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Cheating in Multiplayer Games
millertime3250 writes "Tom's Hardware is running an interesting article on cheating in multiplayer games. In an issues that has gained increasing notority, it is a great read for those Counter-Strike players and others alike. It defines the different types of cheats like Client Hook, OpenGL Hack, and Hard-Coded Hack, and cheating's effect on gaming."
I think common cheats should have a forum where they are documented. That way, if someone at a LAN party gets noticed using them, they can be kicked out.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
In an issues that has gained increasing notority
/.?
George W. Bush has started submitting articles to
That's an interesting strategery for the upcoming presidential race.
my pet machine
Hey, it might make me vote for the guy...
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Of course this isn't complete without a link back to these:
Quake Cheats
Slashdot article on the same
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
Man, its a good thing we'll have MS's Trusted Computing Platform soon, to help deal with things like cheaters.
Counter Strike - Palladium Edition
--I don't want the world, I just want your half.
And it looks really awsome on a Radeon 9800 running DX9, with 1.5 GB of DDR-400 and a Hyper-threaded 4.06 P4 (800 FSB, anyone?).
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Imagine when information becomes free and we all have source code access? I think at some point you can't stop the technology and you just need to trust. We'll just have to play with those we know.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
No one ever accuses me of cheating, probably cos I am so crap. Does camping count ? I'm really good at that.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
3.06 P4, mibad. All apologies.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
For every cheater, there are at least ten players who'll complain that you're cheating when you kill them - sour grapes.
I'v heared of some neat cheats where they disable wall's (keep them wirerame) so you always know where everyone is. Although I would be pissed if this ever got used against me. It's just more fun to play on a level playing field.
"Mr. President, we cannot allow a mineshaft gap!"
There really isn't anything new in this article that hasn't been said before. He at least puts up a basic outline of some of the more popular games out there and the most used cheats. If you want more in depth articles covering the topic then check out the various websites affiliated with the game such as the official site, fan sites, anti-cheat sites, and various gaming sites. Good read none-the-less for those not familiar with game cheats.
Question everything.
I'm too busy cheating on Counter-Strike to go read the article.
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
because they "aren't that good" or "I still get killed even though I'm cheating!"
I've seen lots of cheating in Americas Army and it was the primary reason I stopped playing that game. It really ruins the game, although it is fun to kill a cheater when you KNOW they are cheating! :)
our cs server now has an anti cheat that the admin developed. It runs locally on your machine and checks your hard drive for common cheat files, it will also take screenshots of your game running and ftp them to an ftp server. IT also checks the md5 hash as you play. It's found a lot of h4x's already
you can check it out at www.wnygames.com - it's similar to creeping death imho, but more tailored to the server we play on.
Fear Breeds Knowledge
OMG H4X!!!!!!!!!11111111
-insert a witty something-
I've heard rumors of touch-screens being used to make headshots. Under the definition given by the article (altering config files, etc) this isn't classified as "cheating."
:)
Does "better" equipment constitute cheating? Someone with a laggy connection, for example, becomes harder to hit. Someone with a bigger monitor may be able to see movement more clearly than a poor guy with a 15in screen. Is this the digital divide in fragging?
I know touch-screens could provide a REAL advantage but wouldn't be defined as a cheat by the article. Sure, it's not as deliberate as an aimbot but it has to at least come close.
Cheating has ruined multiplayer games for me. It's extremely frustrating to be constantly spawn killed and the likes. Before i quit playing cs i went on a hunt for cheat free servers. Even the most up to date servers with the latest anti-cheat technology was two steps behind. Even at organized tournaments people constantly cheat. The cheats may be more discreet but they're still used all the time.
On one server in particular i suspected three clanners of cheating but the admin told me that it was rock solid. I later returned with an aim-bot/wall-hack and showed him how false his sense of protection actually was. All i did was a quick search on google and downloaded the first thing that popped up.
What really confuses me is why people cheat in the first place. Those who use aimbots are really lame. Where's the fun if you don't even have to click. All you gotta do is face the cross-hairs in the general direction and it does it all for you. Wouldn't you get bored real quickly? I really don't see anything amusing about it all except that you guys like to open your mouth and talk about how 1337 you are when in fact you're nothing but a bunch of little pathetic script kiddies.
