a rocket at the demon face at *just* the right moment, so it would go through the brainy-looking texture/hole in it's head.
The number of rockets you had to fire in depended on the difficulty... I'm pretty sure it was only the one shot on easy.
I agree with the author..
by
tempestdata
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· Score: 2, Insightful
cheating itself is not such a problem. I remember using tainers in Diablo so that I could just go in and kill some monsters. I never PKed, or went into games where they said 'cheaters not welcome'. I went off with a few friends into the caves in nightmare mode. It was a gore fest and it really was fun! I think the issue is decency more than cheating. There will always be a few who wish to gain a 'competitive advantage' somehow, making life difficult for the average joe. This isn't the case just in games... look at our law books and you'll see what I mean.
-- -
Tempestdata
Re:I agree with the author..
by
ergo98
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Speaking of Diablo, the online variant of it was absolutely destroyed by cheaters. I know that shortly after boring of the single player game I gave the online variant a try: After several attempts at play, always to be PKd by cheaters (level 2s with hundreds of HP, for instance), I gave up on it forever and never tried it again.
Re:I agree with the author..
by
CoolVibe
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· Score: 1
I agree. When I don't have much time and projects to finish, I don't feel like dying everytime I turn around a corner. Enter cheatcodes. They allow me to run through the game, enjoy the "storyline" (for whatever that's worth with FPS games), the scenery and the plotlines, find out secret areas at leasure and then do some real work after.
Of course for online gaming I never cheat, because that does take away the fun. It's also a great confirmation that I suck. I like having my feet planted firmly on the virtual ground when I get too boistrous:)
Re:I agree with the author..
by
liquidflare
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· Score: 0
This isn't the case just in games... look at our law books and you'll see what I mean.
Please, elaborate.
Cheat me once, shame on you. Cheat me twice, shame on me. If I continue to play against cheaters, or people who continuously kick my butt, where probability should demand a more balanced percentage of win/loss, it's my own fault. Better to play honest people like me, who play for the fun of playing, not for some thrill of cheating fellow players.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Re:Cheat me once
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
First time, cheat on you, ummm... don't get cheated again!
I played Quake 2 excessively online for about 4 years. Being one of the very first people in the neighborhood with a cable modem (this was a few years ago) I had a consistently low ping. Couple this with a fast machine and a 22" monitor and I had the ingredients for success. The only thing I lacked was a Boomslang.
However, my skills sucked! So I found the hardest rail tournament servers I could: those with the best players and the game speed jacked up all the way. I took one freaking hell of a beating for a month or two. No shit, I was frag bait...the easy-kill noob.
Then I got better...and better...and better. Soon I was taking first place consistently and loving it.
I have to say that getting the krap kicked out of me is what made me get better. The best part was going to the lower speed game servers and having all the wankers call me a cheater when I grapple into the room, rail them in the head, and then grapple right back out again without touching the ground. SWEET!!!
WAIT! Even better was the kill against the OBVIOUS aim-botter 12 year old. Man do they get pissed! Very Sweet!
-- When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
"There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on--shame on you. Fool me--you can't get fooled again." - GWB, Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002
Re:Cheat me once
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I pretty much just assume/live with the fact that if the top two guys are gettting a combined 90% of the frags that they are being, uhm, well, helped. So I ignore them and play those that are truly in the mix with me...
But what I really hate is on a DM server a group of kids join in an camp on every spawn point. Nothing sux like never having the chance to enter the map in the first place...
Re:Cheat me once
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
An alternative approach is to play against cheaters intentionally as a means to sharpen your skills. Cheating generally results in mediocre skills.
ESR has a good essay on game cheating
by
Dr.+Manhattan
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· Score: 3, Informative
Re:ESR has a good essay on game cheating
by
anonymous+loser
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· Score: 1
There was a good article on cheating in internet games in Game Developer Magazine a while back. I've found the article online, but you probably need to susbcribe to read it:
Others reprogram their video cards to hide the elaborate textured walls in a game. All that is left is a wire-frame outline, allowing a player to see through walls and track those hiding behind them.
If you can reprogram your video card then you wouldn't even HAVE to cheat.
Actually, that reminds me of a Lasagne I had the other day.
-- "Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers."
- Hobbes
Re:please do not post NY Times articles
by
quake74
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· Score: 1
Maybe it's because the NYT actually has *good* articles written by *professional* journalists, as opposed to certain web sites were the same article is published twice on the front page, or where editors do not spell/grammar check. And by the way, "It's even waterproof!"
quake74
Whod they reference...
by
nfsilkey
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· Score: 2, Interesting
PlanetQuake? ^_^
This article seems rather dated when discussing the FPS cheat-em-ups. Punkbuster has been dead in the water since early 2001. VAC is just now gradually working at bridging the gap between legitimate players and cheat-free bliss. Still buggier than a Brit tho.:>
Then again, it is poignant to observe the Q2-era cheats. When the mood strikes, and an old Q2 vet hits up the few Lith servers left on the Net, he is greeted typically with one or more players OBVIOUSLY craxing and haxing. Still going strong. The CS community is one which works hardest, imho, at a social more and communal interest in enforcing a 'policy' of sorts that cheating just sucks and work has to be done.
The first example given in the article, a man who cheats playing Sims Online, seems pointless. Why would you want to cheat playing a game that can't be won?
The are probably the same people that drive in the carpool lane with no other passengers:[
Why would you want to cheat playing a game that can't be won?
by the same token, why cheat at a game that can be won? I play on yahoo chess and every once in a while I will get tricked into a lightning game where there's simply no time to move. I usually just resign at that point and let my opponent collect the rating points, but I wonder what kind of satisfaction somebody can really get from winning that way. to me it's like admitting that you're not good enough to win honestly.
On the other hand I can understand what motivates people to cheat on their taxes, and by virtual extension, cheating at games like sims online.
-- If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
What college is this?
by
Lord_Slepnir
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· Score: 5, Funny
From the article: "When I play an online game, I can't be the best because there are some college kids out there spending 14 hours a day."
What college is this that you can play games 14 hours a day and still pass? Everyone I know that did that either failed out or is taking so few credits they might as well have dropped out. College kids, I fear not. 12-year olds who have nothing to do all summer long, I fear.
Re:What college is this?
by
anon*127.0.0.1
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· Score: 2, Insightful
But thats always the justification that cheaters use. They're not doing it to gain an advantage. They're just doing it to "level the playing field", because everyone else cheats already, or has lots more time to play, or has a better computer.
The worst thing about cheating is the climate of distrust it creates. Any time a player gets lucky, or does something unusually skilled, they're quickly accused of cheating and usually booted. Even worse are the "So-and-so is cheating! / No I'm not!" arguments. Once one of those gets started, the games ruined. I spend more time worrying about whether that person is cheating or not then I do playing my own game.
-- I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
Re:What college is this?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"When I play an online game, I can't be the best because there are some college kids out there spending 14 hours a day."
So basically, he's shit. So shit in fact, that he has to cheat, making him pretty damn shit in any 12-year old kid's book.
The University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Our number one complaint from kids: "Why is Kazaa so slow?" Number two: "Look, I am a professional gamer and I am getting lag to the game server in Fiji that we use. And it is your fault." I had a kid claim that he made $60000 one year. Is this possible?
-- Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Re:What college is this?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Well if he did make $60k in one year (im assuming he lives in a residence hall) that would violate most res hall contracts. Something about using university resources to make money.
Re:What college is this?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I fully agree. I'm playing Counter Strike, and I'd give my right arm (uh no, maybe my left, right is used for the mouse:) for a cheat free environment, so that when someone takes my head as a trophy and kicks me to all corners of the map, I can LOOK UP at that person instead of having to check for round after round to see if he's a cheating asshole.
// What college is this that you can play games 14 hours a day and still pass? who said they're passing? personally, i'm more worried about the recently unemployed techie armies out there.
Yes, which is also a short step away from... he's a better player than me, so I HAD to cheat to be the best.
One of the problems arising from the cheating scene online is that players who are legitimately really really good at a game are often accused by those who aren't as cheating. Usually due to misplaced faith in their abilities and unsupported egos... i.e. Now one could beat me that bad so he MUST be cheating.
-- Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Re:What college is this?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
any college when you only take 11 credits a semester. i probably spent 3 times as many hours mudding as i did studying, easily. even when i was studying i probably was playing at the same time.
Re:What college is this?
by
Moloch666
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· Score: 1
I went to UT a couple years ago, my first year into college. Man, they had a damn nice net connection. I can't imagine complaining, but things could have change since then. I don't know how any one can get work done if they live in a dorm with a computer. Anyhow my grades went sour, now I'm going to Pellssippi (local community college). I'm actually quite impressed with it, it seems to be a much higher quality school.
-- Understanding is a three-edged sword. -- Kosh Naranek
Assuming that he was making the $60K, how is it fair to tell him he can't do his job while he's at the university? For instance, I have a few web development contracts... should I have to go out and buy a dial-up service plan to FTP the files up to the server? After all, I'm using the university services for money.
I don't know about your school, but here, that just applies to things like the web space we're given, not the bandwidth.
-- I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
Actually it violates state law for use of a state resource (resource being the wires, routers, etc) for private profit. The issue isn't bandwidth, it is access. The taxpayers, who heavily subsidize student tuitions, don't want to pay for some kid to update websites on their time, or so the theory goes. He or she can go a private service provider to do this work. Again, we don't write the laws, just merely blah, blah, blah.
-- Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Re:What college is this?
by
Sycraft-fu
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· Score: 1
Well the 14 hours is an exegration, but I can vouch that in college it is possable to play a lot of games and get real good. My first semester in university I played tons of Quake Team fortress. Probably 20-40 hours a week. It occupied most of the time I wasn't in class. Now playing it that much, I got real, real good. Probably better than 99% of the players out there.
So, you get the typical cheater excuse. They want to play a game like that, where it's based on reflex skill. They get their ass handed to them by a really good player. However, unlike the people that took the time to get good (we all sucked at some point) they get bitter and decide that they need a quick fix to be better. Hence thigns like wall hacks, aim bots and so on. This is their rationalization as to why its ok. Like most rationalizations, its hugely exagerated.
These people just want to win all the time, they don't actually want to play the game.
The best approach to that ongoing problem is a grassroots approach that some well-monitored and well run CS servers use. The best ones are the ones where almost all the players are regulars and they all at least recognize each other's names. Then you just have to watch the odd newcomer that shows up.
This can't be as easily in massivly multiplayer online games, but it's possible. In Ultima Online the game itself identifies and places restricitons on player killers (outlaws).
You will not always be able to automatically detect cheaters, but you could setup a self-recruiting police force in your game that has the power to levy brands on cheaters they spot. A cheater will first be branded by an officer, with no restrictions placed on them. Then subsequent officers he meets will watch him more closely. If he isn't seen cheating again, the brand will wear off after a week or two. If he is seen cheating by another officer, he will get that officer's brand and will now have some restrictions placed on him. Subsequent brands will place harder restrictions until finally he gets banned.
This only requires that a player have a consistent account to apply brands to, and MMORPGs already do this. A banned player would have to cancel his account, setup a new one, and start over with a new character. This is MUCH more painful than switching servers.
I read that Square is paying people to play and monitor Final Fantasy XI. I don't even see that as necessary. You could build up a trusted group of police players who do it for fun. Do any of you Slashdot moderators fell you should be paid?
The police force would still have to be monitored for corruption (Diablo Police, Department of Internal Affairs?), but that's a much smaller job then monitoring the entire player population.
Re:What college is this?
by
thinkninja
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· Score: 1
Well, it's certainly possible through a combination of tourament wins and sponsorship but he wouldn't be earning it online. Unless, of course, he was playing solitaire.
-- "The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)
Re:What college is this?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Yes and even at non-public universities, the university uplinks are often through a non-profit which has clauses about non-commerical use. It's not like the do content scanning or anything but it's not cool to go bitching because network problems are intefering with a business that you're not supposed to be doing over that network anyway.
The college might be Space Academy from Star Trek TOS. Captain Kirk started a long career by realizing that one computer problem was insoluble as written. He went into the program and rewrote it, allowing him to solve the problem. He has been emulated by cheaters ever since.
Re:What college is this?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
See it's bullshit. It's a justification that many people use to make themselves feel better when they don't stack up to the competition.
I know several people who play 3-4 hours a week and could still destroy people who played 3-4 hours a day.
Same gig here at East Tennessee State network. Get it all the time.
Re:What college is this?
by
Magius_AR
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· Score: 1
What college is this that you can play games 14 hours a day and still pass? Everyone I know that did that either failed out or is taking so few credits they might as well have dropped out
I beg to differ. Although I doubt I spent 14 hours a day playing games, when you don't go to half your classes because you know the material, can teach it to yourself out of a book, or read class notes on the web in a quarter of the time, it's very easy to pass college while not going to a single class.
Except those pesky teachers that insist on attendance requirements. Fools.
Re:What college is this?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Hmmm...
You a SNMP weenie? Work there? I wonder why they are based in Knoxville, TN. No offense, but not exactly the center of technology in the US. But I would rather live there than in The Valley.
I believe I first read this as a formal statement from Chip Morningstar, one of the creators of the "Habitat" game. Seems that many of these problems stem from people failing to heed that simple rule.
-- Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
A good rule, but even games like EverQuest that "mostly" don't trust the client are susceptible to macro programs that automate movements. Games like Quake are susceptible to aimbots.
Both of these hacks simulate player input that you must have from the client machine.
Re:Never Trust the Client
by
Sloppy
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Games like Quake are susceptible to aimbots.
Then it needs to just be part of the game. Quake is a virtual reality of a very high-tech world; it's only natural that the soldiers of that world have cybernetic enhancements and smart weapons.
Alas, this rationalization wouldn't work in a FPS game that models a low-tech world, like one where savages run around shooting each other with arrows, throwing daggers, etc.
-- As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Then it needs to just be part of the game. Quake is a virtual reality of a very high-tech world; it's only natural that the soldiers of that world have cybernetic enhancements and smart weapons.
Then, you're competing with other players with your clever movement skills. When someone comes up with a movement cyborg that executes dodge combinations and such, then what? Make it a part of the game! After all, it's only natural that the soldiers of that world have cybernetic enhancements and smart movement.
The problem is that you keep painting yourself into a corner, cutting off piece after piece of the game until you're left with nothing... nothing interesting in an action game, at least. Congratulations, a whole genre that was once a lot of fun for people has now become an exercise in watching the computers play one another.
Well, you still make the tactical decisions. Hey, let's play Myth instead!
Yeah, I see your point.
-- As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Re:Never Trust the Client
by
Stonehand
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· Score: 1
This bothered me about the MechWarrior games since the mechs have the technology to perfectly detect, locate and identify enemies but lack the obvious hookups to actually *target* the enemies. In that respect, they're far inferior technology than today's fighter aircraft, I think.
However, letting them aim on their own would change it from being an action game to a tactical game, and it would have been more difficult to implement a "reasonable" challenging AI (e.g. one that didn't cheat blatantly by having infinite jumpjets or anything like that, and one where your superiors weren't stupid enough to send a single unsupported lance with no MFBs against two hundred Timberwolves armed with X-Pulses and Thunderbolts defending a ruined city).
-- Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Here comes the old "leveling the field" argument
by
bigmouth_strikes
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· Score: 1
One of the players engaging in this automated counterfeiting, a 29-year-old financial planner from Texas, said he did so without apology (although he did not want to be identified by name). "I think the bots actually level the playing field for people who have day jobs," he said. "When I play an online game, I can't be the best because there are some college kids out there spending 14 hours a day."
Yeah, bots also level the field for stupid people, less skilled people and complete idiots who don't know the game. "Leveling the playing field" is an stupid excuse. Games usually reward those who spend 14 hours a day compared to those who spend 1 hour a day, it's called practice.
Granted, games where the pure amount of time spent playing is rewarded are inherently poorly designed. But that doesn't excuse using bots.
-- Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
Re:please do not post NY Times articles
by
leviramsey
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· Score: 1
Perhaps because the NYTimes (for articles like this) tends to be the only paper carrying the story (NYTimes rarely uses wire-service reports).
Some software makers are working on more aggressive solutions. Tony Ray, the president of the Houston-based company Even Balance, distributes a free product called Punkbusters that acts as a virus detector by looking for modifications on every player's machine. Game companies are paying for its development in the hope of keeping the games fair. Software installed on every player's machine watches for cheating while periodically filing reports to other players.
This has always bugged me. PunkBuster is just another piece of software. What stops it from being hacked just like the game? It seems to me that theres a sort of circular reasoning going on here: "This software is hacked, add software to prevent hacking." Whats worse is some servers require and kick those who don't have it and it many players assume that when someone uses it they absolutely cannot be cheating.
PunkBuster is just another piece of software. What stops it from being hacked just like the game?
You are right and Punkbuster has been circumvented and hacked in the past.
The difference however is that the company that developed the game seldom provide a good way to stop new cheats fast. PunkBuster provides protection against cheats, and does ONLY that while the developing companies might very well have moved on to different projects and so on...
What does this article say besides "some people cheat at online games and developers don't all agree on how it should be handled"?
Maybe I'm missing something.
Ravi
-- When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
QuakeWorld first-person maze game
by
Alrocket
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· Score: 1
"When QuakeWorld came out online, the community was huge and teeming with people," said Mr. Ray, referring to a first-person maze game that was popular in the mid-1990's. "
It's a what now??
Al.
Re:QuakeWorld first-person maze game
by
TwistedSquare
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· Score: 1
Even Wolfenstein 3D wasn't really a maze game... 2 generations on and QuakeWorld was?
Cheaters can prosper and quite often do, in school, on the job and in politics. It is a moral question rather than a question of "do you profit or not" having been a bot user in Quake 2 and 3 I found the game quickly lost it's fun and I became jaded believing that others were cheaters and there was no "honor" any longer. As silly and naive as that may sound when I first started playing the game it was all about honor and team work (I play CTF) and I loved it. Once I tried a bot and started using it the entire experience became negative for me. So if you can live with your self when cheating more power to you, I can't, and after 5 years (4 of which were cheat free) I don't play Quake any longer.
-- "If any question why we died,
Tell them because our fathers lied."
I used to love playing UT CTF online. Went by Fuzzylogic, FuzzyBad-Mofo, Deuce, and other nicks, and got rather good at the game. I never cheated, but after the aimbots came out, it became hard to trust other players. There are several reasons I don't play anymore, namely:
cheats/aimbots
noobs
facing worlds (need I say more?)
Another economic model for virtual worlds ?
by
OneInEveryCrowd
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· Score: 1
The site www.TSOExtreme.com mentioned in the article is a pay service that costs $24.99 to join and $1.50 a month after that. This is much more compelling than the virtual designer jeans mentioned in yesterdays article about There.com.
My concern with that big moneymaking idea is how long does it take a cheater to post the pay cheats on usenet ?
Some Common-Sense Solutions
by
fuzzybunny
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Note, I'm not a really hard-core gamer or expert, so take this with a grain of salt, but...
Cheating in online games is always going to be a problem. You won't solve it, but can at least reduce it to the point where a server admin can deal with individual accusations.
-Only send each client information it really needs. -Use checksums on binaries and libraries and things. -Try to get more 'mature' gaming crowds together. I have noticed vast difference playing Battlefield 1942 at various times during the day, such as when it's mostly high school kids, or people with jobs who start playing after dinner, whatever. -Make it clear that cheating sucks and won't be tolerated--this can help catch the remaining people with aimbot screen overlays and things that automated means won't take care of.
Netrek used some anti-cheating mechanism, by embedding an RSA key in every "authorized" client, to which only a few developers known to the "RSA guy" and the Netrek community as a whole had access. Imperfect system, but it reduced use of bots to the point where it didn't really matter.
Also, one thing that a lot of people forget is that a lot of 'active' cheats (mainly bots in action games) fall into one of two categories:
a) Fully-automated -- these are predictable. b) Partially automated -- things like aimbots. Their "owners" probably suck otherwise. If they see you, they'll get off a clean shot, but you don't have to confront them directly to smash them.
I am usually sufficiently gratified when I crush someone I suspect strongly of cheating by knowing it's probably some whiny 13 year old staring at his screen in impotent frustration to not really care about the other 9 out of 10 times he's beat me, not by skill but through some technology he most likely didn't create.
Re:Some Common-Sense Solutions
by
SuperKendall
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· Score: 3, Funny
I am usually sufficiently gratified when I crush someone I suspect strongly of cheating by knowing it's probably some whiny 13 year old staring at his screen in impotent frustration to not really care about the other 9 out of 10 times he's beat me, not by skill but through some technology he most likely didn't create
I feel the same way - when the Quake 3 demo first came out, I played online a bit. One day a player came along that was taking advantage of a serious speed enhancement... so I devoted the rest of my time to tracking and killing him. It didn't take long to find him as he'd wander all over at top speed... the funny thing was is that he was pretty predicable, even though very fast... so I was able to kill him before he got me about once for every three kills he got. I also taunted him, and I know I got to him as eventually he started only going after me!! Of course, knowing he was coming made it even easier to get kills as I could just slam rockets into a wall he was about to go past and throw him into a chasm, or other fun things... plus he was rather an idiot and probably killed himself as often as I did by trying to use rockets while running all over at top speed.
Anyway, it is fun to torment cheaters.
-- "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Re:Some Common-Sense Solutions
by
jandrese
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Those Aimbot guys really annoyed me sometimes though. You go to all of the trouble to sneak up on the guy from behind (because he's a camper naturally), and then the railgun embedded in his back shoots you dead the instant you come into view. That's just weak, especially when you are then called a n00b buy the aimbot guy.
That's why I generally only play online with friends. I don't need that kind of BS.
--
I read the internet for the articles.
Re:Some Common-Sense Solutions
by
Joe+the+Lesser
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· Score: 2, Funny
I am usually sufficiently gratified when I crush someone I suspect strongly of cheating by knowing it's probably some whiny 13 year old staring at his screen in impotent frustration to not really care about the other 9 out of 10 times he's beat me, not by skill but through some technology he most likely didn't create.
And then of course, when you finally beat him, he accuses you of cheating.:)
-- "I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Re:Some Common-Sense Solutions
by
aiabx
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· Score: 2, Interesting
That's why I generally only play online with friends.
That's the soliution that works best. If you play with people you trust, you not only escape all the misery and suspicion of dealing with cheaters (potential or actual), you get the pleasure of popping your buddy in the head with the railgun, and not some random dork in his mom's basement.
-aiabx
-- Just this guy, you know?
Re:Some Common-Sense Solutions
by
Rick.C
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· Score: 1
Cub Scouts - Pinewood Derby - remember those days? Some 10-year-olds built their own cars and some obviously were built by Dad.
The problem? Dads wanted to get involved and compete vicariously through their kids.
The solution? Hold a separate, no-holds-barred race for Dads only where anything goes and there is no spending limit on exotic parts and materials. That way Dads are not competing against kids.
For online games, just host two versions, one "straight" where cheating is not tolerated, and the other where cheating is necessary and appreciated as an art form.
-- You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine "Math in a song is good."-Linford
Re:Some Common-Sense Solutions
by
unicron
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Cheating is rather hallow. Whever some new cheat for CS comes out, I always grab it and play with it a bit before it gets patched. Granted, they're fun, and the technology is really coming along(some are at the point where they're in game gui's that come up and you select your cheat from a menu), but it's so unsatisfying. When I'm not cheating and I get some awesome 200 yard head shot or round a corner and put half a dozen shotgun shells into someones chest, it's satisfying. Tracking a guy through a wall and having the cheat auto-aim for his head and fire at will is funny..but I don't get anything from it. I can't say "Yeah, smoked that fucker" because I didn't, the cheat did.
And people that get caught are so fucking stupid. It's so easy to cheat and not get caught that I have to laugh at them. Usually if and when I cheat, I just wall hack, no auto-aim, and DEFINATELY no auto-fire. But I still see the same shit all the time: I'll be dead, ghosting the level, and some kid on one end of the level is firing sporatically and you can see that his gun keeps re-targeting someone that's seperated from him by half a dozen walls. Some of the more powerful rifles will even go through walls, and you'll see a guy just drop to his knees in a hallway with no one else in it. How bad do you suck that you need the game to fire for you?
-- Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
Re:Some Common-Sense Solutions
by
Chazmati
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· Score: 1
Good point, but I think the online gaming cheaters have a different motivation. Where the Dads just wanted to build a great Pinewood car, the cheaters want to cheat to win, and given the choice between a straight environment and a 'please cheat' environment, they'll go to the straight version because it will be too hard to win against all the damn cheaters in the other place.
I agree with the poster who said to play with friends, that's the only way. Or play a moderated game where the administrator can spot and kick clients. I used to temporarily ban cheater's IP addresses from my firewall when running a Q3 server.
