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.
What college is this?
by
Lord_Slepnir
·
· 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.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone have a log and pass for the NY Times site!?
Anyone care to add up these total sales?
...and the first NYtimes cheat code is... :)
UP-Down-Left-Right-Select-START!! (Correct Link!)
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.
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.
--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