Re:Some Common-Sense Solutions
by
TCaptain
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· Score: 1
The problem with that solution is that the cheaters aren't going to compete in the cheating area...they are going to keep going to the "straight" area because then they can win easily and make fun of you...never realizing the kind of losers they actually are.
I used to wonder if people were basically good or basically evil, until I saw what most people do when they think they're anonymous on the net and there are no consequences to their actions.
-- "I'm not a procrastinator, I'm temporally challenged"
Re:Some Common-Sense Solutions
by
fitten
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· Score: 1
Heh... In Ultima Online once, I was PK'd by a griefer. Instead of letting him grief me, I just followed him around in my robes asking him questions like "does it make you feel big?" and any time someone else came on the screen, I'd let them know he was a PK griefer. Every time he would hide so he could ambush someone else, I'd make sure everyone knew where he was and that he was going to PK them. He couldn't kill me (again) but he couldn't shake me either. Eventually he got a friend to come over to help kill me and I was able to lure that one close to the guards who killed him.
I had a very fun time doing this actually, after about 30 minutes or so, the guy got so pissed off at me he logged out.
Re:Some Common-Sense Solutions
by
crevette
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· Score: 1
There is an article on the same subject at: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20000724/pritcha rd_pfv.htm (link doesn't want to work...) . It's fairly interesting to read and gives you a pretty good idea about how much trust you can put in the client machine: not at all!
Don't you need a skill (Spirit Speak?) to understand ghosts? i.e., when you're running around dead telling ppl this guy is a PKer, they just see "oooOOOoOOOo" or something, don't they? Or have they changed this? I have't played UO in about two years. Also, I've never heard the term "griefer" before... how is a griefer different from any other PKer? I guess I can just google it...
-- sudo eat my shorts
Re:Some Common-Sense Solutions
by
TheLoneDanger
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· Score: 1
I play Counter-Strike exclusively on a server (public with admins) where there are many regulars. The jibes and taunts and camaraderie are the biggest reason I still play. It isn't about the kill count at all.
There was one regular who hid his cheating well. There was always the suspicion, but he managed to avoid it until a new anti-cheat caught him (several times, so it wasn't an error) and banned him. Maybe he thought that his high scores got him respect or something. But after a few months he came back (sans cheats, and getting terrible scores), and tried to work his way back into the group. He was friendly enough, but no one engaged him in a truly friendly way anymore. The trust was gone, and any respect was gone. I respect guys that just really try to play with the team much more than the guys with 3 to 1 kill ratios. You may suck, but cheaters don't even try to suck. They let the cheat play for them.
I think cheating is more rampant on densely populated public servers because it's like the idea that punching someone in the dark is a victimless crime. It's sad that the best way to avoid cheaters is to play on a more exclusive server, but at the same time, I've never had more fun online than I've had with these friends I've found.
--
"But I trust in the people's capacity for reflection, rage and rebellion." -Oscar Olivera
Re:Some Common-Sense Solutions
by
fitten
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· Score: 1
No... I was in my robe. There was no reason for him to kill me (got nothing from it) and when he went into fighting stance, I just stayed out of his reach. If he had magic skill, it would have been more difficult.
Re:Some Common-Sense Solutions
by
Noren
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· Score: 1
One MMORPG I play, A Tale in the Desert, operates an official server and a 'hackme' server (yes, that's its actual name). There's no combat in the game and attended macros are legal on the official server, unlike most OGs.
Re:Some Common-Sense Solutions
by
Mac+Degger
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· Score: 1
I don't care for your rationalisations. Fact is, you do try those cheats, therefore fucking up the game when you do. Then you go spouting off the fact that you 'only use wallhack'...well whoopdy-fuckin'-do, you do gooder you. You're still fucking up the game for everyone else.
-- --
Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Re:Some Common-Sense Solutions
by
Post-O-Matic
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· Score: 1
The UT engine utilizes (and this) your first two points. And the UT community utilizes the other two.
Still, the problem persists. Apperently cheaters are immune to common sense.
-- "My mom always said that there are no monsters - no real ones - but there are !"
Re:Some Common-Sense Solutions
by
Magius_AR
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· Score: 1
There's no more gratifying experience than beating a Starcraft map hacker.
Cheaters never prosper
by
Mattygfunk1
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· Score: 1
That video looked fake. The computer wouldn't have taken a hard enough hit to smash the cover off (I suppose he could have been like me and just too lazt to put the screws in). But still I couldn't see any motherboard there either, looked more like an empty case.
If that actually happened to me though, there would be a large number of dead gamers.
However, we are reaching a point where bandwidth will permit realtime polling and storage of stats. Cheatproofing as discussed in the article is possible, however, I don't recommend quiting if cheating is detected but instead resetting the client to the polled composite average. Or possibly even including damage. This will of course open up the floodgates for group cheating where a group of individuals hacks their clients to autokill enemies. SO, the ultimate fix must include random polling(to prevent gang up hacks), random remote storage, and encryption. This will prevent many cheats, but will do little or nothing to eliminate aim-bots etc which IMHO are just as big of a problem, but at this point, the client is still in the control of the "enemy" so partially insecure.
-- Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Most cheaters never prosper, that being because they're usually shunned, and they often just get bored of the game and leave, since where's the fun if there's no challenge?
Sure, you could get an hours worth of kicks out of hit at maximum, but there's a good chance you'd just get bored and leave.
However, there's a big twist here, that new gaming site, YouPlayGames may bring cheating to a whole new level. I've seen how crazy people get in Tournements, how they whine and bitch and some of them try to bend the rules, but at least in Tournements things are monitored. In this service, all you have is a bet, and there probably isn't any monitoring done (and even if you recorded the game, I'm sure your opponent could hide his cheating if he knew how to do it right and make it look natural). Since there is money involved, the cheaters will have a new reason to play, and that is for money. This will be a greater drive for people to implement more complex hacks, that make say, an AimBot look like the same sort of aim present in CAL-i CS players.
Since there is money involved, the cheaters will have a new reason to play, and that is for money. This will be a greater drive for people to implement more complex hacks
Remember the/. story a little while ago about the guy who wrote an AI for Tetris? It used machine vision and a separate computer to "press" the keys to move the pieces.
Do the same for Quake. How in the world would that be detected? It naturally won't be as efficient as a programmed hack (it has to move the mouse, instead of instantly jumping to the head shot) but it would appear as a human at the controls.
Yeah, but who has the money to build a robot that would do this precisely enough? Imagine the development for such a thing, having it respond quickly enough would involve writing custom drivers. The cost would be tremendous, and the payoff would probably take too long.
The kind of payoff I'm referring to here is along the lines of 100 dollars a month, not like $10,000 per month to cover such a project.
Takes the fun out of it
by
mao+che+minh
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· Score: 3, Funny
I never saw the point in cheating, it just lessens the experience. I remember there was this one team of guys that used to use cheats and/or exploits in Operation Flashpoint. I never understood the logic: if you are playing a game for fun and challenge, how do you feel rewarded if you achieve victory unfairly?
For example, CNN reported that Iraqi forces were using wallhacks, and they have been camping in spots located well outside of the battle map/field where US missles can't reach. Totally unfair.
Re:Takes the fun out of it
by
TwistedSquare
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· Score: 1
War is not a game...
Re:Takes the fun out of it
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Funny you should put it that way. With all the satellites, night vision, GPS, and other technoligies, the US is beating on Iraq just like a cheater in Quake.
I'm sure that advantage is one of the reasons why Bush was not so weary of sending people in.
Sorry for the flamebait. I just thought it was funny.
Re:Takes the fun out of it
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
/me smacks TwistedSquare with a clue stick the size of a Buick
Re:Takes the fun out of it
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
And you have no sense of humor. Idiot.
World + Models should be rendered in 1 pass.
by
Otis_INF
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· Score: 4, Informative
Now, the worlds in most FPS games are rendered first, then the models and other entities are rendered, using clipping/depth buffer info of the world. A lot of engines use 2 different render routines to do this: the world is mostly static and uses a different routine than the model renderer.
THe result is, that when you 'patch' the world renderer so that it f.e. renders wireframes instead of solid polys (in OpenGL based engines this is 'not that hard', you just change the value passed to glBegin()) the models still are rendered solid, plus because most renderers for models rely on the depthbuffer filled during the world rendering, the models close to corners are fully rendered, since the depthbuffer is empty. So you can easily 'see' the models close to corners. If you also 'patch' the model renderer for not doing world clipping, you will see ALL models rendered in your window.
This can't be done if the world + models use a single render routine, i.e.: model polygons and world polygons are packed together as THE set of polygons to render, then the single render routine will eat these single pack of polys to render. If you patch the routine for wireframing, you will see the models also wireframed, if you patch out the world clipping, you will get the complete world in your window, not what you want.
I think in future game engines there will be a merger between world + model polygon sets, because worlds are more and more modfyable in game by the player, which in the end requires that the modifyable parts are 'models' too. However games based on the current crop of quake * engines will keep on suffering from this.
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Re:World + Models should be rendered in 1 pass.
by
palad1
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· Score: 1
Then the rendering engine will just get patched as to show the normals of each poly without z-buffer test.
Thus when you see a tight pack of white lines moving, chances are that there's someone coming a round...
Re:World + Models should be rendered in 1 pass.
by
Da+Fokka
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· Score: 1
One of the reasons for this is that in these games the level geometry usually is BSP data, while characters are represented by meshes. Newer engines like the latest Unreal build use BSP less heavily for world geometry, which will partially prevent this problem. Fact of the matter is, if someone can modify the client there still is an awful lot he can do. The only way to minimize potential damage is to send only the data really needed to the client.
Re:World + Models should be rendered in 1 pass.
by
Hortensia+Patel
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· Score: 1
Not a bad thought, but as other posters have pointed out there are still far too many other ways for a hacked renderer/driver to distinguish between "world" and "models". Texture binding being one of the most obvious ones.
<nitpick>I'd have thought the wireframe hack would be via glPolygonMode rather than glBegin, but what the hey.</nitpick>
Re:World + Models should be rendered in 1 pass.
by
pclminion
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· Score: 1
Well, another solution would be to not even send the models if the code determines they aren't going to be visible. That way no amount of tweaking of OpenGL settings can ever make an invisible object visible.
Ironically, the reason this isn't done is that it's *far* faster to just send everything to the video card and let it sort out what is visible and what isn't. Letting the CPU perform visibility calculations would slow rendering down unacceptably.
It's amazing that video cards are *that much* faster than the CPU, that it's actually more efficient to send them a bunch of polygons that will never even be drawn!
Re:World + Models should be rendered in 1 pass.
by
SeanAhern
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· Score: 1
While that would fix the most basic of hacks, it's not a robust solution.
I'm sure we all could come up with ways to differentiate the world from the models. Here are a few off the top of my head:
+ Texture binding + Frame-to-frame coordinate diffs + Polygon extents + Display lists (used to ensure performance) + Submission order (games will *always* draw world first)
Re:World + Models should be rendered in 1 pass.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Don't you think that if it was this easy people like Carmack would have done it by now?
Cheating is part of the "hacker" fun. However it is normally directed against the machine.
If somebody cheats in a single-player game it is a clever hack, if he cheats in a multiplayer game, it is cheating against the other people and it may be considered abusive.
There is something in the idea that the machines are stupid and may be cheated, but not the people. Maybe because the machines can not respond back?
-- You human clever? You human smart cheater? I computer reformat you hard disk!!!
The only real problems with cheating in EverQuest was when ShowEQ came out. Of course, sony gave the owners of the website distributing it a "cease and desist" and it went down immediately, and if I recall correctly, patched EverQuest to look for this running and then ban their account, as it's a violation of their EULA (in short: cannot use third party software to aid EverQuest).
Then of course there's the infamous EverQuest Simulator where you can make any character how powerful you want without a subscription to EverQuest.
There was also a scripting program which the name of dosen't occurr to me at the moment, but it allowed you to sit by a vendor overnight, buy items from him, make something with the items, and sell it back to the vendor at a greater cost than you bought the supplies to make it for, and pretty much let you made a sick amount of EverQuest money (Platinum) overnight. I'm not sure they ever found a way to detect this one, but they made sure that if they found out you were banned for this one as well.
-- "You had this look that of an angel, it was such a bad disguise" --Dishwalla
memory patching
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Console cheating still works by "patching" memory (like trainer programs for PC games). Lock the byte for the players health at a set value, and they never die; lock your ammo at it's maximum and blast away with those ammo-eating rapid fire guns all day long. It's a bit harder with CD/DVD based consoles like the PS2 or Xbox, but it's still done.
Re:memory patching
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Easily defeated in a multiplayer situation. Having the client track a player's health would be stupid.
Cheaters need to be stopped
by
guacamolefoo
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· Score: 1
I hate those people who have installed Hand-Eye Coordination v. 1.4. I am stuck with a crappy alpha that barely works. Something needs to be done!
Re:Cheaters need to be stopped
by
c4Ff3In3+4ddiC+
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· Score: 1
10 Steps to Counter-Strike Success.
1) Walk/run/bike/drive to local computer store.
2) Purchase Counter-Strike Retail
3) Download 100MB+ of patches.
4) Find a fast 20-32 player server.
5) Play eight hours per day for many many many days.
6) Play some more.
7) Play some more.
8) You're still playing? Good.
9) Play all day.
10) Get accused of cheating and be banned from your favorite server.
By the way, I play Counter-Strike 1.5/1.6b constantly as "Caffeine Addict." I have a tendancy to frequent LA servers where I get sub 40ms pings. If I own you, don't cry. If you own me, I wont.
-- *twitch*
Re:Cheaters need to be stopped
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
How do I uninstall Caffeine Shakes 1.2?
rat bastard cheaters!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I used to think it was my age! Little buggers were using bots and wireframe wall on HL mods! I haven't played since.
I love playing Quake 3 online, but I suspect there are a number of players cheating.
I haven't been able to find many resources to Q3 bots, and other cheat methods
other than this site: http://ogc.ath.cx/
Anyone know of other ways people in Q3 cheat?
I love playing Quake 3 online, but I suspect there are a number of players cheating. I haven't been able to find many resources to Q3 bots, and other cheat methods other than this site: http://ogc.ath.cx/ [ogc.ath.cx] Anyone know of other ways people in Q3 cheat?
Dont know if its specifically falls under "cheating" but learning to play with a wide FOV helps. Also, I just upgraded to a new system, and noticed that my scores rather dramtically improved immediately. Simply because it "looks okay" on your end, doesnt mean you see everythign someone with a hot-shit system sees. (I was rather amazed, actually, at the difference in the game.)
Now.. Im still a bit torqued about the guys who can rail you, while facing away from you, and do it from so far away you cannot see them, or who rail you while you are falling off the edge of the space platform, etc. But Im not sure if thats a ratbot, an aimbot, an exceptionally good player with really good combo macros, or just a really really good player.
Maeryk
-- Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
Keep in mind that the model of an enemy you see on your screen may be nothing like what the other person is actually doing. The clients snaps, packetloss and fps all affect how well the server is able to predict a players position and direction, and if the server isn't getting correct data, then it won't give you correct data. The other player might be turned around but your computer hasn't received that information before he shoots and kills you.
As for railing you after you fall of the edge, it's not that hard, your trajectory is very consistent and predictable. If I went back in time and played myself 2 years ago the 2001 me would definitely think I was cheating somehow. Now I can make those instinctual shots I thought were impossible then. Hundreds or thousands of hours of gametime does wonders for ones aim and movement.
-- Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
I have a friend who is a natural at any video game that requires hand-eye coordination. He's shown me many times shooting people in midair. A good example is Tribes/2. When that came out I sat there and watched him snipe people while flying and only tracking them for a few seconds. Same goes for Quake3, he's a big fan, and you just may have run into him before. Kinada423 is his alias.
-- Understanding is a three-edged sword. -- Kosh Naranek
Re:Quake 3 cheaters
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Please list other places for the scrip kiddies to download viruses, trojans, and other stuff that will fuck up their computers.
If there is one that can cause their computer to melt make sure to list it.
Sometimes it's OK, sometimes not
by
ParnBR
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I think it's OK to exploit a game. If there's a loophole, sooner or later everyone will know about it. Although that may be later closed by the game's developer, it's not like someone has unfair advantage. That's in the rules. If the rules change, well, that's OK because everyone is affected by it. Much like the "grenades through walls" in Counter-Strike.
I also think it's OK if it's an inside, official cheat. I don't think this exists in online games, but if it exists, then it should be used. It's like it were in the rules.
But pure cheating is not OK. Yes, some people can be very successful at cheating, but they CAN be caught any time. Their fun is cheating, not playing by the rules. I believe it's OK to cheat in a game, but not at the expenses of the other players. If it detracts from other players' fun, it should be banned. If you want to play fair, it's really annoying when some other person is cheating and usually in a better position in the game than you.
As a side story: we have a card game in Brazil called "Truco" (I think it also exists in other countries) where it is allowed and even encouraged to cheat. But if you get caught you lose instantly or must pay some compensation. Usual cheats include signaling to the other player, hoarding cards or looking at cards before drawing them. You must keep your eyes peeled all the time. As you see, cheating is not really allowed, but you play the game with such a mindset that you expect a cheat anytime, and that's part of the game. It's fair in this context.
-- My neighbor's.sig is better than mine.
Re:Sometimes it's OK, sometimes not
by
Dr.+Manhattan
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· Score: 3, Informative
Midwest US has a game called "Euchre"; the dealer has a slight statistical advantage. The deal is supposed to rotate with each hand, but sometimes players will work to "steal the deal" by skipping opponents and passing the deal on to their teammate. Considering it's usually played at parties with a lot of conversation and such, it can be easy for someone to forget that it's their turn to deal.
Generally the game is declared void if someone's caught after stealing the deal; but if you catch them before, you might continue with the game, wondering if you missed one before...
Re:Sometimes it's OK, sometimes not
by
shrikel
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· Score: 1
When I was in high school, we had a class where the teacher was hardly ever there, so four to eight of us (depending on the day) played "cheating poker" all day long.
The rules were as follows: If you called somebody for cheating, you had to describe HOW they were cheating, and they had to honestly say if they cheated that way or not. If so, they sit out for two hands. If you were wrong, then YOU sit out for two hands. And at the end of the hand, the winner had to tell if he cheated or not. (But not HOW he cheated.)
We didn't play for money, just for fun. And it was really fun. I can tell you, there are few feelings better than being able to have 5 aces (we usually had a wild card or two) four hands in a row, beating seven guys who weren't able to tell how I did it!
I got really good at putting things in my sleeves (and taking them out) inconspicuously, stacking the deck (using a careful shuffle), dealing from the bottom of the deck, etc.
Anybody else have any ideas we might not have tried, for cheating at poker?
-- Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
Re:Sometimes it's OK, sometimes not
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
think it's OK to exploit a game. If there's a loophole, sooner or later everyone will know about it. Although that may be later closed by the game's developer, it's not like someone has unfair advantage. That's in the rules. If the rules change, well, that's OK because everyone is affected by it. Much like the "grenades through walls" in Counter-Strike.
I also think it's OK if it's an inside, official cheat. I don't think this exists in online games, but if it exists, then it should be used. It's like it were in the rules.
but what exactly is cheating and isn't? I know players who in unreal tournament would turn off certain gun effects and explosions to get an unfair advantage. Others would manipulate lighting, or make up crazy binds that would dodge for them. Is it cheating if someone has a better video card than you and that gives them an advantage? That is the problem with *serious* online gaming on the PC. The platform is too open, and there are too many variations on what people are actually seeing and doing. There is no "level" playing field when everyone is running at different framerates, have different amounts of bandwith, etc. The PC isn't ment for this type of thing. I hope eventually we will see a console (not based on the PC) that is ment for playing online games seriously, where everyone has the same hardware, and gamecode being hard to hack is taken seriously by the programmers.
Re:Sometimes it's OK, sometimes not
by
Thing+1
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· Score: 1
It's interesting the kinds of cultural differences that exist. My wife's from Brazil, and has taught me a ton about lying. I was raised never to lie; that it's better to hurt someone's feelings by telling the truth than to "offend God" by lying.
Now, she's not a dishonest person; she differentiates between types of lies -- there are lies that hurt someone, and lies that don't (i.e. what we call "little white lies").
Thinking further I guess all diplomacy is lying; it's like the quote "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggie' while searching for a rock."
OT: I've always disagreed with your.sig. Violence is actually the first refuge of the incompentent; the compentent try all other means available before resorting to violence, so violence is actually the last refuge of the compentent.
-- I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Re:Sometimes it's OK, sometimes not
by
c.emmertfoster
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· Score: 1
-- We can neither love nor pity nor forgive.
If you make a slip in handling us you die!
Re:Sometimes it's OK, sometimes not
by
ParnBR
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· Score: 1
OT: I thought about it before adding it to my.sig. Before adopting it, I tried to figure out its exact writing, since I only know its Brazilian version. I stumbled across this page at E2. I'm more inclined to think like the ones who got C! in their entries, but I didn't realize this quote could be so controversial and ambiguous. Thank you for making me notice it. Probably I should now search for a better one.:)
-- My neighbor's.sig is better than mine.
Re:Sometimes it's OK, sometimes not
by
Thing+1
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· Score: 1
OT: just so you know, you did get the quote exactly right (I remember reading it back in High School and thinking that he misspoke). My beef is with Asimov, not you.;-)
But only in this specific case. He was a prolific writer and I learned a lot from him growing up. I can't think of anything else I disagree with from him, just this one thing. Enjoy!
I hate cheaters
by
diablobynight
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Especially in Counterstrike. I took down my counterstrike server because I spent half my time banning cheaters. The key thing I turned off was the ability to see anything after you died, I found players would ghost enimies and then relay this to their teamates sitting in the same room. It really pissed me off, because of an obvious reason, the dead shouldn't be able to talk to the living, (without a medium and a big seance).
I think cheating in one player games, like I did after I went through and beat Hitman 2 the first time, is fun. But people who cheat in online games, how do they even find it enjoyable. Have the fun of the game is the challenge, being able to cheat and win is stupid. Just develop your skills and get better.
All cheaters should have their IP and user name out on a CS ban list, that all CS servers will automatically view and then BAN those people.
-- Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
Re:I hate cheaters
by
CrudPuppy
·
· Score: 1, Funny
see, the problem can also be viewed as "why are gamers turning to cheating?"
I was a totally legit CounterStrike player until I figured out that the people that were constantly fragging the daylights out of me were not doing so unaided.
so now I sparingly use an aimbot. sparingly, meaning I turn it on when up against major cheaters so I can at least play on even ground with them, and leave it off at times when it appears that all/most opponents are playing un-aided.
I personally wish the CounterStrike world would just bite the bullet and segregate into cheating and non-cheating servers. THEN aggressively kick and ban cheaters on non-cheating servers.
-- A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
I think cheating in one player games, like I did after I went through and beat Hitman 2 the first time, is fun.
Yea, played hitman 2 on xbox, i found that the only way to play that game was to cheat, i actually wanted to play it through, but, it was very tedious... well, you know, you played it
really???I played it through without cheating the first time and beat it in maybe 2 weeks. I thought it was an amazing game, your problem, probably stems from playing a first person shooter on a council, which is simply a very silly idea.
I hope I can get halo for my computer whoop X-box players asses when they get on internet servers.
lets face it, I can shoot someone in the head, using my mouse, about 3 times as fast as they can aim with a joystick.
What?! How do you know that they are cheaters? Maybe they are good and have fast reflexes. A lot of people have been playing CS for a long time and know it inside and out. I'm tired of people accusing me of cheating, it happens all the time, and I see it happen to other players that are cleary not cheating as well.
-- Understanding is a three-edged sword. -- Kosh Naranek
I beat it with out cheating. It took about a month (not hours played). I found if fun actually, I liked the slower pace, but even enjoyed to first hitman with the crappy controls.
-- Understanding is a three-edged sword. -- Kosh Naranek
Re:I hate cheaters
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
One way I can tell in the new delta force demo - there is a guy on a mountain farther away than I can see with my scope (on any gun), and he picks me off with one shot. This is simply not possible without cheating. You can't hit a non-moving target at half the distance more than 1/3 tries.
One way I can tell in the new delta force demo - there is a guy on a mountain farther away than I can see with my scope (on any gun), and he picks me off with one shot. This is simply not possible without cheating. You can't hit a non-moving target at half the distance more than 1/3 tries.
I was talking about Counter-strike, many people assume because some one is a good shot (getting multiple head shots in a row, killing from far away, etc), that they are cheating. This is not probable cause, it's easy to get head shots in CS.
I haven't played delta force.
-- Understanding is a three-edged sword. -- Kosh Naranek
All cheaters should have their IP and user name out on a CS ban list
NOT IP! However, if it's CS, then their WON-ID is fair game. (The WON-ID is a globally unique player identifier, which Half-Life (and hense CS) allows banning by. Unfortunately, such IDs are only given to Internet servers. LAN servers receive bogus WON-IDs, and players must be banned by IP.)
While I'm not currently on a dynamic IP, I am on a recycled IP. I have no idea what the person who had it before me did. It would suck to get banned from games because someone who had your IP once cheated. Many games now give out a unique ID per install, based on the CD-key.
There would also need to be a policy of how people got off the list. Something like after a week or so should be enough to teach cheaters to stop being asses. Of course, if using WON-ID, the cheater could probably work around by reinstalling the game using a new CD-key, but that would be a major hassle. Hopefully enough to keep them off for most of the time - two minutes cheating, then five minutes reinstalling should get annoying fast.
Until someone writes a cheat to rewrite the IDs. You know, maybe IP isn't such a bad idea, as long as it gets removed after a set period of time or there's an arbitration procedure.
Bleh. Cheaters suck.
-- You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I reply with a post that gives genuine insight into the mind of someone who cheats along with a thorough explanation and some moron moderates me as a TROLL???
moderators, get a clue and mod me at least back to "1"
-- A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
I can shoot someone in the head, using my mouse, about 3 times as fast as they can aim with a joystick.
Maybe, but aiming with the joystick actually isn't all that bad. It might be though that there is a bit of a "aiming assitance" though I played it on heroic lately and I doubt they have it in there.
What I noticed though is that the "dead zone" for the rifle for example is pretty big.... Hard to miss anything.
Damn skippy. I agree totally with what you are saying. Cheats in single player mode is a good way to learn the maps and practice different strategy, but online cheating is just LAME.
The easiest way back in the days of Q2 was that the bot was a little bit too good for it's own good. It would spin a character model around to fire faster than any human could ever manage. the side effect of this was, it would move faster than the human eye could keep up as well.. leading to the very distinctive illusion that the bot-user was firing weapons out of his.. ah..exhaust port.
"stealing" free things encourages copy protection
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1
I realize the NYT registration is kind of a pain, but the site is free. People pay $1 for a dead tree version. When you repost the story like this, you deprive the NYT of ad revenue. How do you expect them to pay the people who work there?
Unless they are going to stream the pre-rendered video/audio directly from the server to the client, I think they have to trust the client. Even if they sent all the game data to the client encrypted, the client still has to be able to decrypt and process it, at which point it's wide open for cheat programs. I suppose Palladium will potentially make the client much more trustworthy, though. Even though gamers everywhere would despise it, I'm sure they would use it if the latest games required a Palladium-enabled client.
Simple. The server knows where you are, knows the map, and so it only sends you what you need to know. Nothing more, and the client COULDN'T cheat. Sure, targeting cheats would still work, but that's what the checksum is for.
Unless you have the server keep track of occlusion as well, wallhacks can still be used via video drivers. If you were to have the server keep track of little details like "there's a wall between player 1 and players 2, 3, 4, 6, and 7, but not between player 1 and players 5, 8, and 9,"
you are imposing a huge processing burden on the server. Take that instance I mentioned, realize you have to perform that check for every connected player at every moment of the game, and you can bet that server better be ungodly fast or it will grind to a halt.
Unfortunately, it is unrealistic to think you can effectively and efficiently limit what the client gets only to what it should know.
-- "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Rather than fight... encourage
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
There is no reason why 'robots' should not be allowed in a game; none. It is just a form of descrimination. For example, suppose that someone who is blind has a program that 'helps' them play. Is this cheating?
There is nothing more natural than using robots when playing an on-line game. It is the fault of the game designers if the game is so repetitive that a robot usage is considered 'cheating'. The game should only be concerned with participants, be them human or otherwise.
Re:Rather than fight... encourage
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You suck at the trolling.
Reward those who think outside the box
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Tropaios
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· Score: 1
I remember playing the old TSR Dark Sun game, and discovering you could get unlimited Dragonlances/money/whatever if you loaded up one player and droped him from your group then did a hard shut down on the system. When the game came back up the players who originally had the items/money/whatever would still have it and you could have the other rejoin your group with all the goodies. Granted it was a one player game and it was pretty lame running around with 8+ dragonlances after awhile, but as we always used to say:
It's not cheating if the computer will let you do it.
I say reward those who can think out side the box and be at least marginally creative, it's a rare enough quality in the world today. Of course those who just use someone elses methods are lame posers/cheaters who should be flayed.
Re:Reward those who think outside the box
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Maeryk
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· Score: 1
It's not cheating if the computer will let you do it.
Like L.O.R.D with the "underground" mod on it. If you went into the gambling establishment, bet huge amounts of negative money, and lost, you won that amount in positive.
Local BBS installed it, took em weeks to figure out how I was going from a new character to the crystal shard etc and beating the hell out of people in the Inn in two days.
Yeah.. it was a cheat, but it was a bug, not so much a cheat, and anyone who wanted to do it (and went to that portal first, rather than one of the lame portals like Baba yagas hut or the black castle) could use it.
Maeryk
-- Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
Re:Reward those who think outside the box
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"It's not cheating if the computer will let you do it."
When you cheat in the real world, you'll say "It's not wrong if you can get away with it."
Morality is generally learned from one's parents. Or not.
Re:Reward those who think outside the box
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"It's not cheating if the computer will let you do it."
This is almost the most asinine statement attempting to pass for logic I've ever seen.
There is no middle ground. Either you're playing the game (as the designers intended, without using the cheats you stumble on accidentally or read about), or you're cheating. If you use cheats to play the game then you're basically admitting defeat, that the designers have designed a game that you can't beat.
Note that this is different from having the sole goal of trying to find cheats in the game simply for the sake of finding them (in this instance, you don't really care about the game). People like this are few and far between, though.
Cheating is why I play games over a LAN with friends rather than over the internet with people I don't know. Cheating is why I don't play MMORPGs (well, cheating and the incredibly amounts of time they require to get anything done). The anonymity makes it impossible to punish people for wrecking the game or getting ahead unfairly, and this problem simply isn't solvable without removing the anonymity of the internet, and few people want that.
Reminds me of a time I decided to try a MUD. Even though it was free, I was asked to provide my real name, and address and phone number and was explicitly told in the Terms of Service that they would have no qualms about calling my local police department on me. Once I read that, I changed my mind about trying the game, even though I knew that they were doing this in order to cut through the anonymity of the internet and bring real consequences to people to who used the system to abuse others. That knowledge wasn't enough to make me want to lose my anonymity in order to play the game.
Oddly enough, consoles with their unique serial numbers would be better suited to bringing about real consequences for online assholery. You can change your character, you can change your IP, but you cannot change your PS2's serial number. You get your console banned, your only option would be to buy another one. In this case, you're not anonymous, but you're also not identified by an actual name or address either. I think that's a good tradeoff, and will become an even better one in the future as console online gaming takes off.
Re:Cheaters Anonymous
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Oddly enough, consoles with their unique serial numbers would be better suited to bringing about real consequences for online assholery. You can change your character, you can change your IP, but you cannot change your PS2's serial number. You get your console banned, your only option would be to buy another one. In this case, you're not anonymous, but you're also not identified by an actual name or address either. I think that's a good tradeoff, and will become an even better one in the future as console online gaming takes off.
Good point, but they do have your actual name and credit card number if you are playing online with a console. I think this is why you encounter less cheaters on consoles, but it's hard to tell since console online gaming is in its infancy still.
-NoClanNeeded
turn off the damn hack!!!
by
kraksmoka
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· Score: 1
oy vey! i hate laggy starcrack games!
why bother to play if you're just playing to cheat?
-- "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
Maybe I'm a Little Paranoid
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yoshi_mon
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· Score: 1
But this phrase in the artical just jumped out at me:
All of these techniques depend on users' having full control of the software running on their home machines.
Hrm, a hidden agenda push for DRM? They do go on to say later:
"All of the major developers were saying that they could do nothing to fight cheating because they couldn't control what went on in people's computers," he said. "The whole landscape of online gaming changed when we proved cheating could be fought effectively."
In refrence to a software package that they claim acts like a "virus scanner" in what I would assume basicly prevents people from using trainers. However, and again maybe it's just my paranoia chanting, I can just hear the DRM drumbs beating in the background.
--
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Playing a different game of skill
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EnlightenmentFan
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· Score: 1
The challenge here isn't to be better at Quake, but to be able to cheat the best at Quake, that in itself is a game.
Yes, but--suppose you're winning at chess and your opponent jumps up and skillfully whacks you with a hockey stick? Maybe in his own mind he is playing a different game of skill, but that doesn't mean you want to see him across the chessboard again.
-- Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
Re:Playing a different game of skill
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Isn't that what Captain Kirk did in the "Wrath of Kahn" with the Cobi-ashi Marue test? Sorry, don't know how to spell it. Didn't he beat the unbeatable test, by changing the test itself so that he could win?:) Maybe Captain Kirk used a hockey stick on the guys running the test for him. Too bad, another fallen hero.:)
Re:Playing a different game of skill
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EnlightenmentFan
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· Score: 1
I think you are talking about a battle between a skillful player and the inventor of the game. (From what I know of Khan, I would have been rooting for Captain Kirk.) What I'm talking about is a (hypothetical) situation where Kirk agrees to a sword fight, then pulls out an Uzi.
The skillful inventor of hacks and cheats on a game may be a cool guy in many ways. Even so, his triumphs spoil the fun of players who are paying to play the game as advertised.
I liked the idea that there could be rooms where cheating was advertised and legal.
-- Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
Re:Playing a different game of skill
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Definately agree, they are two different scenarios. I also rooted for Captain Kirk by the way. I also agree with you about the cheater, in all actuality I tend to look at online cheaters as being in the same class as virus writers and people who speed up through the intersection when the light turns yellow even though they have plenty of time to stop. They somehow think they are more important and their time is more important than mine. If I'm ever in an online game and I know someone is cheating, I leave. However, I will sometimes pull out a cheat code when playing a game against the computer, but never against live opponents. Alot of computerized opponents have built in cheats anyway, they know where the health is, the weapons etc.
Re:Playing a different game of skill
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EnlightenmentFan
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· Score: 1
I agree, if the game is person vs. computer, the person gets to decide just what the rules are.
"All of the major developers were saying that they could do nothing to fight cheating because they couldn't control what went on in people's computers," he said.
Interesting. I wonder how the methods of fighting online cheating relate to DRM. Anyone ever heard of such an analysis?
Me and a few friends rent a server for the popular game Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike is a modification to the game Halflife. Halflife has a system where by each game purchased has a unique serial key which directly maps to a "WonID", there are no halflife keygens known and only one WonID can play on the internet at anyone time.
Part of the server administrators command set includes commands for banning WonIDs from the server, these can be accessed in game or remotley through RCON (remote console).
We deal with cheaters by banning the wonid they play on, almost 99% of cheaters do not come back on when we have banned their WonID. There are cheaters who have many serial keys (therefore they have many WonIDs), but this doesnt matter to us. They may beleive they can come back on and cheat once again but the ban isnt by a peice of software monitoring wonid's its by a person and a person can not be circumvented. If their banned, their banned. We report bans to each other through the forums we use, therefore all of the admins know of specific player names that have been banned.
Admins quickly get accustomed to how a player acts when cheating. A disproportionate number of good hits is a sign of an aim bot and the dead give away for "wallhack" (seeing through walls) is that of a player getting kills through walls or following players movement through walls.
Cheaters may always have the upper hand when it comes to technology but experience almost always wins out.
A disproportionate number of good hits is a sign of an aim bot and the dead give away for "wallhack" (seeing through walls) is that of a player getting kills through walls or following players movement through walls.
This is absolutely not true, although it can be an indicator. See my other post for a full explination, but it is possible to just be very good at the game, and get banned all the time because of it. Some server admins ban prematurely, without taking the time to investigate. One thing admins coud do is just to "follow" a player for a bit (which if you have two computers is a good way to cheat in and of itself..). When "following" the player - after just a couple conflicts you will see if they are cheating. Some people just know that if you stand in this particular spot, and fire when a door opens or something like that, that there are good odds you'll get a head shot. (I have the most direct experience with TeamFortress).
Re:On ours, they don't
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
We deal with cheaters by banning the wonid they play on, almost 99% of cheaters do not come back on when we have banned their WonID. There are cheaters who have many serial keys (therefore they have many WonIDs), but this doesnt matter to us. They may beleive they can come back on and cheat once again but the ban isnt by a peice of software monitoring wonid's its by a person and a person can not be circumvented. If their banned, their banned. We report bans to each other through the forums we use, therefore all of the admins know of specific player names that have been banned.
And what happens if they use different names? I play CS once in awhile just for fun, and I make up different nicknames all the time. I don't play seriously (it's a game folks!), just for fun. Now how are you going to ban me? If you are naive enough to think you can always detect a cheater, post your server address and I'll re-install CS and pay you a visit sometime soon:)
Re:please do not post NY Times articles
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meshko
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· Score: 1
do you honestly think this article is news? People cheat in on-line games? wow.
-- I passed the Turing test.
Re:please do not post NY Times articles
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diablobynight
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· Score: 1
dude you can just type archive at the start of the link in place of "www" and your in. You must not be much of a computer user if you couldn't figure this out.
Editors let these stories through because ocassionally I get tired of reading "I love Linux" articles
-- Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
Cheaters hurt good players
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valkraider
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· Score: 1
I have a close friend (no, really I do) who plays HalfLife: CounterStrike - Team Fortress. He plays a lot. He is VERY VERY good, and he knows all the maps so well, that he knows exactly where he can sit and snipe, and exactly when to fire to get a headshot, and all of that jazz.
He is pretty much a computer illiterate, as I have to constantly fix his computer or software. He only uses a PC for email, web, and games. He has never installed a cheat, and in fact has the cheat buster installed on his machine so that he can connect to the servers that require it. I even had to explain to him *how* someone could cheat. In fact, just updating the game to the latest version was a bit too complicated to him (since Nintendo games never require updating...).
So the problem is that when he is playing, he routinely will have 30 or 40 kills and no deaths - people ALWAYS assume he is cheating, and he will almost always get kicked off the server. It is very annoying, especially when he is playing on the cheat protected servers...
Now I suck at the games so I never get accused of cheating...
Re:Cheaters hurt good players
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Your friend is equally a victim of cheaters. They get their scores the unfair way, and in doing this make EVERYONE with such scores look like cheaters. Until we have a cheat free environemnt for at least a YEAR, I don't see people getting to trust such outrageous scores again. Once again, I know some people are really that good, but the problem is that for every one of those there must be at least a 100 losers getting the same score the unfair way.
Re:Cheaters hurt good players
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
He does not play "HalfLife: CounterStrike - Team Fortress". He plays "Team Fortress Classic", which is a mod for "Half-Life". Counter-Strike is a mod for Half-Life.
Seriously, I am really sick of all these people who think that CS is the game, and everything else is a mod for it. THE NAME OF THE GAME IS "Half-Life"! Counter-Strike, Team Fortress Classic, Natural Selection, Day of Defeat, Science and Industry, Firearms, etc ARE ALL MODS.
Neo and his cohorts are cheaters in the great game of life. "There is no spoon," indeed.
-- When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
Yeah right.
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"I can't be the best because there are some college kids out there spending 14 hours a day."
I cant remember the last time I had 14 hours free in a day. Maybe if I skip half my classes, get hardly any sleep, and just play a game I could. Of coures I wouldnt stay in school very long if I did that:).
Cheater mates
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I had a mate just like that when I was at college. He wasn't called Neal Jenkinson by any chance was he? And if you're reading this Neal, you're a loser!
Re:Cheater mates
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I may be a loser, but I can kick your ass at Doom!
Re:Cheater mates
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I think I remember you kicking/punching your GFs monitor's ass when Doom2 got too much for u, but you couldn't play Doom for shit man!
Re:Cheater mates
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I think I fucked your girlfriend once. Maybe twice, I don't remember. Then I fucked all your friends girlfriends, and now they hate you.
Re:Cheater mates
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Dude, didn't you know? All my "girlfriends" were trannies. When you got your revenge against me, you were fucking guys. They reason they hate me now, is because I wouldn't go down on them, but you did.
Fine, you can have them. I grew up and I hang with real girls now, and have mastered Doom 2 finally.
Re:Cheater mates
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Shoulda known you couldn't trust me. just a bad penny.
Re:Cheater mates
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
This is Jordan.
Re:Cheater mates
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Hey little girl in U.S. dress Come and give daddy kiss.
From Dead Billy
foreign language troll revealed
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Hello, they are a Erstanwender called Slashdot here the website this. My English is not, therefore the good one writes therefore in my German born them. They are I am strange, because it has therefore much disowned people, than if it communicates here. In my country we call this people the feminine asses fat people, than she does not have the life. Which thing called to it in the relative country? I would want to know really such things. He is moreover applicable that the public is completely homosexual Slashdot? They are not homosexual, but I would want to be. Therefore inscato it the entire day I have the warm sex with the customers of MitLinux. Linux gives to the wood me, believes that to it, that one. To the times I can trace down under leves and male the masturbate knots of the penguin of for the sight. Like erotisch! Task to that one ch' hour I go. They are satisfied in order to read the relative answers. Superday has one!
"It's just a game."
No shit, sherlock? You have no clue how much that sentence ticks me off - enough to make an account just to post this. Football is just a game, maybe I should start sneaking into locker rooms of teams playing against my school and dump strichnine in their gatoraide bottles, or put steel spikes in their jock straps. It's only a game.
I play an online RPG called Dransik, and cheaters have, at periods, been pretty rampant. The first, and most common, kind is bug abuse, which goes largely uncaught because it's nearly impossible to police fully unless the bug being used is one that would be noticed by other players (like bypassing safezones, committing crimes in view of NPC guards without the guards responding, etc). But the worst kind have been "hacers." There's a pretty popular program generally called a "speed hack" that messes with the computer's clock and makes it run faster (not just programs, but the system clock will also advance at nearly double speed). The problem is that, since all client-side operations of just about any game is timed by the CPU clock, this allows a player running the speedhack while playing a game to (depending on the nature of the game) faster unit/character movement, have much faster build/research times, faster rates of fire, faster item/skill use. In Dransik, these programs are used for everything from PKing (especially with ranged weapons - in cunjunction with a speedhack, a strong bow can't be countered except with a speedhack and a strong bow), to hunting (allows characters to outrun fast monsters), to tradeskills (a speedhacking miner, particularly with a macro, can initiate five or six operations before the item lock kicks in to freeze their inventory until the first one completes). Macros are widely used as well, particularly with trade skill bugs. There was a bug with the cooking skill when it was first introduced into the game, and people used macros to gain millions exp in the skill in a matter of minutes - with the regular side effect of crashing the servers (which was used by some people to initiate "timewarps," - where the server reverts to the last backup save - to recover lost items, or just to plain piss people off).
Cheating is nothing more than grief playing.
Re:cheating=lame
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
It's just a game." No shit, sherlock? You have no clue how much that sentence ticks me off - enough to make an account just to post this. Football is just a game, maybe I should start sneaking into locker rooms of teams playing against my school and dump strichnine in their gatoraide bottles, or put steel spikes in their jock straps. It's only a game.
There are several problems with your analogy.
1. Football isn't just for fun, on the pro level there is money involved. On the lower levels people might go on to do it as a real job. How many pro video gamers are there?
2. Nobody gets hurt when people hack online video games. It's not like "putting steel spikes in their jock straps". I think maybe you take online gaming too seriously. You should be mad at the people who made the game, not the hackers.
When I first started playing UO it was fun at first but then it got boring, chopping wood, mining, etc. So, I started interacting with the player controlled characters more. Like pick pocketing, PKing, etc. Then I found that B&E was much more fun. I could hide (become invis), a skill that I was a master at, and wait in front of a door of a users house then when they opened the door I could run in, thus revealing myself. Generally a battle would start with the most likely outcome of my character dying. This was OK with me because I knew if I waited until they left to revive then I would revive inside their house. Then, with the help of friends, we would empty all their possessions. We completely packed a tower doing this. Later they changed the code so this was not possible. I was still able to do this by having larger groups hiding making sure we could kill the person once they opened the door. Again they changed the code. They eventually changed the code so much that the game was unrealistic and became boring for all except those that didn't mind spending mind numbing hours mining or chopping trees.
I don't think it was wrong to do it... Heck they had the same opportunity to do it to me or anyone else.
Nick Powers
--
Encryption:
I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
Re:Early Exploits in UO
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Actually, you can spend mind numbing hours killing med-level monsters and get what you want too. I got to the point that I was going after monsters that had a slight chance of killing me becuase I could endlessly pick-off these medium levels and get large amounts of gold/items over time.
At first I thought, "What a sad state to get your ego boosted by cheating at a virtual game".
Then I though, "What a sadder state to hold those who do in high regard".
Cheating is the automatic admission that you are not competent.
Two kinds of cheating
by
Pejorian
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Hey, I haven't seen anyone mentioning that there are two kinds of cheating. The Quake-style cheats that involve looking through walls or whatever are relatively harmless, mainly because most people can play Quake online for free, and unless someone is wagering on your performance, there's no cash rewards.
On-line game cheating in role-playing, especially subscription games is FAR more serious, because in some games, the currency or objects of power or weapons are worth real cash and can even be sold on e-bay (see the post with the e-bay link above) and it suddenly matters very much that some people are cheating.
-- - Murphy's Corollary: -
It is impossible to make things foolproof
because fools are so ingenious.
I fully agree. I don't like either kind, but you're right, the effects of cheating in a Quake or Starcraft or any nonpersistent world game only last the duration of the game. Everyone starts off at the beginning next game. In persistent world games like Everquest, Runescape, or Dransik, the effects of cheating remain forever.
Well if you actually bothered to read the article, you would have seen that thats exactly what they talk about. Jeez, why do I even bother visiting this site...
You can often catch them in the replays. When watching the replay, you might see one of your units (usually a hero) suddenly get highlighted as your opponent selected it to see how powerful it is. If this happens and there are no enemy units within visual range and the animated circle of light, that indicates a legitimate far seeing or reveal attempt has been made, doesn't appear then chances are your opponent used a map hack to reveal the entire map and consequently the position of your units.
There are a lot of folks complaining that one of the "top" Scandinavian players does this. They say the proof is in watching the replays and the near prescience of his troop movements. Many of them were quite thrilled when he lost repeatedly to another top European player despite his obvious cheating.
While on the subject, I hate playing against people who don't cheat but who use "highly optimized" strategies. For instance, they load up on one kind of unit. This isn't good strategy, though it might win in the game, and it's no fun to place against or to play as, IMHO. The only effective way to counter players who do so is to load up on the unit that is best at destroying the unit that your opponent has chosen to load up on. This robs the fun from the game as fast any cheat.
-- Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Cheating ruined Counter-Strike!
by
ArcticCelt
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· Score: 1
I play Counter-strike since the first beta version and I play computer games since the dawn of PC gaming. The first game who hocked me for hours was ZORK on a "intel 8086". Since then,for me, gaming is a hobby. Long time ago I was kind of surprise when my 10 years nephew totally kicked my but.
So I ask him how do he do and he told me "go to download some kind of cheat here" its fun..... I knew since the beginning that there was some cheaters but they where the exception. This is really not the cases anymore. When a little newby who don't know nothing about gaming or even computers can easily download all kind of cheat after a couple of days I think there is a problem.
So I downloaded OGC to see what were the cheats and I understood something. It is not only the good players who cheat, there is also a bunch of lame losers who cheat and suck ass. When I was playing a almost everybody where following me looking thought walls. I realised that when you have all the cheats the game look more like Predator against the Iraki army; Aim bot, anti-flash, speed cheat, lambert, no walls , no recoil etc.... (By the way some specials units of the American army are not so fare from the Predator;) ).
Now I am completely disgust. I have uninstalled counter-Strike.
--
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
Re:Cheating ruined Counter-Strike!
by
Winterblink
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· Score: 1
Ignoring all the anti-american bullshit in your message, I will agree with you that cheating indeed did utterly ruin Counter-strike. In my opinion though, it's only the really shitty skill-less players that cheat, not the good ones. There ARE good CS players out there, but it's hard to pick them out of the pack of cheating losers.
-- "I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Re:Cheating ruined Counter-Strike!
by
Moloch666
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· Score: 1
I've been playing sense beta3. I still do, actually. I have never cheated before, not even to try it out. I did download OGC and plan to use it at the next lan party of close friends, just to fuck with them. I think you should be picky about the servers you join, I generally don't knowingly encounter cheaters. I do have a problem with people calling me a cheater though. So I can either keep up with the cheater (which I doubt) or I am finding good servers.
It's just odd seems like some people claim there are cheaters all over the place. I can count the number of people I KNEW were cheating.
-- Understanding is a three-edged sword. -- Kosh Naranek
Re:Cheating ruined Counter-Strike!
by
ArcticCelt
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· Score: 1
...Ignoring all the anti-american bullshit in your message...
OK...!!?? I think there is a misunderstood here and your attack really pissed me off..
This wasn't anti-american but simply stating the fact that the American army is the most technological advance fighting force in human history. Take a look at The Objective Individual Combat Weapon (OICW) for yourself and tell me that this is not the weapon of "The Predator" (from the 1987 movie of the same name).;)
If you think that I was referring to the fact that the Predator in the movie is a cold blooded barbarian assassin then I want state that even if I think that the real marines are technologically closer to the alien in the movie Predator, Sadam and is troops are the cold blooded barbarian assassins.
For the parallel with OGC in counter-strike just look the results of the battle of Najaf. Iraqis dead 1000, Alliance troops dead 0. I think it is obvious that the Iraqis are doomed and can't win. Like if you play a game in counter-strike against a team that use OGC it is obvious that you are doomed and can't win.
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
Re:"stealing" free things encourages copy protecti
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
They would get their ad revenue if they just let me go to the article, and not go through their annoying signup, since that gives them no revenue anyway.
Annoying hoops that dont have to be jumped through wont be jumped through.
While on the subject, I hate playing against people who don't cheat but who use "highly optimized" strategies. For instance, they load up on one kind of unit. This isn't good strategy, though it might win in the game, and it's no fun to place against or to play as, IMHO. The only effective way to counter players who do so is to load up on the unit that is best at destroying the unit that your opponent has chosen to load up on. This robs the fun from the game as fast any cheat.
Having never played Warcraft, Im not sure what you mean. However, sounds rather parallel to playing Magic:The Obsessi^h^h^h^hgathering. When you face someone with a really ANNOYING deck, you have to figure out A) how to get around it or B) realize your own "really annoying deck" isnt necessarily the best thing to have when dealing with it. It's all part of the strategy, IMHO. Not cheating. (the only MTG cheating I hate is when people are lucky enough to own four of every rare or banned card, and play them, and to me, that makes the game unfair.. if someone has four black lotuses and a mox of each color, cards that "sell" for the 300$ price range each, it tends to unbalance the game a bit).
maeryk
-- Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
Power playing. I've seen it in all the MMO/persistent world games I've tried. There are people who see that they must win, even if there isn't a winning condition in the game parameters, there is still a certain level of ranking, even if it's informal among the community, where the richest or strongest players are most respected.
Or play games/mods Mature players play
by
That_Dan_Guy
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· Score: 1
I gave up on Counter Strike many years ago, after the cheats were posted all over the sites and everyone (even myself, I'm sorry to say- I just didn't beleive cheats worked until I tried it) downloaded and tried them.
About 6 months later I found Day of Defeat. I've seen some people cheat there, but it is much more rare than CS ever was.
Other games to try would be games that don't move so fast. I Hear there are WW2 mods for Ghost Recon that move so slowly cheaters/Immature idiots never bother.
Re:Here comes the old "leveling the field" argumen
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Practice? You mean I need to put effort into something?
The hell with that!
Have no games learned from the past?
by
mkraft
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· Score: 1
Players should not even be able to cheat in games written today.
When the first MMORPG Ultima Online came out, programmers severely underestimated the resourcefulness of cheaters. All checks were done on the client side. Once the encryption scheme was broken there were hacks that pretty much allowed you to do anything you wanted from running superfast to instant teleportation to taking things that were never designed to be carried. Eventually all checks were moved to the server and the cheating subsided. Then people started Macroing with Bots to do the same thing mentioned in this article. Code was added to detect repetitive behavior and experience wasn't given unless you varied your game play (which Bots don't do well).
This was around 5 years ago. I can understand having problems with UO since it was one of the first of its kind, but if today's games still allow players to do this, then its the programmers fault since solutions for these problems have been around for about 3 years now.
Wallhackers mirroring reality
by
MachineShedFred
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· Score: 1
You know, in warfare, technological advantage is revered, yet in entertainment, it is reviled.
Are Iraqis calling us l33t hax0rs because we use nightvision, GPS, infrared imaging, and stealth aircraft?
Probably.
How does one call another a wallhacker in Farsi or Arabic?
-- Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Re:Wallhackers mirroring reality
by
Ayaress
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· Score: 1
If you need to make the connection between war and a game... Anyway, the difference here isn't so much cheating as power playing. The general effect would be like playing a game like Civilization in a situation where one player has a vast technological superiority. Cheating, on the other hand, creates a gap that can't exist normally. It would be the equivalent of Bush growing five hundred feet tall and just stepping on Baghdad.
Re:Wallhackers mirroring reality
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Well cheating in war is: -Acting like you are surrendering but then attack. -Troops hiding near civilians -Iraq killing their own civilians and then saying that U.S. troops did it.
Technological advantage does not mean cheating. Having technological advantage in a war is analagous to having a lot of experience points, money, and/or weapons in a MMORPG because you've spent the time to accumulate those.
Re:Wallhackers mirroring reality
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
LOL. Cheating implies a set of agreed conventions which, to gain "unfair" advantage, someone contravenes.
Haven't you heard the saying "All's fair in love and war" ?
This is WAR baby. Not a game. You can't "cheat" at war. You *can* employ underhanded and less than honourable tactics to gain a perceived advantage, but you can't cheat. (Apart breaking from the Geneva convention that is.... and even that isn't "cheating", just very nasty..)
Re:Wallhackers mirroring reality
by
MachineShedFred
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· Score: 1
Good lord.
Maybe I need to start encapsulating the sarcasm in an HTML tag so you guys KNOW WHEN THERE IS SARCASM PRESENT.
sheesh.
-- Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Cheaters aren't that nice
by
banana+fiend
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· Score: 1
"HaXorz RUlez!!! I Ownz U". etc. etc. etc.
remember... it's like the seperate olympics idea... one that does drugs, one that doesn't. No-one wants to win the drugged-up-to-my-eyeballs drooling orange-eyed, dead at 30 olympics... we want to win the clean one. So we cheat at it.
Similarly, a lot of these cheaters don't want to lose against other cheaters, they want to beat people, and then laugh at them.
There are various kinds of cheaters remember, from the ones that want to challenge the system to the ones that sell simulated money for real on e-bay. I believe most get most pleasure/money etc. from cheating and causing harm to honest players.
-- Johns: Well, how does it look now?
Riddick: Looks clear.
Re:Cheaters aren't that nice
by
JaxGator75
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· Score: 1
He's right... It's useless to try to understand, since kidz will be kidz. It says something about their level of maturity.
If you honestly get thrills from laughing at someone you fragged using a `bot or a flat-out cheat, you have greater issues (self-esteem, learning how to interact with people, trying to talk to girls) that should be examined.
A "Cheaters Welcome" server would be the perfect answer FOR THOSE OF US WHO HATE CHEATERS. The Cheaters themselves would *never* be caught in a room where they could be fragged-at-will and (*gasp*) laughed at by some OTHER wet-end who has managed to get his skin the same color as his mother's wallpaper. If they played basketball, it would be in a wheelchair league. If they golfed, their score would all be 18 (all Holes-in-One! I 0wnz ur g01fc0vr2e).
The best revenge is to let them have their "triumph" and go make love to your wife/girlfriend. You'll have forgotten all about them by the time they cry themselves to their lonely, lonely sleep. (sound familiar, cheaters???)
-- Come and see the violence inherent in the system!
But "computer lets you do it" is not a valid reason when it's multiplayer. In fact when you play multiplayer there can be unwritten rules. You keep breaking them you could end up playing a single player game.
An example, say you go to a quake server, and everyone there says, we're playing shotguns only for this map. You start using a rocket launcher, you're being an asshole. EVEN if it's allowed by the game engine AND by the server/map settings. If you want to play with a rocket launcher, you either play elsewhere or get permission to do it or just wait till most people have enough of shotguns only.
It's just like any other sport. If you say it's not cheating if the computer's game physics/rules allow it, then you can say it's not cheating if the law of physics allows you to grab a soccer ball and run all the way to the goal mouth, or glue it to your foot.
In sport even if something doesn't break any existing rules in the rule book, if enough people think something is cheating/bad/inappropriate and some people do it too often, a new rule is written.
People who don't get it don't understand what _playing_ with other people means and probably missed a significant part of their preschool life/education (where kids agree on/negotiate arbitrary rules in games they create together).
No clientside processing, the solution?
by
cyb97
·
· Score: 1
I guess the day extreme-broadband (we're talking speed here) is available for joe schmoe, online multiplayer games might take the turn many turn-based or table-based games have taken... Getting rid of client-side processing, which would kind-of eradicate all this lowlevel cheats like wire-frames and stuff. If all the client gets it's a stream of pictures to display and all it sends back is the coordinates of what the state-of-the-art gaming controls are at the time, most cheats as we know them today would be gonzo.
Some of this theory could even be realized today as a lot of cheats (wireframe etc) is based on information that the player isn't able to see, but his client (the game) still gets it from the server. If the server is more selective on who gets to know what (which would increase processing by a 10-fold I guess), a lot of potential cheaters could be kept in the dark about the position of their enemies that are hiding with that sniper-rifle behind the next doorway...
But until real broadband and really powerful CPUs (beowulfs ?) are mainstream, I guess we'll have to put up with some cheating from time to time...
Re:No clientside processing, the solution?
by
zootread
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· Score: 1
Getting rid of client-side processing, which would kind-of eradicate all this lowlevel cheats like wire-frames and stuff. If all the client gets it's a stream of pictures to display and all it sends back is the coordinates of what the state-of-the-art gaming controls are at the time, most cheats as we know them today would be gonzo.
Well, true this would make it more difficult to write a cheat. But then people could just write an aimbot that just reads the screen and use some kind of AI to determine where the enemy is. In any case, I don't see this ever happening in any game that involves fast-paced graphics. By the time we have very fast broadband, video cards will be at such a level that streaming video would not even come close to a locally rendered image. Maybe it would be a good idea for game developers to minimize the amount of information the client gets, though. For example, give the client only enough information to be able to render what's on the screen at a given moment, but let it render it by itself. Granted, you still have the posibility of writing an aimbot.
The only way to really defeat cheating is to use some kind of hardware solution. If this DRM crap takes off, game developers will be able to implement the technology to prevent outside applications from accessing what is being displayed on screen. But this may get hacked just like everything else. For example, someone could pipe the output of their video card to another PC, which will do the aimbot processing for you and send it back through to your keyboard/mouse/joystick.
In fact something like this has already been done. In the last few months there was a Slashdot article about someone who setup a camera which watched the computer screen and used AI to play Tetris (IIRC). The computer with the camera had no connection with the computer with Tetris on it, other than sending a keyboard signal back to it.
You can never stop cheating. But you can make it difficult to the point where most people won't attempt it.
--
Zoot!
Re:No clientside processing, the solution?
by
cyb97
·
· Score: 1
A DRM solution is pretty interesting as it seems like it's more or less being introduced on the x-box (MS bans x-boxes with a mod-chip, or so I've heard). But until open-architectures (like normal PCs, ie. not consoles) get DRM implemented through the whole architecture (most notably in the kernel/CPU) nothing can stop you from tampering with the RAM. I guess this could potentially end up being a showstopper for gaming on OpenSource platforms as they might not be the first ones to implement fullscale DRM-solutions right through the OS...
I guess there must be reason why there's TIA (total information awareness) in multiplayer games, I guess it's a combination of bandwidth and server-processingpowers.
The last FPS game I played seriously was Q2 (or AQ2 to be exact), the server required all players to have a complete copy of the map (.bsp's), afaik this is still normal... I guess a more advanced server-client solution would be feaseable where the client receives map-data on the fly from the server. This way wireframing would still be possible (it would increase your frames per second, but you'd only see what you could with textures switched on as the client wouldn't know anything about non-visible objects...
I guess the point here is dumbing down the clients...
In the future who knows, the turing-test of the 21st century could be playing FPS believably (with all the mistakes humans make...).
Oligatory Additional Reference on Cheating
by
The+Optimizer
·
· Score: 1
I know it's old new to many/.'ers, but here is a link to my article "How to the Hackers: The Scoop on Internet Cheating and How You Can Combat It" from the July 2000 issue of Game Developer Magazine.
It's a programmer's view on a variety of cheating methods and some disuccsion of limitations and countermeasures. And before you even say it-- I didn't choose the title for the article, my editor did, so don't email me again about the misuse of the word 'hackers'.:-)
-Mp
Re:Oligatory Additional Reference on Cheating
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Good Article. A few years ago I coded my own aimbots, and found model cheats in Unreal Tournament. A lot of your stuff was right on the money. I write my own small games now, and I hope to code something large one day. I'll will save your artcle for when that day comes.
May'be the game just need referees
by
hcduvall
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· Score: 1
I myself don't play too many of these games, online or not. But it sounds like they should add ref to games in their next incarnation. or something like a DM/GM/etc... in role playing games.
Or a couple of the players can sit out a game by getting fragged and ghosting around to keep the rest honest. Its like being goalie in pickup soccer games, the majority of people don't like it, but if you rotate the job between (reasonable) players I don't see the problem.
quakeworld a maze game .. i dont think so
by
cyrax777
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· Score: 1
"When QuakeWorld came out online, the community was huge and teeming with people," said Mr. Ray, referring to a first-person maze game that was popular in the mid-1990's. "There was serious competition and an enormous amount of online status. Then the cheats showed up, and almost overnight it went from something that was a hugely popular community into something that was a wasteland.''
No it was a multiplayer tweak for Quake 1 that made it play alot smoother for us modem people.
Cheaters will always exist on the PC platform.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
As long as you are on a PC, cheating will always be a part of any game. The PC is simply too open, not to be hacked for fun never mind if real money is going to be involved someday.
Hacking consoles is harder, especially if they are obscure hardware. It does happen though.
I hate to say this, but I think micro$oft has a good solution with the x-box. They have your credit card number and all of your information. If you cheat they throw you off the network. I have yet to see anyone I would suspect of cheating on xbox live(although there are plenty of people who exploit glitches). If anyone has any info about such things, do tell:)
It is already being done
by
doublem
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· Score: 2, Informative
Gameshark
Codebreaker
There are others, but they do the same thing.
Boot form the CD. Select the cheats. Boot the game. The cheat program runs in memory changing values for you so you have lots of cash, lots of lives and so on.
-- "Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Pretty weird, heh?
First, there's the gamer, abusing a glitch or loading up a mod, and everybody starts yelling "cheater", kick him out and enforce policies. Because he ruins the game experience.
Then, there goes the real life, with night vision googles, stealth jets, smart bombs, laser guided projectiles, satelite imagery and the like.
Hmmm... Maybe something shoud be done...
> login: world (password not shown)
> boot reality
> modprobe fairplay [ok]
> userdel nobrainer_military_maniac
> ban.gov,.mil
> wall Go fight for equality NOW!
> reboot
;)
-- Bite my shiny metal... oops... Nevermind!
The interest just oozes from this story...
by
Mulletproof
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· Score: 1
"Do Cheaters Ever Prosper?"
Not that you would ever look to real life for an answer to that question...
One of the players engaging in this automated counterfeiting, a 29-year-old financial planner from Texas, said he did so without apology (although he did not want to be identified by name). "I think the bots actually level the playing field for people who have day jobs," he said. "When I play an online game, I can't be the best because there are some college kids out there spending 14 hours a day."
Judging by his definition of leveling the playing field, he must have been an Anderson intern.
I remember when I worked as an SE intern at SGI (back in the glory days!) some of the employees brought in their teenage children and they played quake (II?) against us. There was this one level where you could get your group in this one circular room with one automatic door. Things spawned in there and so forth.
We were having a hard time getting them out so I just changed my team color and got in, stood at the back of the pack. Then changed color back and "WHAM! WHAM!" which was followed by "SCREAM SCREAM". It was beautiful.
I have no problem with cheating...IFF!!!
by
Kakurenbo+Shogun
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't think cheating is a problem IF AND ONLY IF everyone who's playing agrees that it's okay to cheat. In other words, if one of the rules is "you may use any methods you wish to gain an advantage--if you find a way to hack the game, more power to you", then great! It's a competition between hackers.
I think a partial solution to the problem would be for online game sites to have separate games where cheating is explicitly allowed. Lame-ass cheaters who don't have the guts to match their hacking skills against others will still cheat in the no-cheating games, but at least the cheaters who have confidence in their skills will participate in these games, because winning there will earn them legitimate respect from the community they have the most respect for.
If those who participate in the hacker games make some effort to create a culture that looks down on people who hack in the non-hacking games, that could help too.
People who cheat in games where cheating is not allowed by the rules are lame-ass selfish bastards with no character and a pathetic substitute for self-confidence. If they really feel like they've accomplished something by winning in a way that spoils the game for unsuspecting people who play by the rules, then I feel sorry for them.
A few years ago when I was teaching middle school, I wanted a way to show wireframes in 3D games so I could take screenshots and use them with my 6th and 7th graders as examples of geometry in application. Most often, I would write to developers and ask them if there was still a way to view wireframes. They seemed to like this question, and would always send a pretty thoughtful response, but I did notice over the years that the availability of this feature seemed to disappear. I guess cheat potential has something to do with that effect.
By the way, the best screenshots I got were from UltraHLE with N64 ROMs.
Ravi
-- When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
Cheating is a social problem--
by
Cerebus
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
--and therefore requires a social solution.
As long as code executes on fundamentally untrusted platforms and as long as code is imperfect, there is no way to prevent cheating or exploiting in a multiplayer game. That's just the way it is; more technology isn't going to change it a whit, especially for
If we approach the problem socially, however, solutions present themselves.
Many games provide unique identifiers for each installation, like Half-Life/CounterStrike. This is usually an anti-piracy measure-- but we could use it to control cheating. Banning by unique ID is part of the solution, but not everything. Consider a solution modeled on USENET killfiles--
I join a game, and the client downloads the UIDs of the other connected players. The client compares this list against my personal list of people I don't like to play against (cheaters-- or maybe just obnoxious twits) and notifies me if any are in the game. I can then make an informed decision about whether to play there or look elsewhere.
Clients could also collaborate; if a player joins who's on my 'shit list,' I could allow the client to notify the other players. Perhaps even an automated voting scheme could be enabled-- a player UID thats on enough people's shit lists could be automatically banned (assuming the server allows it).
Yes, there would be a market for new UIDs, much as there is a market for CD keys. However, if the client makes it easy enough to maintain the shit list, that in and of itself is only a temporary problem. As a side-effect, if an ID gets widespread my client plonks the whole lot of cheaters with one entry.
The emergent behaviour of such a system would force all the cheaters to play each other on cheater-friendly servers. At that point, who cares? 8) I see this as a win-win scenario; cheaters get to cheat, and the rest of us don't get bothered.
Some games are partway there. Tribes2 and some CS admin mods have voting mechanisms that kick/ban players; but this doesn't carry over between servers, whereas the above scheme would.
A third-party tool would help, but to be really effective it needs to be integrated into the game client so that all players are using it.
-- -- Cerebus
Re:Cheating is a social problem--
by
Winterblink
·
· Score: 2
I almost hesitate to draw a parallel, but look at XBox Live. There we have a system of centrally managing not only user information but problem user reporting. Maybe they weren't being innovative in their idea, but at least they implemented it. Might be a step in the right direction for gaming as a whole.
-- "I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Re:Cheating is a social problem--
by
Alsee
·
· Score: 1
One problem is that the best players also often get accused of cheating. Getting on some whiner's "shitlist" isn't a big deal, but it can become a problem with the voting system or shared list system.
-
-- - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Re:Cheating is a social problem--
by
|/|/|||
·
· Score: 1
I agree that the only real solution to cheating is a social solution, not a technological one.
Even in the solution that you suggested there are problems - you mentioned cheaters generating new IDs, but what if a cheater simply starts using *your* ID? Now you're screwed when the cheater gets banned. Even a randomly generated valid ID might happen to be yours, but a cheater could more easily just grab an ID that's not on the "shit list" when it's sent to his/her client.
Perhaps an ID/IP combo...
-- [javac] 100 errors
Re:Cheating is a social problem--
by
Cerebus
·
· Score: 1
That's all well and good, but it doesn't address games that are intended to have no central authority-- like all the FPS games that give the server hosting software away.
-- -- Cerebus
Re:Cheating is a social problem--
by
Saeger
·
· Score: 1
Well, see, in a web of trust that would be a good thing. The whiners would be distancing themselves from the really good players, and the really good players would be befriending other skillful players, and also using their experience to spot and shitlist the true cheaters.
But since the wounded-ego whiners wouldn't trust the good players out of spite, they also wouldn't get access to the (theoretically) more accurate shitlist of real cheaters... which isn't good.
Hmm. Complicated.
--
-- Power to the Peaceful
Re:Cheating is a social problem--
by
Winterblink
·
· Score: 1
If given the choice between playing on a managed server (overseen by said central authority) and an unmanaged one, MOST gamers would pick the first. Anyone who'd pick the second either just want to play private games with their buddies or aren't worth playing with at all.:)
-- "I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Re:Cheating is a social problem--
by
Alsee
·
· Score: 1
But since the wounded-ego whiners wouldn't trust the good players out of spite, they also wouldn't get access to the (theoretically) more accurate shitlist of real cheaters... which isn't good.
LOL. Actually I don't have much sympathy for the Whiners so that doesn't bother me.
What *is* a problem is the majority of people in the middle who will share lists with the Whiners. Average players usually can't identify Whiners, they don't whine to average players.
-
-- - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Re:Cheating is a social problem--
by
Saeger
·
· Score: 1
Maybe the saying, "it's lonely at the top," is some kind of natural law that applies to all social networks.:)
You must register your soul under a Stockbroker at the New York Stock exchange. Only by signing your soul away to your crediters may you enter the NY Times website.
The Shadows remain unseen.
The college I went to had signs posted up in the computer labs; "Don't feed the MUDers." These guys were practically wearing asset tags and taken down in the inventory list.
Multi User Dungeon; weren't those the days?
Stealing what ?
by
Archfeld
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I saw the banner ad, I did not click on it, I would not have anyways. The NY times has one less bogus entry in thier DB and I was educated. Where is the LOSS that is required for stealing ? If this is a crime it is like prostitution then.
-- errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
You are giving up your personal information, email address, etc.
Agree with it or not, the use of sale of such information is the only way that NYT can justify making their content available. Bandwidth, servers, and staff are not free.
Bullshit, they justify it by selling advertising and by increased exposure. Journalism is about more than making money, so the "shareholder value" crap thats bandied about to excuse anything corporations do doesn't fly. If selling personal information is the only way they can justify an online presence, then they can close down, we don't need them.
Besides, Business Week is also running the article:
You can call it whatever you want, but there IS a LEGAL definition of thievery and I am trying to see how this fits that definition. I agree that business needs to be able to charge for services or it will go away but just because Hillary Rosen call it theft does not a crime it make. I pay for many things on the net, and expect some things for free as a under-educated, over-litigous American, I am still working on the over-weight part.
-- errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Some people believe that it's worth it, and sign up. It's been like this for a while, so it's obviously worth the trouble for NYT.
If you don't like the registration, you aren't forced to use the site. As you said, Business Week also has it, and you've decided to go there. Ain't capitalism great?
The head on the stick was a bitmap of John Romero's.
Romero later left id Software and founded Ion Storm.
Coincidence? I think not!
-- The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
There is also the problem that...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Some mod creators have programed backdoors and cheats into their creations.
Now not only do we have lamers and script kiddies making games online games un-fun, but we have mod creators joining in as well.
I can find the post and don't rember the mods name, but I remember someone was bragging on blues news something about the backdoor. I think they where a member of the clan the mod programmer belonged to.
I've just got one thing to say to that...
by
WIAKywbfatw
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· Score: 1
Whoa.
--
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Ultima Online Cheat
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Back in the day of UO I remember coming accross a cheat that allowed me to walk thru locked doors into peoples homes. It had to do with running as fast as you can while being a ghost directly at the door. You simply got a roaming healer from the woods to stand right next to the house and as you past thru the door the healer could revive you into flesh. Now im sorry cheats like these are just handed to players all the time thru bad game development. Who are we to not exploit them and make the game safer. Im sure that 9 out of 10 would exploit before reporting!
Your journal...off-topic
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Ahaha. So you're trying to get OTHER people to pay for you to leave the country? And that's supposed to prove some sort of point? "Put your money where your mouth is?"
Typical liberal.
um
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Theres' a thing called Retail Half-Life: Counter-Strike. There's also Retail Half-Life: Team Fortress Classic. There's also Retail Half-Life, which includes TFC and all other mods for free ( so why sell Retail TFC separately? ) And when you buy Platinum HL, you get like 3 HL CD keys.
Why Be a Cheater ?
by
DJ+FirBee
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· Score: 3, Funny
How to ruin a 14 year olds day. Or a 30 year old.
Why be a cheater when it's more fun to TeamKill instead ??
Seriously, killing guys all day with wireframe and grenade hacks does not piss the otherr players off as much as team killing.
You have to get really psychological with the other players. Do a couple of team kills and explain that you are a newbie (having a name like Player 6 helps). Sorry man !! didn't mean to kill you!! I did not know where you were when I threw the grenade and so on...
After a while they will figure it out and team kill you and get the same server enforced penaltys (less money for weapons and whatnot).
Then you go into chat and start saying "what's your problem man ? Just trying to have some fun and being a dick.." During this phase don't team kill (just GET team killed).
Finally the last phase is when people trust you again to really open up the team killing whoopass.
This is so damn fun....
Re:Why Be a Cheater ?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
No, you've got it all wrong. Don't team kill, team injure. If you don't actually kill anyone, it's a lot less obvious what you're doing ("Player1 is TKing!" "but he hasn't killed anyone yet" "he shot me!" "quit picking on the n00b") and less people will be chanting "BAN HIM! BAN HIM! BAN HIM!". And sending your team in with 5hp is almost as good as killing them anyways.
Showing my ignorance but...
by
SuperKendall
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· Score: 1
What is a greifer? Never did try out UO...
Sounded like fun, anyway!
-- "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Re:Showing my ignorance but...
by
Surlyboi
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· Score: 1
Griefers are the guys that play games just to fuck up someone else's experience.
There are many varieties of griefer, including the spawn camper who hangs out at spawn points waiting for you to pop after dying and then kills your unarmed/unprepared respawn. Usually taunting you as they do so with such gems as "I pwn j00 lololol"
Then there are the people who take pleasure in killing newbs that can't put up a decent fight or getting a bunch of friends and ganging up on more capable players 20 to 1.
There are plenty of other examples, but you get the general idea...
-- Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine...
Which body parts missing from their 3rd player?
by
iamacat
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· Score: 1
Wow, the other team had 2 2/3 games. Sounds nice and bloody. What were you playing?
Re:Which body parts missing from their 3rd player?
by
Moloch666
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· Score: 1
4:3, 4 on the other team, 3 on the team I was on, including me. I was playing Counter-Strike.
-- Understanding is a three-edged sword. -- Kosh Naranek
Designers of the new Star Wars game initially planned to let players communicate in strange languages that would be translated by other players' computers, he said. But the developers soon realized that cheats would find a way to break into the hidden dictionary, gaining the ability to speak the various languages and negotiate with aliens from other planets - a skill that would normally develop only over time.
Have the LucasArts people seen the new Star Wars movies? The only alien languages would be "Broken English with Asian accent," "Broken English with Jamaican accent," "Broken English with Italian accent"...
"Broken English with Asian accent," "Broken English with Jamaican accent," "Broken English with Italian accent"
Yep, no need for a hacker to break into a language that's already broken:D
-
-- - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
If you ask the cheaters...
by
bluyonder
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· Score: 3, Funny
wouldn't they cheat and just lie?
Cheating takes the fun out of it.
by
Restil
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Some comments to comments made in the article.
said he did so without apology (although he did not want to be identified by name)
This means you know what you're doing is wrong, and you have a great deal of shame for doing so. Otherwise, why would you care? Oh, maybe your account would get canceled, but that's a small price to pay for being right, isn't it?
While breaking the rules or using secret "cheat codes" has always been an accepted, even treasured part of single-player games,
Yes, sometimes you find insurmountable obstacles that cheating seems to be the only way around. But it's not true, you're just not trying hard enough. But by cheating, you rob yourself of the thrill of actually BEATING the damn thing. But once you start adding extra programs to "assist" you in playing the game, or exploit hidden bugs to give your character an unfair advantage, you've just admitted to yourself that you aren't good enough to play by the rules.
and when it becomes boring it is time to turn to the greater game of beating the system, they argue.
No, when it gets boring, that means its TIME TO STOP PLAYING! That's your brain telling you that it's time to get a life.
They fear that people would stop playing if those who cheated held all the power.
And ultimately this is true. However, all game companies aren't perfectly innocent in this regard. Cheaters may comprise a small percentage of the total player base, but it has appeared at times that reforming the cheaters seems to be of a higher priority than showing them where they can get off, and giving them a shove in that direction. Ultima Online went through this several times during the first few months. Kept giving amnesty to cheaters if they just gave back the stuff they obtained by cheating, or even warning them a few days before they would start checking. I say, day one, mention that all cheaters will be banned permanantly and immediately, no exceptions, no warnings, NOTHING. And in their defense, a lot of them say this, but there wouldn't be that many cheaters if they were serious about it.
In theory, this should give players many options and strategies to explore, but it could also lead to players' gaining monopolies.
And in the real world, monopolies are regulated.
Games also typically have a grey area, mentioned in the article. These are tricks you can do in the game that are within the rules and maybe even the spirit of the game, but have a result that was not planned for. FPS Speedrunners have long exploited these tricks without crossing the line into cheating. In Doom for instance, you had strafe running, wall grabs, wall running, rocketjumps, archie jumps, flipping switches that are "out of reach", clearing ledges that should have been too far, but aren't, etc. Of course, all of these tricks are generally more difficult than playing exactly as it was intended. Players have spent hours trying to perfect a trick that will save them a few seconds, just so they can shave a second or two off the record.
If a grey area is considered unfair, then it should be stated as such and fixed. In a perfect world, most such exploits and grey areas will be identified and removed during an extensive beta period, but beta periods have been traditionally too short, and game developers are caught with problems that they have to fix without upsetting a world that can't be reset. In games that end after 30-60 minutes, this isn't a problem, but for the games that go on forever, your options are limited.
Re:Cheating takes the fun out of it.
by
JahToasted
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· Score: 1
I say, day one, mention that all cheaters will be banned permanantly and immediately, no exceptions, no warnings, NOTHING.
Problem is, the cheaters may be paying customers. Its just bad business to turn away paying customers.
I think the best solution is to segregate the cheaters. Have an alternate universe type game where cheating is allowed. If someone cheats, send him there where he can't bother the legit players.
There are 3 main advantages to this: 1) Legit playes aren't bothered by cheaters 2) Cheaters can have their fun being 3733+ H@x0r5 3) the game developers now only have to be able to detect the cheats, not prevent them altogether. The developers could even make easily detectable cheats widely distributed. Right now by preventing cheats, you are encouraging people to create even better and harder to detect cheats. By allowing cheats in a confined area, the cheats are going to keep working, and the cheaters will be content.
Of course I'm not sure how much the cheaters will like it playing against other cheaters on an even playing field. But to them you say "tough shit, you chose this world when you cheated".
I know. Thats why its not in quotes. Its also so damned difficult to spell "chartreuse" (as noted above) that I figured I'd stick with pink. Kind of an homage to "Night of the Mary Kay Commandos".
maeryk
-- Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
Why cheating ticks me off
by
Quill_28
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I _used_ to play Counter-Strike. But it took to much time too many cheaters.
Two reasons I haters cheaters.
When I made a great move or kill or too many kills in a short amount of time, people would call me a cheater. I would get tired of defending myself.
In other games(real basketball) when someone makes a nice move or shot/pass, I tell them so(Complimenting other players seems to keep egos in check, and thus more fun) The problem is in Counter-Strike I never know if they are cheating or not.
Thus is the end, is simply ruins the game.
Cheaters don't win - they lose
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
How can you win when you are not actually playing?
I mean, if you are cheating... then you aren't playing the game by it's rules - defeating others under such circumstances is pointless.
How can you prove your "ACTUAL" gaming skills with crutches such as aimbots or a wireframehack?
Simple answer: You can't.
Anyone who cheats at a competitive game is just, quite simply, a luzer. Codifex Maximus posting as AC
What I do to users that cheat at my online games..
by
mustangdavis
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Now I know that everyone that administers an online game handles cheaters differently, but here is what we like to do... (depending on how "bad" they have been)
First, deactivate their account(s)
Allow the other players to pick appart their characters, so that the people that "lost" something from these cheaters can enjoy a little revenge...
Rename their characters in a very colorful, but interesting way... example: General Pink Fuzzy Bunny of Candyland
Post in the forums who was caught cheating, what they did, any appropriate amount of proof, and what penalties they suffered from for cheating
Then, finally, sit back and allow the player community to embarass the person that cheated
Now, don't get me wrong... we're not terrible people. When a player in our game finds a bug, we reward them for reporting it to the proper moderator and for not exploiting it (other than to verify that they did, in fact, find a bug).
We only do the above nasty things to people when they ruin the experience for the other players... and if they do it intentionally. We do our best to squash any time of bug or imperfection in game balance as soon as it is located, but no game is perfect... and there will always be people out there that are going to ruin games for an entire gaming community just for a laugh, so we allow the community to retain some sort of dignity by allowing them to have the last laugh....
It may not be the perfect answer, but most of the people playing my games seem to enjoy it...
Begin Ranting and Raving
My thought on cheating, especially with games, is simple: Why would you spend hours and hours playing a game that doesn't provide a challenge? If you cheat, it takes away the feeling of accomplishment that you have when you're done playing... whether you win or lose... since all you have done is proven that you don't have the skill to win; that you have to cheat in order to feel the "thrill of victory"... and that you are so selfish and self-centered that you don't take into account that there are other people playing against you, people that have invested their time and effort, that have just wasted their time so that you can prove that you suck so bad at a game that you have to cheat...
So again, what is the point of cheating?... to prove that you an untalented, selfish ass???
What we need are more games using the C&C method of game cheats - there aren't any, only hints and game bugs (most of which have now been rectified).
Speaking of which, do westwood remove their game cheats before release or do they not have any at all to intensify testing?
-- Murphy's Law of Research: Enough research will tend to support your theory.
Whether cheaters prosper is not the issue...
by
Zenjive
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· Score: 1
The issue is that cheaters make games less fun and less entertaining for the people that are not willing to stoop to that level.
--
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. - Tennessee Williams
Cheating Digital Rights Management
by
Mr_Blank
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· Score: 1
This article shows that people are willing to put in the time, skill, and effort to crack *GAMES* for *FUN* just so they can say "ha ha I killed you". These cheaters put in all this effort for no financial gain. Then, how much more effort will people put in to crack DRM schemes when there is financial gain? $20 saved on a cd is $20 earned. $600 saved on some fancy paint program version 9 is $600 earned.
Considering that people will work so hard to cheat when there is almost nothing to gain ("ha ha I killed you") then it seems to me that DRM in hardware, software, and legislation is doomed because there is so much more to gain.
This space for rent
gamehacking
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
www.gamehacking.com
Interesting
What is cheating anyway?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
There are lots of comments about CS and Quake type cheating. However, about the time I quit Dark Ages of Camelot there was a hubbub about "mechanical cheating". This effectively outlawed putting something heavy on your keyboard to avoid being kicked for inactivity. People did this when they went to dinner of were running some scheme where it was to their advantage to be online in a safe place.
Basically if an in game referee tried to talk to you and you didn't respond, you would be kicked and banned for mechanical cheating. If the game wasn't such a damn grind just to do anything they wouldn't have to worry about this....
what do you think? Is the old pencil on the keyboard a real cheat!?
I'm one of the best bot writers out there
by
CrazyJim0
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· Score: 1
I wrote most of the popular macros for asheron's Call. I was the first person to write the drain health macro. I wrote a bot that ran around, and parsed text by taking pixel readings from the screen and determining words...
For DAOC, it was way easier, I parsed the.txt log file while it was running took the coorinate readings... Then I could triangulate my current direction and figure if i had to press left or right to change to the next waypoint. Then I'd have a complex series of clicking and looking around to do stuff like fighting the correct monsters, lewting, then selling...
Patrol place for monsters. Path to return to vendors
It was great:) I love coding shit like that. I don't view macroing as cheating... I view hacking stats as cheating... Since macroing is shit you could do behind the keyboard anyway.
Back when gamespy was worth while...
by
A_Non_Moose
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· Score: 1
and cable was actually fast the start of some of the anti-cheats would annoy non-cheaters as well.
Like a modified binary (mentioned in the article) from say...oh, I don't know...and UPDATED version or removing the annoying cd checks when you have several games and switch back and forth without hunting for one of several cds.
Now the main deterrant to online gaming is lack of speed since the downfall of cable and the overzealous caps.
What's frightening is the online and IRL circle of friends I play against (then and now) is some are so good/sneaky/have good tactics that anyone who joins in usually calls "cheater".
Laughter ensues.
Either they shut up and play or leave or perhaps sit and watch a battle and figure out that some of us are just "that good".
Sometimes it is hard to tell.
Ah, well.
-- Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK?
(and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
FPS map design
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
With respect to first-person shooters (FPS), I think some of the responsibility to prevent cheaters to see through walls goes to the map designer. iD software games uses "Hint" and "Caulk" brushes (map elements) to partition the space within a map into "portals" to prevent the 3D hardware from rendering polygons that will not visible in the finished frame. If designed correctly, these maps will be protected from cheaters using hacked video card drivers to see through walls.
Well, right, but my point is that you're playing different games. Everyone else is playing "Quake." If you're cheating at it, then you're playing "hack Quake for whatever reason," which is not the same thing. The two have completely different goals, and, in my experience, don't mix well.
Now a "let's hack Quake" tournament *does* sound like a heck of a lot of fun. Get a bunch of hackers together w/ the source, whoever has the best hacks will come out on top...
showeq, probably most complex 'cheat' today
by
mcguyver
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· Score: 1
The best and most complicated 'cheat' I have ever seen:
http://seq.sourceforge.net
I'm sure this has been on slashdot in the past. seq = showeq. It's a tool for everquest users. It runs on a separate machine under linux and gives the user a birds eye view of the map. Over the years it has become fairly complex. At the moment it requires a program on the computer running the everquest client to read the key from memory, it then sends the key to the machine running seq and that machine uses the key to decrypt the everquest packets.
Re:showeq, probably most complex 'cheat' today
by
Fizzol
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· Score: 1
No need to put cheat in quotes. ShowEQ is an absolute and total cheat and anyone caught using it will be quickly and justifiably banned.
Re: Make it part of the game
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JaxGator75
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· Score: 1
I think the parent may have been referring to making something like "Aimbot" part of the game, thus along an On / Off switch. That could be part of the criteria for a game server, and you wouldn't have to say "No Cheaters".
-- Come and see the violence inherent in the system!
And online life mirrors real life yet again...
by
irritating+environme
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Gee, what a surprise.
If a sufficient percentage of people cheat, the entire system falls apart.
That never happens in real life. Unfortunately, I can't switch servers with my wet body. Or can I? Maybe if I moved to Australia...
Once again, (glass half empty) the online world shows humanity to be tragically and irreparably flawed. No good deed goes unpunished in this world.
--
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
I am a bad, bad cheater boy...
by
CodeMunch
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· Score: 1
Scenario: loud mouth archy. student running a trivia script in IRC. Pokes fun at those that can't answer questions.
So, to "level" the playing field, I built a quick & dirty mIRC script that calls a COM object to query a database and automatically/notice 's other channel members the answer for the question. I also switch it in to auto-answer mode when he isn't around. Works _decently_ so far, but mIRC crashes often when calling the COM object. Likely buggy COM implementation in mIRC or i'm using it wrong in the script kuz my test client doesn't crap out.
Meh. Anyone hiring in Canada? I could be doing much better things than this in my "spare" unemploymed time.
Re:What I do to users that cheat at my online game
by
calethix
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· Score: 1
So again, what is the point of cheating?... to prove that you an untalented, selfish ass???
I agree. In fact, if I find myself on a team that's continuously beating the other, I'll often switch because I get bored when there's no challenge.
However, people are just different and some think if they win even by cheating that makes them better than everyone else. Maybe they think the simple fact that they know how to cheat makes them better than everyone else. I would guess these type of people are losers that are hated and belittled by everyone they know.
Then you have the people that just get pleasure out of pissing off other people on the server. I think they prefer team killing over cheating though.
So the point of cheating, some people get their jollies from making you mad. That's just a sad fact of life.
Re:What I do to users that cheat at my online game
by
mustangdavis
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· Score: 1
So the point of cheating, some people get their jollies from making you mad. That's just a sad fact of life.
... and I agree with you...
That is why the other honest players and I get our jollies off of embarassing the hell out of losers that cheat!:)
I think that it has a nice ironic twist to it... the honest people getting their jollies by pissing off the people that were trying to piss everyone else off by cheating...
... so as you see, cheaters never prosper, at least in my little world:)
i've always had an idea for a cheat
by
standsolid
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· Score: 1
watch and a souceforge project will be made after I post this
i always thought for FPS, you could make a virtual device in windows -- one that acts as a 3d video card. you setup that video card to pass on instructions to your physical video card so you don't lose the hard ware speed. all the device does is output wireframe. IT can't read textueres. Is there something like this already? can it be stopped?
-- WTPOUAWYHTTOTWPA What's the point of using acronyms when you have to type out the whole phrase anyways?
Re:i've always had an idea for a cheat
by
Cid+Highwind
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· Score: 1
There are already cheats that intercept and rewrite OpenGL/Direct3D calls at the OS level, without needing to set up a virtual video card. In OpenGL it's just a matter of rewriting one parameter in the function call to turn a shaded polygon into a wireframe.
-- 0 1 - just my two bits
People cheat at video games?
by
Zathras11
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· Score: 0
Geez.
We didn't find it to be too problematic...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Several years ago, I played Quake (1) avidly, and was involved in a clan, that was consistently ranked in the top 10. The difference in skill level at such competitive extremes were unbelievable. For example, match a top five player (say, Dennis Fong) against someone in the 6-10 spots. In 100 matches, the 6th best person would probably win 1 match, if that. Match a top 10 person with somebody in the top 50, and same result. For me, playing against anybody not in the top 100 was a joke. Thus, I constantly received complaints of "cheating". Anybody that good can easily beat somebody who was using an aimbot. Perfect aim does nothing when your entire understanding of the level and how to control it is exponentially better than your opponent.
On the other side, during clan competitions, we prevented cheating by taking screenshots after the game, and emailing them to a judge. Thus, anybody using pak2 (it gave the player models huge spikes so you could see them through walls, made invisibility very visible, and other little things) would be discovered. We didn't account for any other cheats (aimbots) because we didn't consider those cheats effective.
I can see how this is a problem nowadays however, especially with MMORPGs. I haven't played any games since Quake 1 (i've tried a few) because the games lack the balance and perfect level design of Quake 1. For example, in UT, all the weapons are powerful enough that something like an aimbot can make a drastic difference. In Quake 1, the only really powerful weapons were the rocket launcher and tbolt, and a noob with an aimbot was worthless with a rocket launcher, and the tbolt ran out of ammo so quickly that it was impossible for an aimbot to dominate with one.
All in all, I guess I am just reminiscing about the good ol' days, when cheating was ineffective due to good game design. It seems that cheating is now a fact of life and actually does have a very negative effect on gameplay, which is why I will never play any game competitively again.
Excellent point. If a word is so hard to spell that even after 6 years of higher education I can't spell it properly, I might as well avoid using it, as I shall do in the future.
I've never heard that term before, good to know...
-- "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Re:No cheating here.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I GOT FIRST REPLY, W0000t!!!
Re:What I do to users that cheat at my online game
by
beta21
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· Score: 1
Space - Glory Through Conquest - space.coldfirestudios.com doesn;t accept accounts from Mozilla.
It did work in IE though, just thought you'd want to know
The Morality of Online-Cheating
by
Makarakalax
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· Score: 1
I used to wonder if people were basically good or basically evil, until I saw what most people do when they think they're anonymous on the net and there are no consequences to their actions.
This is exactly what occured to me after two months of Diablo II, 16 hours a day. At first it was great fun, but soon I began to feel the general attitude of the realms. It's very mercenary and cold. And worse it seemed like every other player was trying to tradehack you or trick you into giving them your items. I saw plenty of people "item fountain" or drop a valuable piece of kit by mistake and then lose it to some other bastard who then promptly left the game. In normal life these people wouldn't dare steal from people they didn't know, even if it was something they really wanted. The difference is that the realms have no police, no state, no punishment and no consequences. I was apalled when I realised how many people wouldn't object to stealing when there are no consequences to their actions.
But I expect I should have realised that that's why we need police, and punishment and why we have a concept called "justice". If people can get away with it they will.
I just hope the majority of these people are teenagers who are going to grow up and gain some morality. But I still feel a little tainted by the whole affair. Can I really trust all these people I know in the real world? Or would they backstab me if they could get away with it? I think it's different when you can see the other person's face. Most of those 12 year old thieves would feel some guilt if they could see how upset some of the victims got.
I stopped playing Diablo II, and only then realised that I'd stopped eating and sleeping properly and that I'd been ignoring my family and friends. Whoops!
Personally I'm not particularly fond of cheating, especially in the cases where it provides an unfair advantage vs other players.
However I feel that the definition of what is "cheating" here is somewhat over broad and that some examples given in this article do not fall under my envelope of cheating(assuming the game has any sense at all). Many games particularly of the skill developing variety are designed so that the only real way to increase a skill is to repeat said skill over and over again. I think so long as this is the case, and especially in cases where this is the only way to build up skills, I feel that the use of reasonable bots is not all that a hugely bad idea.
In essence I think that the best way to prevent cheating in on-line games would be to alter said games in such a way where regular users were not encouraged to cheat by the circumstances of the game, at which point the few who did so would have either a much harder time doing it, or would be so blatantly obvious that no one would play with them.
Proposed solution - Handle more on the server side
by
zapp
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm not all too familiar with the multiplayer gaming infrastructure, but I am a 4th year computer science student... so I think this makes sense.
How about The server keeps track of positions of all the clients, and does some vector math on calculating visibily before even transmitting coordinates to the clients? With the fast-as-hell CPU's we have out there now, I'm sure this could be pulled off with VERY little slowdown. This reduces network traffic by not sending everyone everyone else's position, but also... so what if player X does have a see through walls hack? If the server doesn't tell Player X where Player Y is, he still can't see him.
Any Thoughts?
Oh, and by the way... I knew a guy doing transparent wall hacks back before 3d accel cards were even invented, it's not news:)
-- no comment
It is easy to prevent cheating.
by
IdeaMan
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Step 1: Create unbeatable CD-key mechanism. Ala Diablo 2. Step 2: Create an RBL style list of cheaters.
Cheat = global ban, means that no-one would dare run cheats.
-- They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
And when you're NOT cheating...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
When you frag 6 people in Unreal Tournament it's "Monster Kill". In Quake 3 it's "Excellent". In Counter-Strike it's "Kicked by Console".
Re:Here comes the old "leveling the field" argumen
by
Richy_T
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· Score: 2, Funny
Ah, the "Tonya Harding" justification.
Rich
Polygon culling to the rescue
by
cjellibebi
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· Score: 1
Just a thought, but enabling wirefarme graphics may not be enough to see through walls.
3D engines are designed to cull as many invisible polys as possible (invisible = hidden or obscured by another object). So if a character is hiding behind a wall, the engine will realise that the polys that make up the wall obscure the entire character. It doesn't have to check that each poly in the character is obscured, just that the bounding sphere/box of the character is obscured. Or if the character is close to a corner, that part of the bounding volume is exposed, then another polygon-culling technique may be applied.
If the programmer of the 3D engine is lazy and is only relying on z-buffer rendering to obscure hidden objects, then all the polys are being sent to the renderer, so enabling wireframe will let you see the hidden ones.
Re:Polygon culling to the rescue
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Ok, you are right when you say that seeing through the wall may not be enough if the game does exact visibility culling. The problem is that exact visibility culling is still not possible in real time (perhaps there will be one paper about this at Siggraph 03 - who knows:)
However it would be possible to rely on a functionality called "Occlusion Query" to hide the non visible characters. It is available on the latest video cards. The problems are that: - the game has to run even on old graphic cards - occlusion queries are done by the hardware, through the driver; the driver can be hacked.
So the 3D programmers are not lazy when they do not exact visibility culling: graphics hardware is faster at rendering non visible polygons (clipped by the z-buffer) than the software at computing exact visibility. They simply assume that nobody will be weird enough to replace their beautiful hardware accelerated bump mapped surfaces by an ugly wireframe view;)
So the only lazy people are the cheaters !
Re:Polygon culling to the rescue
by
Edward+Kmett
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· Score: 1
The problem isn't so much laziness as efficiency.
Your quake era engines tend to go through and scan a quick and easy potentially visible list of convex cels, slap all of the objects and polygons contained therein up to the card and let the card sort it out.
Dynamic obscura such as half open moving doors, smoke grenades, aren't calculated into this. (well, most of the time, there are some optimizations for closed doors) largely because the overhead of sorting every a model into a span-buffer or beam-tree to check if it should be visible can be very high and doesn't scale linearly. (I had to do so once for an engine I designed to handle hard lighting) Even so, it probably won't catch 'visibility' hacks through alpha-translucent smoke.
It isn't being lazy to try to ship a product that runs when more than 3 people are visible on the screen. There is a certain point where pragmatic considerations come into play. Wildly varying frame processing times are not acceptable to the modern gamer. If your game slows to 4 fps so your machine can chooose exactly what polygons to render to eliminate one subclass of cheaps, you may feel a bit more secure, but you are still vulnerable to proxy based cheating methods, etc.
Add to this the fact that you have to allow for updates of light sources from every cel which can be seen from any point within any visible cel, there is a good reason for many of these games to give you enough information to 'see around corners', even if you can build an efficient enough culling algorithm that your server can just tell the client that there is a flashlight coming around the corner.
heaven forbid you want to do any secondary lighting, or play with realtime radiosity and need more information a the client.
Plus, you need to allow for the any motion prediction that is beeing ddone client side to smooth the action. this adds an additional fuzz factor, which in the interest of smoother operation might give the 'wallhacker' a hundred millisecond drop on the trusting mainstream gamer.
There is a certain amount of trust required for twitch gaming over the internet. if you want to build a 'secure' internet game go sell your soul to palladium while building up your network protocols over a public key infrastructure and hope that it is all that microsoft wants it to be, convert to a less twitchy game design. or preemptively build the cheats into the game to level the playing field.
I am not particularly fond of any of these options.
This is a quote from the postscript in ESR's article on Quake Cheating (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/quake-cheats.ht ml):
>There's just no getting around the fact that the execution path on the client machine is going to be under the client-user's control. Thus, good security has to be designed as though any code on the client side is open.
My observation is that this is only strictly true if the client game executable is complete (in the game content sense) and available apriori.
I think that in the future we'll see games that have a light client 'shell' engine which handles content generation (procedural), i/o, graphics, sound, and so forth, but does NOT contain the multiplayer game code. The game content code itself will be written in a scripting language (Lua is a good canidate) and downloaded from the server at play time.
Thus the server could impose dynamic language and protocol changes to running clients so as to make them unhackable (in any useful sense) during the game. A given piece of code could be reverse engineered and/or modified after the fact, but by that time it is useless, since you'd never run the same game code twice.
The clients then MUST be running the server supplied code, or they would quickly become unplayable by whatever means the game creator has deemed appropriate.
The obvious /. answer :)
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Install Linux, rewrite your mIRC script for Xchat's perl bindings. Set up a mySQL database to store answers, and off you go!
linux is already installed and i prefer postgres. i'm missing the Xchat kuz my linux box is for _real_ work. Winderz PC for gaming and pissin' around. MSVC6 is really quite nice and I prefer it to vi with g++.
I know I'm going to get modded down by the DRM police who has a knee-jerk reaction to anything containing that word, but this is just the kind of thing that a "trusted computing" kind of concept would solve.
If you only allowed signed, trusted binaries to execute, and sent only encrypted packets, with OS and hardware support for limiting access to the memory space of the trusted application, it would lock out most of the avenues of cheating, or at least make it a lot harder to do.
You can't modify packets because they're encrypted
You can't hack the drivers/game code because it would fail the trusted binary check
You can't read/write the game's memory space because that would be blocked by the hardware/OS.
Assuming it is implemented properly (yeah, it's a big "if"), is there any way to work around such a scheme?
This kind of application (and many more serious applications that require similar solutions) is exactly where some sort of software signing/authentications is useful. People should be able to modify/do whatever with the games they bought, but if they do, they should't be able to play online with others who don't have such advantages; at least not under any pretense that they are playing fair.
-- --
"This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
Can't believe this crap is still going on! Cheaters completely destroyed Diablo on-line.
Part of the deal with any RPG is to find that über-item that is just around the corner; if I just play another 30 minutes, I'll probably find it.
Until you meet the super-l33t idiot who has 300 duped weapons for sale, and has never actually played the game; just trolling the news groups for the latest exploits.
Sigh. Nowadays I play Civ III. Alone.
If were playing war online ...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
... then those who cheat are fedayins and terrorists.
NO FAIR !!!
Re:"stealing" free things encourages copy protecti
by
Hognoxious
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· Score: 1
No. Because to sell ads, they need to show that people are seeing them. Because that's what the people who place ads (they're called advertisers) want. One indicator of how much eyeballshare they've got is via registrations.
-- Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Finally an excuse for Palladium...
by
Demon+of+the+fall
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· Score: 1
Wow, stopping cheaters from patching their games might be the first (for us end-users) good reason to accept Palladium...
Not that I'd sacrifice my privacy to get rid of online cheaters, but anyway...:)
--
Be an elitist - read Slashdot at +4.
And speaking of the Sims...
by
polyiguana
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· Score: 1
The East Bay Express has a good article written by someone that just explored the Sims Online for a few weeks, basically on assignment. She details some of the scams that are floating around and the problems in the game from a newbie perspective. It's a good read.
Excellent point. If a word is so hard to spell that even after 6 years of higher education I can't spell it properly, I might as well avoid using it, as I shall do in the future.
That just earned you a fan.
M
-- Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
Real Solution to Cheating : Unique Ids
by
sqlzealot
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· Score: 1
In the "real" world, people don't run around stealing from each other because they are afraid of being caught. Although many mechanisms (voting, spy programs) to boot cheaters exist now, they seem to be temporary solutions. That is, cheaters simply log back in again and try some more, protected by their anonymity.
We need to uniquely identify each gamer, and (more or less) permanently ban gamers found to be cheating. I propose using credit cards, since people have a finite number of them. While cheaters with more than one credit card could have multiple identities, they eventually all would get caught.
For online gaming services the solution seems simple. Gamers caught blatently cheating would have their account revoked with no refund. The cannot login using any account payed for with the same credit card. Revokations could last a month to start, and be permanent for serial abusers. Since online services have resources, they could devote "detectives" to find and ban cheaters. Banned gamers could appeal their revokation, but the vast majority of cheaters will prolly just slink away into the shadows. Since real money is involved, cheaters have a strong incentive to stay honest.
For free (no monthly fee) network games, independent companies could provide the service of identifing gamers. People would pay a small fee ($10?) to get an gamer-id (and password), with only ONE gamer-id for each credit card. All online games would require a this gamer-id. Game servers would communicate with the id companies to verify the identity of logged in gamers. These identities would be there for everyone to see, so people with a bad reputation would quickly be kicked. At the very least, you could refuse to play with a gamer you suspect of being a cheater.
-- "Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."
Re:"stealing" free things encourages copy protecti
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
well im sure their advertisers will be pleased to see that "Mike Hunt" visits their page 10,000 times a day & that his email address is eat@shit.com
theyre certainly getting their moneys worth from this free registration scheme
How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?
-- Plato
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone have a log and pass for the NY Times site!?
Anyone care to add up these total sales?
Do Cheaters Ever Prosper? Just Ask Them
By PETER WAYNER
HE Sims Online is a clean, well-lighted corner of the Internet where people work to build an elaborately decorated, chat-filled virtual world. But if playing by the rules in this realm isn't entertaining enough, there are after-hours joints where rogues and grifters gather to swap schemes for gaming the game and growing rich.
The chatter at TSOExtreme.com, for example, is a mix of simple tips for guiding the characters known as Sims and elaborate strategies for earning millions of the online currency known as simoleans. Recently much of the talk has centered on using extra software, known as a bot, to automate the most tiresome clicking so players can rack up hundreds of thousands of simoleans in their sleep.
One of the players engaging in this automated counterfeiting, a 29-year-old financial planner from Texas, said he did so without apology (although he did not want to be identified by name). "I think the bots actually level the playing field for people who have day jobs," he said. "When I play an online game, I can't be the best because there are some college kids out there spending 14 hours a day."
Web sites like TSOExtreme.com are a challenge for the rapidly growing world of interactive games. While breaking the rules or using secret "cheat codes" has always been an accepted, even treasured part of single-player games, new online games match competitors, often strangers, remotely, which changes the dynamic. No one likes to lose unfairly, and those who play by the rules often struggle against schemers who believe that all is fair in love and simulated war.
For their part, many of the cheats say that bending the game's rules is part of the fun. It is only a game, and when it becomes boring it is time to turn to the greater game of beating the system, they argue.
Brian Reynolds, a designer of a new online game, Rise of Nations, likes to joke that he was "the guy who put 'Cheat' on the main menu" when he developed games like Civilization II. A player could use the menu at any time to create new assets like warriors or defenses for a city.
In his new game, however, in which players meet and battle for ratings over the Internet, that option is gone. Mr. Reynolds and his team try to ensure that people who buy the game have a pleasant and balanced experience when battling others to dominate a virtual world. They fear that people would stop playing if those who cheated held all the power.
Haden Blackman, the producer at LucasArts responsible for Star Wars Galaxies, an online game now being tested by 5,000 users, said that preventing cheating was one of the biggest challenges of creating a virtual world.
One lesson the game industry learned the hard way is that dedicated cheats will rewrite software to give themselves an advantage. "There are a lot of great ideas we come up with and skip because there's going to be 1 percent who will abuse them," Mr. Blackman said.
Designers of the new Star Wars game initially planned to let players communicate in strange languages that would be translated by other players' computers, he said. But the developers soon realized that cheats would find a way to break into the hidden dictionary, gaining the ability to speak the various languages and negotiate with aliens from other planets - a skill that would normally develop only over time.
Bots like the ones discussed on TSOExtreme.com are just the beginning. Some players of games with a shooter, like Quake or Counter-Strike, have automated aiming tools that target an opponent more rapidly than the quickest of fingers.
Others reprogram their video cards to hide the elaborate textured walls in a game. All that is left is a wire-frame outline, allowing a player to see through walls and track those hiding behind them.
All of these techniques depend on users' having full control of the software running on their home machines. Adept programmers can rewrite the game or insert new instructi
This unique sig is intended to make this user more recognisable.
...so Linux is insecure?
.NET then...
Until Unix and Linux programmers get over their macho love for low-level programming languages, the security holes will continue to flow freely.
Cool.. let's port all our Linux shit to
It took me less than 2 minutes to sign up the first time now i just enter an user name and pass, is that really so hard? I would rather people feel they can post from any site than have to worry about someone "complaining" that they have to log in.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
http://archive.nytimes.com/2003/03/27/technology/c ircuits/27chea.html
linkified for the lazy
...and the first NYtimes cheat code is... :)
UP-Down-Left-Right-Select-START!! (Correct Link!)
How would you catch a cheater?
Not sure what you mean. I dont play MMORPGS or RTS.. Im a first person shooter kinda guy.. but when I get on Quake3 server, adn I see one score of 300 and the rest are around 30, its a clue.. and when you see the skin standing in the wide open firing faster than any human could shoot and spin, with rails apparently coming out its ass, you get a clue that this is what is going on.
usually, I suspect those bots are actually _on_ the server. But Punkbuster helps..
Playing UT23K I havent seen much trouble.. the game seems much more even and better than Quake(s) ever were.
But Im sure there are people scripting things for Evercrack, and letting them run overnight. And buying and selling items on Ebay.. or running six player accounts, and then transferring things to each other.. but I guess thats part of the game. There is always some moron who just isnt happy that he isnt as good as the next guy, and feels the need to "even" the playing field for himself.
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
I'm a fan of the game Urban Terror, a mod for Quake 3, and play online a fair bit (I usually run Visual Studio on one monitor, UT on the other: One good thing about being a rambo player in team survivor games is that I'm dead the majority of the time, and hence find it to actually be a remarkably productive time): While recently an anti-cheat tool, PunkBuster was added to Q3 (and it is constantly updated), there is still a serious issue of cheaters, the most common among them being wallhackers. What is a wallhacker? Well it's what was mentioned in the summary: Wire frame worlds, allowing cheating players to view other players whereever they are on the map, obviously giving a pretty clear advantage.
So what does this have to do with the honesty of surveillance? Well in team survivor when you die you can ghost other players as they move around the map, and it tends to be that wallhackers are discovered quite quickly--Their behaviour and actions in the game do not correlate with the information that they should be visually receiving (from what we can see ghosting them). Usually this quickly leads to cries of cheater and a vote to kick the offending player.
In terms of being "better" at the game than others, but part of the question should be is it cheating, or just another game.
Someone who buys or downloads a cheat that someone else made is a different deal, and clearly some of those people are pretty sad individuals who just want to say "ha ha fragged you", before never ever having sex with anyone.
However the person who creates the cheat, who engages in what can be described as espionage against the game developer is playing a different game of skill, that person is learning things, developing things and playing their own game with their own rules and "winning" by being able to cheat. The challenge here isn't to be better at Quake, but to be able to cheat the best at Quake, that in itself is a game.
How about an open game in which these developers play their cheats off against each other using the best players without cheats as the players in the game. That way you can find out who developed the best cheat.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Wasn't there a driver several years ago for a video card that allowed somehting like this? (Ok found /. story here.)
Why modify the game where they might be able to detect it when you can just play with drivers to do the same thing (assuming the game is sending all that to the video card already)
I'm not sure about how the Xbox handles games (how much does it load on the hard disk?), but wouldn't consoles which run the software off of a non-rewritable medium (PS2/Gamecube) be ideal for online gaming since then the distributor can control what software is on everyone's machine?
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
- iddqd
- idkroz
- idkfa
That was fun. Load up on the berzerk pak, and god mode. Then run around smooshing imps. I used to cheat on all my old single-player games, Descent, Duke Nukem, Shadow Warrior. But that was just me, not me vs some other real person, that doesn't like it when I'm invincible, and got the rocketlauncher with unlimited rockets.Cheats on the internet probably shouldn't be allowed, it'll just piss people off.
find ~your -name '*base* | xargs chown
cheating itself is not such a problem. I remember using tainers in Diablo so that I could just go in and kill some monsters. I never PKed, or went into games where they said 'cheaters not welcome'. I went off with a few friends into the caves in nightmare mode. It was a gore fest and it really was fun!
I think the issue is decency more than cheating. There will always be a few who wish to gain a 'competitive advantage' somehow, making life difficult for the average joe. This isn't the case just in games... look at our law books and you'll see what I mean.
- Tempestdata
Cheat me once, shame on you. Cheat me twice, shame on me. If I continue to play against cheaters, or people who continuously kick my butt, where probability should demand a more balanced percentage of win/loss, it's my own fault. Better to play honest people like me, who play for the fun of playing, not for some thrill of cheating fellow players.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm working, in my copious spare time, on a cheat-resistant comm library. Someone is sure to beat me to it.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Others reprogram their video cards to hide the elaborate textured walls in a game. All that is left is a wire-frame outline, allowing a player to see through walls and track those hiding behind them.
If you can reprogram your video card then you wouldn't even HAVE to cheat.
You already are "The One"
Maybe it's because the NYT actually has *good* articles written by *professional* journalists, as opposed to certain web sites were the same article is published twice on the front page, or where editors do not spell/grammar check. And by the way, "It's even waterproof!"
quake74
PlanetQuake? ^_^
:>
This article seems rather dated when discussing the FPS cheat-em-ups. Punkbuster has been dead in the water since early 2001. VAC is just now gradually working at bridging the gap between legitimate players and cheat-free bliss. Still buggier than a Brit tho.
Then again, it is poignant to observe the Q2-era cheats. When the mood strikes, and an old Q2 vet hits up the few Lith servers left on the Net, he is greeted typically with one or more players OBVIOUSLY craxing and haxing. Still going strong. The CS community is one which works hardest, imho, at a social more and communal interest in enforcing a 'policy' of sorts that cheating just sucks and work has to be done.
The first example given in the article, a man who cheats playing Sims Online, seems pointless. Why would you want to cheat playing a game that can't be won?
:[
The are probably the same people that drive in the carpool lane with no other passengers
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
What college is this that you can play games 14 hours a day and still pass? Everyone I know that did that either failed out or is taking so few credits they might as well have dropped out. College kids, I fear not. 12-year olds who have nothing to do all summer long, I fear.
I believe I first read this as a formal statement from Chip Morningstar, one of the creators of the "Habitat" game. Seems that many of these problems stem from people failing to heed that simple rule.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
One of the players engaging in this automated counterfeiting, a 29-year-old financial planner from Texas, said he did so without apology (although he did not want to be identified by name). "I think the bots actually level the playing field for people who have day jobs," he said. "When I play an online game, I can't be the best because there are some college kids out there spending 14 hours a day."
Yeah, bots also level the field for stupid people, less skilled people and complete idiots who don't know the game. "Leveling the playing field" is an stupid excuse. Games usually reward those who spend 14 hours a day compared to those who spend 1 hour a day, it's called practice.
Granted, games where the pure amount of time spent playing is rewarded are inherently poorly designed. But that doesn't excuse using bots.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
Perhaps because the NYTimes (for articles like this) tends to be the only paper carrying the story (NYTimes rarely uses wire-service reports).
Some software makers are working on more aggressive solutions. Tony Ray, the president of the Houston-based company Even Balance, distributes a free product called Punkbusters that acts as a virus detector by looking for modifications on every player's machine. Game companies are paying for its development in the hope of keeping the games fair. Software installed on every player's machine watches for cheating while periodically filing reports to other players.
This has always bugged me. PunkBuster is just another piece of software. What stops it from being hacked just like the game? It seems to me that theres a sort of circular reasoning going on here: "This software is hacked, add software to prevent hacking." Whats worse is some servers require and kick those who don't have it and it many players assume that when someone uses it they absolutely cannot be cheating.
What does this article say besides "some people cheat at online games and developers don't all agree on how it should be handled"?
Maybe I'm missing something.
Ravi
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
It's a what now??
Al.
Cheaters can prosper and quite often do, in school, on the job and in politics.
It is a moral question rather than a question of "do you profit or not" having been a bot user in Quake 2 and 3 I found the game quickly lost it's fun and I became jaded believing that others were cheaters and there was no "honor" any longer.
As silly and naive as that may sound when I first started playing the game it was all about honor and team work (I play CTF) and I loved it.
Once I tried a bot and started using it the entire experience became negative for me.
So if you can live with your self when cheating more power to you, I can't, and after 5 years (4 of which were cheat free) I don't play Quake any longer.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The site www.TSOExtreme.com mentioned in the article is a pay service that costs $24.99 to join and $1.50 a month after that. This is much more compelling than the virtual designer jeans mentioned in yesterdays article about There.com.
My concern with that big moneymaking idea is how long does it take a cheater to post the pay cheats on usenet ?
Note, I'm not a really hard-core gamer or expert, so take this with a grain of salt, but...
Cheating in online games is always going to be a problem. You won't solve it, but can at least reduce it to the point where a server admin can deal with individual accusations.
-Only send each client information it really needs.
-Use checksums on binaries and libraries and things.
-Try to get more 'mature' gaming crowds together. I have noticed vast difference playing Battlefield 1942 at various times during the day, such as when it's mostly high school kids, or people with jobs who start playing after dinner, whatever.
-Make it clear that cheating sucks and won't be tolerated--this can help catch the remaining people with aimbot screen overlays and things that automated means won't take care of.
Netrek used some anti-cheating mechanism, by embedding an RSA key in every "authorized" client, to which only a few developers known to the "RSA guy" and the Netrek community as a whole had access. Imperfect system, but it reduced use of bots to the point where it didn't really matter.
Also, one thing that a lot of people forget is that a lot of 'active' cheats (mainly bots in action games) fall into one of two categories:
a) Fully-automated -- these are predictable.
b) Partially automated -- things like aimbots. Their "owners" probably suck otherwise. If they see you, they'll get off a clean shot, but you don't have to confront them directly to smash them.
I am usually sufficiently gratified when I crush someone I suspect strongly of cheating by knowing it's probably some whiny 13 year old staring at his screen in impotent frustration to not really care about the other 9 out of 10 times he's beat me, not by skill but through some technology he most likely didn't create.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
___________
Want a vanity domain? Cheap Web Site Hosting @ $3 a Month
However, we are reaching a point where bandwidth will permit realtime polling and storage of stats. Cheatproofing as discussed in the article is possible, however, I don't recommend quiting if cheating is detected but instead resetting the client to the polled composite average. Or possibly even including damage. This will of course open up the floodgates for group cheating where a group of individuals hacks their clients to autokill enemies. SO, the ultimate fix must include random polling(to prevent gang up hacks), random remote storage, and encryption. This will prevent many cheats, but will do little or nothing to eliminate aim-bots etc which IMHO are just as big of a problem, but at this point, the client is still in the control of the "enemy" so partially insecure.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Most cheaters never prosper, that being because they're usually shunned, and they often just get bored of the game and leave, since where's the fun if there's no challenge?
Sure, you could get an hours worth of kicks out of hit at maximum, but there's a good chance you'd just get bored and leave.
However, there's a big twist here, that new gaming site, YouPlayGames may bring cheating to a whole new level. I've seen how crazy people get in Tournements, how they whine and bitch and some of them try to bend the rules, but at least in Tournements things are monitored. In this service, all you have is a bet, and there probably isn't any monitoring done (and even if you recorded the game, I'm sure your opponent could hide his cheating if he knew how to do it right and make it look natural). Since there is money involved, the cheaters will have a new reason to play, and that is for money. This will be a greater drive for people to implement more complex hacks, that make say, an AimBot look like the same sort of aim present in CAL-i CS players.
For example, CNN reported that Iraqi forces were using wallhacks, and they have been camping in spots located well outside of the battle map/field where US missles can't reach. Totally unfair.
Now, the worlds in most FPS games are rendered first, then the models and other entities are rendered, using clipping /depth buffer info of the world. A lot of engines use 2 different render routines to do this: the world is mostly static and uses a different routine than the model renderer.
THe result is, that when you 'patch' the world renderer so that it f.e. renders wireframes instead of solid polys (in OpenGL based engines this is 'not that hard', you just change the value passed to glBegin()) the models still are rendered solid, plus because most renderers for models rely on the depthbuffer filled during the world rendering, the models close to corners are fully rendered, since the depthbuffer is empty. So you can easily 'see' the models close to corners. If you also 'patch' the model renderer for not doing world clipping, you will see ALL models rendered in your window.
This can't be done if the world + models use a single render routine, i.e.: model polygons and world polygons are packed together as THE set of polygons to render, then the single render routine will eat these single pack of polys to render. If you patch the routine for wireframing, you will see the models also wireframed, if you patch out the world clipping, you will get the complete world in your window, not what you want.
I think in future game engines there will be a merger between world + model polygon sets, because worlds are more and more modfyable in game by the player, which in the end requires that the modifyable parts are 'models' too. However games based on the current crop of quake * engines will keep on suffering from this.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Cheating is part of the "hacker" fun. However it is normally directed against the machine.
If somebody cheats in a single-player game it is a clever hack, if he cheats in a multiplayer game, it is cheating against the other people and it may be considered abusive.
There is something in the idea that the machines are stupid and may be cheated, but not the people. Maybe because the machines can not respond back?
-- You human clever? You human smart cheater? I computer reformat you hard disk!!!
The only real problems with cheating in EverQuest was when ShowEQ came out. Of course, sony gave the owners of the website distributing it a "cease and desist" and it went down immediately, and if I recall correctly, patched EverQuest to look for this running and then ban their account, as it's a violation of their EULA (in short: cannot use third party software to aid EverQuest).
Then of course there's the infamous EverQuest Simulator where you can make any character how powerful you want without a subscription to EverQuest.
There was also a scripting program which the name of dosen't occurr to me at the moment, but it allowed you to sit by a vendor overnight, buy items from him, make something with the items, and sell it back to the vendor at a greater cost than you bought the supplies to make it for, and pretty much let you made a sick amount of EverQuest money (Platinum) overnight. I'm not sure they ever found a way to detect this one, but they made sure that if they found out you were banned for this one as well.
"You had this look that of an angel, it was such a bad disguise" --Dishwalla
Console cheating still works by "patching" memory (like trainer programs for PC games). Lock the byte for the players health at a set value, and they never die; lock your ammo at it's maximum and blast away with those ammo-eating rapid fire guns all day long. It's a bit harder with CD/DVD based consoles like the PS2 or Xbox, but it's still done.
I hate those people who have installed Hand-Eye Coordination v. 1.4. I am stuck with a crappy alpha that barely works. Something needs to be done!
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
I used to think it was my age! Little buggers were using bots and wireframe wall on HL mods! I haven't played since.
...thank God! now I have a life again!
I love playing Quake 3 online, but I suspect there are a number of players cheating. I haven't been able to find many resources to Q3 bots, and other cheat methods other than this site: http://ogc.ath.cx/ Anyone know of other ways people in Q3 cheat?
I think it's OK to exploit a game. If there's a loophole, sooner or later everyone will know about it. Although that may be later closed by the game's developer, it's not like someone has unfair advantage. That's in the rules. If the rules change, well, that's OK because everyone is affected by it. Much like the "grenades through walls" in Counter-Strike.
I also think it's OK if it's an inside, official cheat. I don't think this exists in online games, but if it exists, then it should be used. It's like it were in the rules.
But pure cheating is not OK. Yes, some people can be very successful at cheating, but they CAN be caught any time. Their fun is cheating, not playing by the rules. I believe it's OK to cheat in a game, but not at the expenses of the other players. If it detracts from other players' fun, it should be banned. If you want to play fair, it's really annoying when some other person is cheating and usually in a better position in the game than you.
As a side story: we have a card game in Brazil called "Truco" (I think it also exists in other countries) where it is allowed and even encouraged to cheat. But if you get caught you lose instantly or must pay some compensation. Usual cheats include signaling to the other player, hoarding cards or looking at cards before drawing them. You must keep your eyes peeled all the time. As you see, cheating is not really allowed, but you play the game with such a mindset that you expect a cheat anytime, and that's part of the game. It's fair in this context.
My neighbor's
Those Nethack cheaters finally confessed!
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
Especially in Counterstrike. I took down my counterstrike server because I spent half my time banning cheaters. The key thing I turned off was the ability to see anything after you died, I found players would ghost enimies and then relay this to their teamates sitting in the same room. It really pissed me off, because of an obvious reason, the dead shouldn't be able to talk to the living, (without a medium and a big seance). I think cheating in one player games, like I did after I went through and beat Hitman 2 the first time, is fun. But people who cheat in online games, how do they even find it enjoyable. Have the fun of the game is the challenge, being able to cheat and win is stupid. Just develop your skills and get better. All cheaters should have their IP and user name out on a CS ban list, that all CS servers will automatically view and then BAN those people.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
The easiest way back in the days of Q2 was that the bot was a little bit too good for it's own good. It would spin a character model around to fire faster than any human could ever manage. the side effect of this was, it would move faster than the human eye could keep up as well.. leading to the very distinctive illusion that the bot-user was firing weapons out of his.. ah..exhaust port.
I realize the NYT registration is kind of a pain, but the site is free. People pay $1 for a dead tree version. When you repost the story like this, you deprive the NYT of ad revenue. How do you expect them to pay the people who work there?
I hope people mod this guy down.
Unless they are going to stream the pre-rendered video/audio directly from the server to the client, I think they have to trust the client. Even if they sent all the game data to the client encrypted, the client still has to be able to decrypt and process it, at which point it's wide open for cheat programs. I suppose Palladium will potentially make the client much more trustworthy, though. Even though gamers everywhere would despise it, I'm sure they would use it if the latest games required a Palladium-enabled client.
There is no reason why 'robots' should not be allowed in a game; none. It is just a form of descrimination. For example, suppose that someone who is blind has a program that 'helps' them play. Is this cheating?
There is nothing more natural than using robots when playing an on-line game. It is the fault of the game designers if the game is so repetitive that a robot usage is considered 'cheating'. The game should only be concerned with participants, be them human or otherwise.
I remember playing the old TSR Dark Sun game, and discovering you could get unlimited Dragonlances/money/whatever if you loaded up one player and droped him from your group then did a hard shut down on the system. When the game came back up the players who originally had the items/money/whatever would still have it and you could have the other rejoin your group with all the goodies. Granted it was a one player game and it was pretty lame running around with 8+ dragonlances after awhile, but as we always used to say:
It's not cheating if the computer will let you do it.
I say reward those who can think out side the box and be at least marginally creative, it's a rare enough quality in the world today. Of course those who just use someone elses methods are lame posers/cheaters who should be flayed.
Cheating is why I play games over a LAN with friends rather than over the internet with people I don't know. Cheating is why I don't play MMORPGs (well, cheating and the incredibly amounts of time they require to get anything done). The anonymity makes it impossible to punish people for wrecking the game or getting ahead unfairly, and this problem simply isn't solvable without removing the anonymity of the internet, and few people want that.
Reminds me of a time I decided to try a MUD. Even though it was free, I was asked to provide my real name, and address and phone number and was explicitly told in the Terms of Service that they would have no qualms about calling my local police department on me. Once I read that, I changed my mind about trying the game, even though I knew that they were doing this in order to cut through the anonymity of the internet and bring real consequences to people to who used the system to abuse others. That knowledge wasn't enough to make me want to lose my anonymity in order to play the game.
Oddly enough, consoles with their unique serial numbers would be better suited to bringing about real consequences for online assholery. You can change your character, you can change your IP, but you cannot change your PS2's serial number. You get your console banned, your only option would be to buy another one. In this case, you're not anonymous, but you're also not identified by an actual name or address either. I think that's a good tradeoff, and will become an even better one in the future as console online gaming takes off.
why bother to play if you're just playing to cheat?
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
But this phrase in the artical just jumped out at me:
All of these techniques depend on users' having full control of the software running on their home machines.
Hrm, a hidden agenda push for DRM? They do go on to say later:
"All of the major developers were saying that they could do nothing to fight cheating because they couldn't control what went on in people's computers," he said. "The whole landscape of online gaming changed when we proved cheating could be fought effectively."
In refrence to a software package that they claim acts like a "virus scanner" in what I would assume basicly prevents people from using trainers. However, and again maybe it's just my paranoia chanting, I can just hear the DRM drumbs beating in the background.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Yes, but--suppose you're winning at chess and your opponent jumps up and skillfully whacks you with a hockey stick? Maybe in his own mind he is playing a different game of skill, but that doesn't mean you want to see him across the chessboard again.
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
"All of the major developers were saying that they could do nothing to fight cheating because they couldn't control what went on in people's computers," he said.
Interesting. I wonder how the methods of fighting online cheating relate to DRM. Anyone ever heard of such an analysis?
Me and a few friends rent a server for the popular game Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike is a modification to the game Halflife. Halflife has a system where by each game purchased has a unique serial key which directly maps to a "WonID", there are no halflife keygens known and only one WonID can play on the internet at anyone time.
Part of the server administrators command set includes commands for banning WonIDs from the server, these can be accessed in game or remotley through RCON (remote console).
We deal with cheaters by banning the wonid they play on, almost 99% of cheaters do not come back on when we have banned their WonID. There are cheaters who have many serial keys (therefore they have many WonIDs), but this doesnt matter to us. They may beleive they can come back on and cheat once again but the ban isnt by a peice of software monitoring wonid's its by a person and a person can not be circumvented. If their banned, their banned. We report bans to each other through the forums we use, therefore all of the admins know of specific player names that have been banned.
Admins quickly get accustomed to how a player acts when cheating. A disproportionate number of good hits is a sign of an aim bot and the dead give away for "wallhack" (seeing through walls) is that of a player getting kills through walls or following players movement through walls.
Cheaters may always have the upper hand when it comes to technology but experience almost always wins out.
do you honestly think this article is news? People cheat in on-line games? wow.
I passed the Turing test.
dude you can just type archive at the start of the link in place of "www" and your in. You must not be much of a computer user if you couldn't figure this out. Editors let these stories through because ocassionally I get tired of reading "I love Linux" articles
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
I have a close friend (no, really I do) who plays HalfLife: CounterStrike - Team Fortress. He plays a lot. He is VERY VERY good, and he knows all the maps so well, that he knows exactly where he can sit and snipe, and exactly when to fire to get a headshot, and all of that jazz.
He is pretty much a computer illiterate, as I have to constantly fix his computer or software. He only uses a PC for email, web, and games. He has never installed a cheat, and in fact has the cheat buster installed on his machine so that he can connect to the servers that require it. I even had to explain to him *how* someone could cheat. In fact, just updating the game to the latest version was a bit too complicated to him (since Nintendo games never require updating...).
So the problem is that when he is playing, he routinely will have 30 or 40 kills and no deaths - people ALWAYS assume he is cheating, and he will almost always get kicked off the server. It is very annoying, especially when he is playing on the cheat protected servers...
Now I suck at the games so I never get accused of cheating...
Finally, I understand the movie "The Matrix."
Neo and his cohorts are cheaters in the great game of life. "There is no spoon," indeed.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
"I can't be the best because there are some college kids out there spending 14 hours a day."
I cant remember the last time I had 14 hours free in a day. Maybe if I skip half my classes, get hardly any sleep, and just play a game I could. Of coures I wouldnt stay in school very long if I did that:).
I had a mate just like that when I was at college. He wasn't called Neal Jenkinson by any chance was he?
And if you're reading this Neal, you're a loser!
Hello, they are a Erstanwender called Slashdot here the website this. My English is not, therefore the good one writes therefore in my German born them. They are I am strange, because it has therefore much disowned people, than if it communicates here. In my country we call this people the feminine asses fat people, than she does not have the life. Which thing called to it in the relative country? I would want to know really such things. He is moreover applicable that the public is completely homosexual Slashdot? They are not homosexual, but I would want to be. Therefore inscato it the entire day I have the warm sex with the customers of MitLinux. Linux gives to the wood me, believes that to it, that one. To the times I can trace down under leves and male the masturbate knots of the penguin of for the sight. Like erotisch! Task to that one ch' hour I go. They are satisfied in order to read the relative answers. Superday has one!
"It's just a game." No shit, sherlock? You have no clue how much that sentence ticks me off - enough to make an account just to post this. Football is just a game, maybe I should start sneaking into locker rooms of teams playing against my school and dump strichnine in their gatoraide bottles, or put steel spikes in their jock straps. It's only a game. I play an online RPG called Dransik, and cheaters have, at periods, been pretty rampant. The first, and most common, kind is bug abuse, which goes largely uncaught because it's nearly impossible to police fully unless the bug being used is one that would be noticed by other players (like bypassing safezones, committing crimes in view of NPC guards without the guards responding, etc). But the worst kind have been "hacers." There's a pretty popular program generally called a "speed hack" that messes with the computer's clock and makes it run faster (not just programs, but the system clock will also advance at nearly double speed). The problem is that, since all client-side operations of just about any game is timed by the CPU clock, this allows a player running the speedhack while playing a game to (depending on the nature of the game) faster unit/character movement, have much faster build/research times, faster rates of fire, faster item/skill use. In Dransik, these programs are used for everything from PKing (especially with ranged weapons - in cunjunction with a speedhack, a strong bow can't be countered except with a speedhack and a strong bow), to hunting (allows characters to outrun fast monsters), to tradeskills (a speedhacking miner, particularly with a macro, can initiate five or six operations before the item lock kicks in to freeze their inventory until the first one completes). Macros are widely used as well, particularly with trade skill bugs. There was a bug with the cooking skill when it was first introduced into the game, and people used macros to gain millions exp in the skill in a matter of minutes - with the regular side effect of crashing the servers (which was used by some people to initiate "timewarps," - where the server reverts to the last backup save - to recover lost items, or just to plain piss people off). Cheating is nothing more than grief playing.
When I first started playing UO it was fun at first but then it got boring, chopping wood, mining, etc. So, I started interacting with the player controlled characters more. Like pick pocketing, PKing, etc. Then I found that B&E was much more fun. I could hide (become invis), a skill that I was a master at, and wait in front of a door of a users house then when they opened the door I could run in, thus revealing myself. Generally a battle would start with the most likely outcome of my character dying. This was OK with me because I knew if I waited until they left to revive then I would revive inside their house. Then, with the help of friends, we would empty all their possessions. We completely packed a tower doing this. Later they changed the code so this was not possible. I was still able to do this by having larger groups hiding making sure we could kill the person once they opened the door. Again they changed the code. They eventually changed the code so much that the game was unrealistic and became boring for all except those that didn't mind spending mind numbing hours mining or chopping trees.
I don't think it was wrong to do it... Heck they had the same opportunity to do it to me or anyone else.
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
At first I thought, "What a sad state to get your ego boosted by cheating at a virtual game". Then I though, "What a sadder state to hold those who do in high regard". Cheating is the automatic admission that you are not competent.
Hey, I haven't seen anyone mentioning that there are two kinds of cheating. The Quake-style cheats that involve looking through walls or whatever are relatively harmless, mainly because most people can play Quake online for free, and unless someone is wagering on your performance, there's no cash rewards.
On-line game cheating in role-playing, especially subscription games is FAR more serious, because in some games, the currency or objects of power or weapons are worth real cash and can even be sold on e-bay (see the post with the e-bay link above) and it suddenly matters very much that some people are cheating.
- Murphy's Corollary: - It is impossible to make things foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
People cheat to make you angry ;)
They're just trolls, basically.
What would Brian Boitano do?
I've seen map hackers in War Craft III.
You can often catch them in the replays. When watching the replay, you might see one of your units (usually a hero) suddenly get highlighted as your opponent selected it to see how powerful it is. If this happens and there are no enemy units within visual range and the animated circle of light, that indicates a legitimate far seeing or reveal attempt has been made, doesn't appear then chances are your opponent used a map hack to reveal the entire map and consequently the position of your units.
There are a lot of folks complaining that one of the "top" Scandinavian players does this. They say the proof is in watching the replays and the near prescience of his troop movements. Many of them were quite thrilled when he lost repeatedly to another top European player despite his obvious cheating.
While on the subject, I hate playing against people who don't cheat but who use "highly optimized" strategies. For instance, they load up on one kind of unit. This isn't good strategy, though it might win in the game, and it's no fun to place against or to play as, IMHO. The only effective way to counter players who do so is to load up on the unit that is best at destroying the unit that your opponent has chosen to load up on. This robs the fun from the game as fast any cheat.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
I play Counter-strike since the first beta version and I play computer games since the dawn of PC gaming. The first game who hocked me for hours was ZORK on a "intel 8086". Since then ,for me, gaming is a hobby. Long time ago I was kind of surprise when my 10 years nephew totally kicked my but.
;) ).
Now I am completely disgust. I have uninstalled counter-Strike.
So I ask him how do he do and he told me "go to download some kind of cheat here" its fun..... I knew since the beginning that there was some cheaters but they where the exception. This is really not the cases anymore. When a little newby who don't know nothing about gaming or even computers can easily download all kind of cheat after a couple of days I think there is a problem.
So I downloaded OGC to see what were the cheats and I understood something. It is not only the good players who cheat, there is also a bunch of lame losers who cheat and suck ass. When I was playing a almost everybody where following me looking thought walls. I realised that when you have all the cheats the game look more like Predator against the Iraki army; Aim bot, anti-flash, speed cheat, lambert, no walls , no recoil etc.... (By the way some specials units of the American army are not so fare from the Predator
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
They would get their ad revenue if they just let me go to the article, and not go through their annoying signup, since that gives them no revenue anyway.
Annoying hoops that dont have to be jumped through wont be jumped through.
While on the subject, I hate playing against people who don't cheat but who use "highly optimized" strategies. For instance, they load up on one kind of unit. This isn't good strategy, though it might win in the game, and it's no fun to place against or to play as, IMHO. The only effective way to counter players who do so is to load up on the unit that is best at destroying the unit that your opponent has chosen to load up on. This robs the fun from the game as fast any cheat.
Having never played Warcraft, Im not sure what you mean. However, sounds rather parallel to playing Magic:The Obsessi^h^h^h^hgathering. When you face someone with a really ANNOYING deck, you have to figure out A) how to get around it or B) realize your own "really annoying deck" isnt necessarily the best thing to have when dealing with it. It's all part of the strategy, IMHO. Not cheating. (the only MTG cheating I hate is when people are lucky enough to own four of every rare or banned card, and play them, and to me, that makes the game unfair.. if someone has four black lotuses and a mox of each color, cards that "sell" for the 300$ price range each, it tends to unbalance the game a bit).
maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
Power playing. I've seen it in all the MMO/persistent world games I've tried. There are people who see that they must win, even if there isn't a winning condition in the game parameters, there is still a certain level of ranking, even if it's informal among the community, where the richest or strongest players are most respected.
I gave up on Counter Strike many years ago, after the cheats were posted all over the sites and everyone (even myself, I'm sorry to say- I just didn't beleive cheats worked until I tried it) downloaded and tried them.
About 6 months later I found Day of Defeat. I've seen some people cheat there, but it is much more rare than CS ever was.
Other games to try would be games that don't move so fast. I Hear there are WW2 mods for Ghost Recon that move so slowly cheaters/Immature idiots never bother.
Practice? You mean I need to put effort into something?
The hell with that!
Players should not even be able to cheat in games written today.
When the first MMORPG Ultima Online came out, programmers severely underestimated the resourcefulness of cheaters. All checks were done on the client side. Once the encryption scheme was broken there were hacks that pretty much allowed you to do anything you wanted from running superfast to instant teleportation to taking things that were never designed to be carried. Eventually all checks were moved to the server and the cheating subsided.
Then people started Macroing with Bots to do the same thing mentioned in this article. Code was added to detect repetitive behavior and experience wasn't given unless you varied your game play (which Bots don't do well).
This was around 5 years ago. I can understand having problems with UO since it was one of the first of its kind, but if today's games still allow players to do this, then its the programmers fault since solutions for these problems have been around for about 3 years now.
and it took you all this time to figure that out?
>
You know, in warfare, technological advantage is revered, yet in entertainment, it is reviled. Are Iraqis calling us l33t hax0rs because we use nightvision, GPS, infrared imaging, and stealth aircraft? Probably. How does one call another a wallhacker in Farsi or Arabic?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
"HaXorz RUlez!!! I Ownz U".
etc.
etc.
etc.
remember... it's like the seperate olympics idea... one that does drugs, one that doesn't. No-one wants to win the drugged-up-to-my-eyeballs drooling orange-eyed, dead at 30 olympics... we want to win the clean one. So we cheat at it.
Similarly, a lot of these cheaters don't want to lose against other cheaters, they want to beat people, and then laugh at them.
There are various kinds of cheaters remember, from the ones that want to challenge the system to the ones that sell simulated money for real on e-bay. I believe most get most pleasure/money etc. from cheating and causing harm to honest players.
Johns: Well, how does it look now? Riddick: Looks clear.
Sure as long as it's single player.
But "computer lets you do it" is not a valid reason when it's multiplayer. In fact when you play multiplayer there can be unwritten rules. You keep breaking them you could end up playing a single player game.
An example, say you go to a quake server, and everyone there says, we're playing shotguns only for this map. You start using a rocket launcher, you're being an asshole. EVEN if it's allowed by the game engine AND by the server/map settings. If you want to play with a rocket launcher, you either play elsewhere or get permission to do it or just wait till most people have enough of shotguns only.
It's just like any other sport. If you say it's not cheating if the computer's game physics/rules allow it, then you can say it's not cheating if the law of physics allows you to grab a soccer ball and run all the way to the goal mouth, or glue it to your foot.
In sport even if something doesn't break any existing rules in the rule book, if enough people think something is cheating/bad/inappropriate and some people do it too often, a new rule is written.
People who don't get it don't understand what _playing_ with other people means and probably missed a significant part of their preschool life/education (where kids agree on/negotiate arbitrary rules in games they create together).
Getting rid of client-side processing, which would kind-of eradicate all this lowlevel cheats like wire-frames and stuff. If all the client gets it's a stream of pictures to display and all it sends back is the coordinates of what the state-of-the-art gaming controls are at the time, most cheats as we know them today would be gonzo.
Some of this theory could even be realized today as a lot of cheats (wireframe etc) is based on information that the player isn't able to see, but his client (the game) still gets it from the server. If the server is more selective on who gets to know what (which would increase processing by a 10-fold I guess), a lot of potential cheaters could be kept in the dark about the position of their enemies that are hiding with that sniper-rifle behind the next doorway...
But until real broadband and really powerful CPUs (beowulfs ?) are mainstream, I guess we'll have to put up with some cheating from time to time...
"How to the Hackers: The Scoop on Internet Cheating and How You Can Combat It" from the July 2000 issue of Game Developer Magazine.
It's a programmer's view on a variety of cheating methods and some disuccsion of limitations and countermeasures. And before you even say it-- I didn't choose the title for the article, my editor did, so don't email me again about the misuse of the word 'hackers'. :-)
-Mp
I myself don't play too many of these games, online or not. But it sounds like they should add ref to games in their next incarnation. or something like a DM/GM/etc... in role playing games.
Or a couple of the players can sit out a game by getting fragged and ghosting around to keep the rest honest. Its like being goalie in pickup soccer games, the majority of people don't like it, but if you rotate the job between (reasonable) players I don't see the problem.
"When QuakeWorld came out online, the community was huge and teeming with people," said Mr. Ray, referring to a first-person maze game that was popular in the mid-1990's. "There was serious competition and an enormous amount of online status. Then the cheats showed up, and almost overnight it went from something that was a hugely popular community into something that was a wasteland.'' No it was a multiplayer tweak for Quake 1 that made it play alot smoother for us modem people.
Crime always pays if the perpetrator is never hunted or caught.
All human interactions have the opportunity for criminal (i.e., harmfully antisocial) behavioral events.
Prevention is only rarely feasible, and enforcement of morality (i.e., the law) is very effective at keeping society from looking like the Internet.
At the Title Screen press Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start. pwned j00
Some one set us up the bomb.
As long as you are on a PC, cheating will always be a part of any game. The PC is simply too open, not to be hacked for fun never mind if real money is going to be involved someday.
:)
Hacking consoles is harder, especially if they are obscure hardware. It does happen though.
I hate to say this, but I think micro$oft has a good solution with the x-box. They have your credit card number and all of your information. If you cheat they throw you off the network. I have yet to see anyone I would suspect of cheating on xbox live(although there are plenty of people who exploit glitches). If anyone has any info about such things, do tell
-NoClanNeeded
Campers 4 Ever
Gameshark
Codebreaker
There are others, but they do the same thing.
Boot form the CD. Select the cheats. Boot the game. The cheat program runs in memory changing values for you so you have lots of cash, lots of lives and so on.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Then, there goes the real life, with night vision googles, stealth jets, smart bombs, laser guided projectiles, satelite imagery and the like.
Hmmm... Maybe something shoud be done...
> login: world (password not shown)
> boot reality
> modprobe fairplay [ok]
> userdel nobrainer_military_maniac
> ban .gov, .mil
> wall Go fight for equality NOW!
> reboot
Bite my shiny metal... oops... Nevermind!
"Do Cheaters Ever Prosper?"
Not that you would ever look to real life for an answer to that question...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
One of the players engaging in this automated counterfeiting, a 29-year-old financial planner from Texas, said he did so without apology (although he did not want to be identified by name). "I think the bots actually level the playing field for people who have day jobs," he said. "When I play an online game, I can't be the best because there are some college kids out there spending 14 hours a day."
Judging by his definition of leveling the playing field, he must have been an Anderson intern.
I remember when I worked as an SE intern at SGI (back in the glory days!) some of the employees brought in their teenage children and they played quake (II?) against us. There was this one level where you could get your group in this one circular room with one automatic door. Things spawned in there and so forth.
We were having a hard time getting them out so I just changed my team color and got in, stood at the back of the pack. Then changed color back and "WHAM! WHAM!" which was followed by "SCREAM SCREAM". It was beautiful.
I think a partial solution to the problem would be for online game sites to have separate games where cheating is explicitly allowed. Lame-ass cheaters who don't have the guts to match their hacking skills against others will still cheat in the no-cheating games, but at least the cheaters who have confidence in their skills will participate in these games, because winning there will earn them legitimate respect from the community they have the most respect for.
If those who participate in the hacker games make some effort to create a culture that looks down on people who hack in the non-hacking games, that could help too.
People who cheat in games where cheating is not allowed by the rules are lame-ass selfish bastards with no character and a pathetic substitute for self-confidence. If they really feel like they've accomplished something by winning in a way that spoils the game for unsuspecting people who play by the rules, then I feel sorry for them.
Convert RSS to HTML - integrate webfeeds into your website
A few years ago when I was teaching middle school, I wanted a way to show wireframes in 3D games so I could take screenshots and use them with my 6th and 7th graders as examples of geometry in application. Most often, I would write to developers and ask them if there was still a way to view wireframes. They seemed to like this question, and would always send a pretty thoughtful response, but I did notice over the years that the availability of this feature seemed to disappear. I guess cheat potential has something to do with that effect.
By the way, the best screenshots I got were from UltraHLE with N64 ROMs.
Ravi
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
Only if you register your soul for Stock pricing
--and therefore requires a social solution.
As long as code executes on fundamentally untrusted platforms and as long as code is imperfect, there is no way to prevent cheating or exploiting in a multiplayer game. That's just the way it is; more technology isn't going to change it a whit, especially for
If we approach the problem socially, however, solutions present themselves.
Many games provide unique identifiers for each installation, like Half-Life/CounterStrike. This is usually an anti-piracy measure-- but we could use it to control cheating. Banning by unique ID is part of the solution, but not everything. Consider a solution modeled on USENET killfiles--
I join a game, and the client downloads the UIDs of the other connected players. The client compares this list against my personal list of people I don't like to play against (cheaters-- or maybe just obnoxious twits) and notifies me if any are in the game. I can then make an informed decision about whether to play there or look elsewhere.
Clients could also collaborate; if a player joins who's on my 'shit list,' I could allow the client to notify the other players. Perhaps even an automated voting scheme could be enabled-- a player UID thats on enough people's shit lists could be automatically banned (assuming the server allows it).
Yes, there would be a market for new UIDs, much as there is a market for CD keys. However, if the client makes it easy enough to maintain the shit list, that in and of itself is only a temporary problem. As a side-effect, if an ID gets widespread my client plonks the whole lot of cheaters with one entry.
The emergent behaviour of such a system would force all the cheaters to play each other on cheater-friendly servers. At that point, who cares? 8) I see this as a win-win scenario; cheaters get to cheat, and the rest of us don't get bothered.
Some games are partway there. Tribes2 and some CS admin mods have voting mechanisms that kick/ban players; but this doesn't carry over between servers, whereas the above scheme would.
A third-party tool would help, but to be really effective it needs to be integrated into the game client so that all players are using it.
-- Cerebus
You must register your soul under a Stockbroker at the New York Stock exchange. Only by signing your soul away to your crediters may you enter the NY Times website. The Shadows remain unseen.
The college I went to had signs posted up in the computer labs; "Don't feed the MUDers." These guys were practically wearing asset tags and taken down in the inventory list.
Multi User Dungeon; weren't those the days?
I saw the banner ad, I did not click on it, I would not have anyways. The NY times has one less bogus entry in thier DB and I was educated. Where is the LOSS that is required for stealing ? If this is a crime it is like prostitution then.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
The head on the stick was a bitmap of John Romero's.
Romero later left id Software and founded Ion Storm.
Coincidence? I think not!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Some mod creators have programed backdoors and cheats into their creations.
Now not only do we have lamers and script kiddies making games online games un-fun, but we have mod creators joining in as well.
I can find the post and don't rember the mods name, but I remember someone was bragging on blues news something about the backdoor. I think they where a member of the clan the mod programmer belonged to.
Berke Breathed actually used the color Chartruse.
Don't Panic!
Whoa.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Back in the day of UO I remember coming accross a cheat that allowed me to walk thru locked doors into peoples homes. It had to do with running as fast as you can while being a ghost directly at the door. You simply got a roaming healer from the woods to stand right next to the house and as you past thru the door the healer could revive you into flesh. Now im sorry cheats like these are just handed to players all the time thru bad game development. Who are we to not exploit them and make the game safer. Im sure that 9 out of 10 would exploit before reporting!
Ahaha. So you're trying to get OTHER people to pay for you to leave the country? And that's supposed to prove some sort of point? "Put your money where your mouth is?"
Typical liberal.
Theres' a thing called Retail Half-Life: Counter-Strike. There's also Retail Half-Life: Team Fortress Classic. There's also Retail Half-Life, which includes TFC and all other mods for free ( so why sell Retail TFC separately? ) And when you buy Platinum HL, you get like 3 HL CD keys.
nuf said :)
(that's from memory -- am I correct?)
Join Tor today!
How to ruin a 14 year olds day. Or a 30 year old.
...
.." During this phase don't team kill (just GET team killed).
....
Why be a cheater when it's more fun to TeamKill instead ??
Seriously, killing guys all day with wireframe and grenade hacks does not piss the otherr players off as much as team killing.
You have to get really psychological with the other players. Do a couple of team kills and explain that you are a newbie (having a name like Player 6 helps). Sorry man !! didn't mean to kill you!! I did not know where you were when I threw the grenade and so on
After a while they will figure it out and team kill you and get the same server enforced penaltys (less money for weapons and whatnot).
Then you go into chat and start saying "what's your problem man ? Just trying to have some fun and being a dick
Finally the last phase is when people trust you again to really open up the team killing whoopass.
This is so damn fun
What is a greifer? Never did try out UO...
Sounded like fun, anyway!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wow, the other team had 2 2/3 games. Sounds nice and bloody. What were you playing?
Have the LucasArts people seen the new Star Wars movies? The only alien languages would be "Broken English with Asian accent," "Broken English with Jamaican accent," "Broken English with Italian accent"...
wouldn't they cheat and just lie?
Some comments to comments made in the article.
said he did so without apology (although he did not want to be identified by name)
This means you know what you're doing is wrong, and you have a great deal of shame for doing so. Otherwise, why would you care? Oh, maybe your account would get canceled, but that's a small price to pay for being right, isn't it?
While breaking the rules or using secret "cheat codes" has always been an accepted, even treasured part of single-player games,
Yes, sometimes you find insurmountable obstacles that cheating seems to be the only way around. But it's not true, you're just not trying hard enough. But by cheating, you rob yourself of the thrill of actually BEATING the damn thing. But once you start adding extra programs to "assist" you in playing the game, or exploit hidden bugs to give your character an unfair advantage, you've just admitted to yourself that you aren't good enough to play by the rules.
and when it becomes boring it is time to turn to the greater game of beating the system, they argue.
No, when it gets boring, that means its TIME TO STOP PLAYING! That's your brain telling you that it's time to get a life.
They fear that people would stop playing if those who cheated held all the power.
And ultimately this is true. However, all game companies aren't perfectly innocent in this regard. Cheaters may comprise a small percentage of the total player base, but it has appeared at times that reforming the cheaters seems to be of a higher priority than showing them where they can get off, and giving them a shove in that direction. Ultima Online went through this several times during the first few months. Kept giving amnesty to cheaters if they just gave back the stuff they obtained by cheating, or even warning them a few days before they would start checking. I say, day one, mention that all cheaters will be banned permanantly and immediately, no exceptions, no warnings, NOTHING. And in their defense, a lot of them say this, but there wouldn't be that many cheaters if they were serious about it.
In theory, this should give players many options and strategies to explore, but it could also lead to players' gaining monopolies.
And in the real world, monopolies are regulated.
Games also typically have a grey area, mentioned in the article. These are tricks you can do in the game that are within the rules and maybe even the spirit of the game, but have a result that was not planned for. FPS Speedrunners have long exploited these tricks without crossing the line into cheating. In Doom for instance, you had strafe running, wall grabs, wall running, rocketjumps, archie jumps, flipping switches that are "out of reach", clearing ledges that should have been too far, but aren't, etc. Of course, all of these tricks are generally more difficult than playing exactly as it was intended. Players have spent hours trying to perfect a trick that will save them a few seconds, just so they can shave a second or two off the record.
If a grey area is considered unfair, then it should be stated as such and fixed. In a perfect world, most such exploits and grey areas will be identified and removed during an extensive beta period, but beta periods have been traditionally too short, and game developers are caught with problems that they have to fix without upsetting a world that can't be reset. In games that end after 30-60 minutes, this isn't a problem, but for the games that go on forever, your options are limited.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Ditto. No such thing as idkroz.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Berke Breathed actually used the color Chartruse.
I know. Thats why its not in quotes. Its also so damned difficult to spell "chartreuse" (as noted above) that I figured I'd stick with pink. Kind of an homage to "Night of the Mary Kay Commandos".
maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
I _used_ to play Counter-Strike.
But it took to much time too many cheaters.
Two reasons I haters cheaters.
When I made a great move or kill or too many kills in a short amount of time, people would call me a cheater. I would get tired of defending myself.
In other games(real basketball) when someone makes a nice move or shot/pass, I tell them so(Complimenting other players seems to keep egos in check, and thus more fun)
The problem is in Counter-Strike I never know if they are cheating or not.
Thus is the end, is simply ruins the game.
How can you win when you are not actually playing?
I mean, if you are cheating... then you aren't playing the game by it's rules - defeating others under such circumstances is pointless.
How can you prove your "ACTUAL" gaming skills with crutches such as aimbots or a wireframehack?
Simple answer: You can't.
Anyone who cheats at a competitive game is just, quite simply, a luzer.
Codifex Maximus posting as AC
I run several massively multiplayer, free, web based online games (WWII - War of Supremacy - war.coldfirestudios.com and Space - Glory Through Conquest - space.coldfirestudios.com to name a couple)
Now I know that everyone that administers an online game handles cheaters differently, but here is what we like to do
Now, don't get me wrong
We only do the above nasty things to people when they ruin the experience for the other players
It may not be the perfect answer, but most of the people playing my games seem to enjoy it
Begin Ranting and Raving
My thought on cheating, especially with games, is simple: Why would you spend hours and hours playing a game that doesn't provide a challenge? If you cheat, it takes away the feeling of accomplishment that you have when you're done playing
So again, what is the point of cheating?
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
If open code leads to better since security though obfustrication is no security.
A blog I run for the wealth
What we need are more games using the C&C method of game cheats - there aren't any, only hints and game bugs (most of which have now been rectified).
Speaking of which, do westwood remove their game cheats before release or do they not have any at all to intensify testing?
Murphy's Law of Research: Enough research will tend to support your theory.
The issue is that cheaters make games less fun and less entertaining for the people that are not willing to stoop to that level.
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. - Tennessee Williams
This article shows that people are willing to put in the time, skill, and effort to crack *GAMES* for *FUN* just so they can say "ha ha I killed you". These cheaters put in all this effort for no financial gain. Then, how much more effort will people put in to crack DRM schemes when there is financial gain? $20 saved on a cd is $20 earned. $600 saved on some fancy paint program version 9 is $600 earned.
Considering that people will work so hard to cheat when there is almost nothing to gain ("ha ha I killed you") then it seems to me that DRM in hardware, software, and legislation is doomed because there is so much more to gain.
This space for rent
www.gamehacking.com
Interesting
There are lots of comments about CS and Quake type cheating. However, about the time I quit Dark Ages of Camelot there was a hubbub about "mechanical cheating". This effectively outlawed putting something heavy on your keyboard to avoid being kicked for inactivity. People did this when they went to dinner of were running some scheme where it was to their advantage to be online in a safe place.
Basically if an in game referee tried to talk to you and you didn't respond, you would be kicked and banned for mechanical cheating. If the game wasn't such a damn grind just to do anything they wouldn't have to worry about this....
what do you think? Is the old pencil on the keyboard a real cheat!?
I wrote most of the popular macros for asheron's Call. I was the first person to write the drain health macro. I wrote a bot that ran around, and parsed text by taking pixel readings from the screen and determining words...
.txt log file while it was running took the coorinate readings... Then I could triangulate my current direction and figure if i had to press left or right to change to the next waypoint. Then I'd have a complex series of clicking and looking around to do stuff like fighting the correct monsters, lewting, then selling...
:) I love coding shit like that. I don't view macroing as cheating... I view hacking stats as cheating... Since macroing is shit you could do behind the keyboard anyway.
For DAOC, it was way easier, I parsed the
Patrol place for monsters.
Path to return to vendors
It was great
God spoke to me
and cable was actually fast the start of some of the anti-cheats would annoy non-cheaters as well.
Like a modified binary (mentioned in the article) from say...oh, I don't know...and UPDATED version or removing the annoying cd checks when you have several games and switch back and forth without hunting for one of several cds.
Now the main deterrant to online gaming is lack of speed since the downfall of cable and the overzealous caps.
What's frightening is the online and IRL circle of friends I play against (then and now) is some are so good/sneaky/have good tactics that anyone who joins in usually calls "cheater".
Laughter ensues.
Either they shut up and play or leave or perhaps sit and watch a battle and figure out that some of us are just "that good".
Sometimes it is hard to tell.
Ah, well.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
With respect to first-person shooters (FPS), I think some of the responsibility to prevent cheaters to see through walls goes to the map designer. iD software games uses "Hint" and "Caulk" brushes (map elements) to partition the space within a map into "portals" to prevent the 3D hardware from rendering polygons that will not visible in the finished frame. If designed correctly, these maps will be protected from cheaters using hacked video card drivers to see through walls.
it depends on what you view as the game.
Some view the game as the collective data that the server sends and receives.. and that's it; the client is just a stepping stone.
Others, the majority, view it as "whatever the authors intended"
The best and most complicated 'cheat' I have ever seen: http://seq.sourceforge.net I'm sure this has been on slashdot in the past. seq = showeq. It's a tool for everquest users. It runs on a separate machine under linux and gives the user a birds eye view of the map. Over the years it has become fairly complex. At the moment it requires a program on the computer running the everquest client to read the key from memory, it then sends the key to the machine running seq and that machine uses the key to decrypt the everquest packets.
I think the parent may have been referring to making something like "Aimbot" part of the game, thus along an On / Off switch. That could be part of the criteria for a game server, and you wouldn't have to say "No Cheaters".
Come and see the violence inherent in the system!
Gee, what a surprise.
If a sufficient percentage of people cheat, the entire system falls apart.
That never happens in real life. Unfortunately, I can't switch servers with my wet body. Or can I? Maybe if I moved to Australia...
Once again, (glass half empty) the online world shows humanity to be tragically and irreparably flawed. No good deed goes unpunished in this world.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
So, to "level" the playing field, I built a quick & dirty mIRC script that calls a COM object to query a database and automatically /notice 's other channel members the answer for the question. I also switch it in to auto-answer mode when he isn't around. Works _decently_ so far, but mIRC crashes often when calling the COM object. Likely buggy COM implementation in mIRC or i'm using it wrong in the script kuz my test client doesn't crap out.
Meh. Anyone hiring in Canada? I could be doing much better things than this in my "spare" unemploymed time.
So again, what is the point of cheating? ... to prove that you an untalented, selfish ass???
I agree. In fact, if I find myself on a team that's continuously beating the other, I'll often switch because I get bored when there's no challenge.
However, people are just different and some think if they win even by cheating that makes them better than everyone else. Maybe they think the simple fact that they know how to cheat makes them better than everyone else. I would guess these type of people are losers that are hated and belittled by everyone they know.
Then you have the people that just get pleasure out of pissing off other people on the server. I think they prefer team killing over cheating though.
So the point of cheating, some people get their jollies from making you mad. That's just a sad fact of life.
That is why the other honest players and I get our jollies off of embarassing the hell out of losers that cheat!
I think that it has a nice ironic twist to it
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
watch and a souceforge project will be made after I post this
i always thought for FPS, you could make a virtual device in windows -- one that acts as a 3d video card. you setup that video card to pass on instructions to your physical video card so you don't lose the hard ware speed. all the device does is output wireframe. IT can't read textueres. Is there something like this already? can it be stopped?
WTPOUAWYHTTOTWPA
What's the point of using acronyms when you have to type out the whole phrase anyways?
Geez.
Several years ago, I played Quake (1) avidly, and was involved in a clan, that was consistently ranked in the top 10. The difference in skill level at such competitive extremes were unbelievable. For example, match a top five player (say, Dennis Fong) against someone in the 6-10 spots. In 100 matches, the 6th best person would probably win 1 match, if that. Match a top 10 person with somebody in the top 50, and same result.
For me, playing against anybody not in the top 100 was a joke. Thus, I constantly received complaints of "cheating". Anybody that good can easily beat somebody who was using an aimbot. Perfect aim does nothing when your entire understanding of the level and how to control it is exponentially better than your opponent.
On the other side, during clan competitions, we prevented cheating by taking screenshots after the game, and emailing them to a judge. Thus, anybody using pak2 (it gave the player models huge spikes so you could see them through walls, made invisibility very visible, and other little things) would be discovered. We didn't account for any other cheats (aimbots) because we didn't consider those cheats effective.
I can see how this is a problem nowadays however, especially with MMORPGs. I haven't played any games since Quake 1 (i've tried a few) because the games lack the balance and perfect level design of Quake 1. For example, in UT, all the weapons are powerful enough that something like an aimbot can make a drastic difference. In Quake 1, the only really powerful weapons were the rocket launcher and tbolt, and a noob with an aimbot was worthless with a rocket launcher, and the tbolt ran out of ammo so quickly that it was impossible for an aimbot to dominate with one.
All in all, I guess I am just reminiscing about the good ol' days, when cheating was ineffective due to good game design. It seems that cheating is now a fact of life and actually does have a very negative effect on gameplay, which is why I will never play any game competitively again.
Excellent point. If a word is so hard to spell that even after 6 years of higher education I can't spell it properly, I might as well avoid using it, as I shall do in the future.
Don't Panic!
I've never heard that term before, good to know...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I GOT FIRST REPLY, W0000t!!!
Space - Glory Through Conquest - space.coldfirestudios.com doesn;t accept accounts from Mozilla.
It did work in IE though, just thought you'd want to know
I used to wonder if people were basically good or basically evil, until I saw what most people do when they think they're anonymous on the net and there are no consequences to their actions.
This is exactly what occured to me after two months of Diablo II, 16 hours a day. At first it was great fun, but soon I began to feel the general attitude of the realms. It's very mercenary and cold. And worse it seemed like every other player was trying to tradehack you or trick you into giving them your items. I saw plenty of people "item fountain" or drop a valuable piece of kit by mistake and then lose it to some other bastard who then promptly left the game. In normal life these people wouldn't dare steal from people they didn't know, even if it was something they really wanted. The difference is that the realms have no police, no state, no punishment and no consequences. I was apalled when I realised how many people wouldn't object to stealing when there are no consequences to their actions.
But I expect I should have realised that that's why we need police, and punishment and why we have a concept called "justice". If people can get away with it they will.
I just hope the majority of these people are teenagers who are going to grow up and gain some morality. But I still feel a little tainted by the whole affair. Can I really trust all these people I know in the real world? Or would they backstab me if they could get away with it? I think it's different when you can see the other person's face. Most of those 12 year old thieves would feel some guilt if they could see how upset some of the victims got.
I stopped playing Diablo II, and only then realised that I'd stopped eating and sleeping properly and that I'd been ignoring my family and friends. Whoops!
However I feel that the definition of what is "cheating" here is somewhat over broad and that some examples given in this article do not fall under my envelope of cheating(assuming the game has any sense at all). Many games particularly of the skill developing variety are designed so that the only real way to increase a skill is to repeat said skill over and over again. I think so long as this is the case, and especially in cases where this is the only way to build up skills, I feel that the use of reasonable bots is not all that a hugely bad idea.
In essence I think that the best way to prevent cheating in on-line games would be to alter said games in such a way where regular users were not encouraged to cheat by the circumstances of the game, at which point the few who did so would have either a much harder time doing it, or would be so blatantly obvious that no one would play with them.
I'm not all too familiar with the multiplayer gaming infrastructure, but I am a 4th year computer science student... so I think this makes sense.
:)
How about The server keeps track of positions of all the clients, and does some vector math on calculating visibily before even transmitting coordinates to the clients? With the fast-as-hell CPU's we have out there now, I'm sure this could be pulled off with VERY little slowdown. This reduces network traffic by not sending everyone everyone else's position, but also... so what if player X does have a see through walls hack? If the server doesn't tell Player X where Player Y is, he still can't see him.
Any Thoughts?
Oh, and by the way... I knew a guy doing transparent wall hacks back before 3d accel cards were even invented, it's not news
no comment
Step 1: Create unbeatable CD-key mechanism. Ala Diablo 2.
Step 2: Create an RBL style list of cheaters.
Cheat = global ban, means that no-one would dare run cheats.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
When you frag 6 people in Unreal Tournament it's "Monster Kill". In Quake 3 it's "Excellent". In Counter-Strike it's "Kicked by Console".
Rich
Just a thought, but enabling wirefarme graphics may not be enough to see through walls.
3D engines are designed to cull as many invisible polys as possible (invisible = hidden or obscured by another object). So if a character is hiding behind a wall, the engine will realise that the polys that make up the wall obscure the entire character. It doesn't have to check that each poly in the character is obscured, just that the bounding sphere/box of the character is obscured. Or if the character is close to a corner, that part of the bounding volume is exposed, then another polygon-culling technique may be applied.
If the programmer of the 3D engine is lazy and is only relying on z-buffer rendering to obscure hidden objects, then all the polys are being sent to the renderer, so enabling wireframe will let you see the hidden ones.
This is a quote from the postscript in ESR's article on Quake Cheating (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/quake-cheats.ht ml):
>There's just no getting around the fact that the execution path on the client machine is going to be under the client-user's control. Thus, good security has to be designed as though any code on the client side is open.
My observation is that this is only strictly true if the client game executable is complete (in the game content sense) and available apriori.
I think that in the future we'll see games that have a light client 'shell' engine which handles content generation (procedural), i/o, graphics, sound, and so forth, but does NOT contain the multiplayer game code. The game content code itself will be written in a scripting language (Lua is a good canidate) and downloaded from the server at play time.
Thus the server could impose dynamic language and protocol changes to running clients so as to make them unhackable (in any useful sense) during the game. A given piece of code could be reverse engineered and/or modified after the fact, but by that time it is useless, since you'd never run the same game code twice.
The clients then MUST be running the server supplied code, or they would quickly become unplayable by whatever means the game creator has deemed appropriate.
Install Linux, rewrite your mIRC script for Xchat's perl bindings. Set up a mySQL database to store answers, and off you go!
If you only allowed signed, trusted binaries to execute, and sent only encrypted packets, with OS and hardware support for limiting access to the memory space of the trusted application, it would lock out most of the avenues of cheating, or at least make it a lot harder to do.
You can't modify packets because they're encrypted
You can't hack the drivers/game code because it would fail the trusted binary check
You can't read/write the game's memory space because that would be blocked by the hardware/OS.
Assuming it is implemented properly (yeah, it's a big "if"), is there any way to work around such a scheme?
This kind of application (and many more serious applications that require similar solutions) is exactly where some sort of software signing/authentications is useful. People should be able to modify/do whatever with the games they bought, but if they do, they should't be able to play online with others who don't have such advantages; at least not under any pretense that they are playing fair.
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
Can't believe this crap is still going on! Cheaters completely destroyed Diablo on-line.
Part of the deal with any RPG is to find that über-item that is just around the corner; if I just play another 30 minutes, I'll probably find it.
Until you meet the super-l33t idiot who has 300 duped weapons for sale, and has never actually played the game; just trolling the news groups for the latest exploits.
Sigh. Nowadays I play Civ III. Alone.
... then those who cheat are fedayins and terrorists.
NO FAIR !!!
No. Because to sell ads, they need to show that people are seeing them. Because that's what the people who place ads (they're called advertisers) want. One indicator of how much eyeballshare they've got is via registrations.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Not that I'd sacrifice my privacy to get rid of online cheaters, but anyway... :)
Be an elitist - read Slashdot at +4.
The East Bay Express has a good article written by someone that just explored the Sims Online for a few weeks, basically on assignment. She details some of the scams that are floating around and the problems in the game from a newbie perspective. It's a good read.
Excellent point. If a word is so hard to spell that even after 6 years of higher education I can't spell it properly, I might as well avoid using it, as I shall do in the future.
That just earned you a fan.
M
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
We need to uniquely identify each gamer, and (more or less) permanently ban gamers found to be cheating. I propose using credit cards, since people have a finite number of them. While cheaters with more than one credit card could have multiple identities, they eventually all would get caught.
For online gaming services the solution seems simple. Gamers caught blatently cheating would have their account revoked with no refund. The cannot login using any account payed for with the same credit card. Revokations could last a month to start, and be permanent for serial abusers. Since online services have resources, they could devote "detectives" to find and ban cheaters. Banned gamers could appeal their revokation, but the vast majority of cheaters will prolly just slink away into the shadows. Since real money is involved, cheaters have a strong incentive to stay honest.
For free (no monthly fee) network games, independent companies could provide the service of identifing gamers. People would pay a small fee ($10?) to get an gamer-id (and password), with only ONE gamer-id for each credit card. All online games would require a this gamer-id. Game servers would communicate with the id companies to verify the identity of logged in gamers. These identities would be there for everyone to see, so people with a bad reputation would quickly be kicked. At the very least, you could refuse to play with a gamer you suspect of being a cheater.
"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."
well im sure their advertisers will be pleased to see that "Mike Hunt" visits their page 10,000 times a day & that his email address is eat@shit.com
theyre certainly getting their moneys worth from this free registration scheme
For the info & link.
Sweet--thanks. Mom always said that admitting when you're wrong is good for your karma.
Don't Panic!
How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our
thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another
in the waking state?
-- Plato
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