What i really hate is the fact that every game is prone to cheaters. Even when playing chess online some people resort to using computer programs to help them out. How lame is it to run gnu chess in the background?
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Boy that was sure fun :)
Does getting a life and seeing daylight count as cheating?
I'm surprised that the article didn't mention hlguard, also developed by united admins. It runs on all sorts of hl mods and is likely one of the most used anti cheat tools available. In case you are not familiar with it, it contains tools to check for aimbotting, common cheat cvars, and manual ogc detection. If you run any type of hl server (and it's interesting they don't mention the hundreds of other hl mods) hlguard is definitely a server side addon you should look in to.
http://www.unitedadmins.com/hlguard.php
-= Why can't I add 'Anonymous Coward' to my list of Foes? =-
I haven't played counter-strike, but it seems like the same types of people are at it again... I don't know, they always barge in and ruin perfectly innocent games. Cheating really does take out all the fun in multiplayer and even singleplayer videogames. That's why, you play with who you trust!
The only way to do THAT is to make friends...and know them well. A third party isn't going to be able to determine if someone will be a good friend for you or not.
My problem is I could never find anyone who was as obsessed as I was with videogames (Descent II was fun over modem, I got to kick my friend's ass all the time =P)
... does "no clipping mode" mean see through walls? Every game I can recall that has a no clipping mode used it to enable the player to WALK through the walls.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
For this kinda info is the forum at www.gamehacking.com
Actually they discourage multiplayer hacks, but otherwsise there is just about any info on the subject you may want.
well done.
Yeah. It's annoying. Cheating also takes place in casinos and in other physical forms of game play. It's a difficult problem that has been around since games were invented... and it's not going away anytime soon. I don't claim to know the answer. It's just like SPAM, popup ads, and all sorts of other online annoyances. There may not even be a good technological solution... The only thing I can think of is to play with people you know, and if you play with someone else, be wary of what's going on. If they cheat, fuck 'em... There are lots of other people to play with.
I think any technological advantages are typically minor. Skill (and sometimes luck) really apply as advantages. Besides, the gaming community is typically no-holds-barred when it comes to equipment. If Rambus 1066, at three times the cost of DDR and coming from a dubious company, gives an extra few percentage points in speed, gamers will go forit. And they have. This attitude seems to permeate the entire community, and no one wants to get left behind. I have personally seen people with steam-powered BOXen beat the crap out of people running top-of-the-line equipment anyway.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Like your mother was last night, Trebeck.
Consider this:
1) Many of todays multiplayer games are closed-source/proprietary(Q3, Americas Army, Halflife)
2) Many of the cheats for todays multiplayergames are open-source/free(OGC HL/Q3 Bot, Evilhack America's Army Bot)
So... before you jump at the cheaters, who are really the bad/good ones?
We set up special servers where cheaters could go all-out doing what they do best?
It could become an entirely different form of competition. Just because you can cheat doesn't mean you can do it well.
I know there'd always be some cheaters hell-bent on ruining the experience for legitimate players, but perhaps this would give a lot of them the chance to harmlessly work off whatever it is that drives them to cheat.
The coolest voice ever.
Damn I forgot and that ... and your mention it of made my fingers muscle memory instantly remember the keyboard combination to pound that code out.
Thats kinda like the Mike Tyson Punchout! game -- 007 373 5963
That got you directly into the fight with Mike Tyson
I play a lot of CS and I Don't really think cheating is THAT big of a deal, with kickvoting, people can kick off the cheaters, so it becomes irrelevant... Really the most annoying thing is people that get killed and then automically accuse the person that killed them of "HAXXORING".
Not to say that I've not seen any cheaters, but they are easy to spot, and it's always fun to mess with them, you would be surprised what information about a person you can discover with just google and public information...
Always fun to give them a call in the middle of the night suggesting they keep to honest methods of gameplaying...
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
If I were placed on a multiplayer game server where half of the players are cheating, I think I'd just sit and watch the other half frantically screamed "OMG HAX!!!1" messages scrolling down the screen.
If this continues then the only players of CS and the like will be hardcore cheaters. This will be even funnier because often cheaters consider themselves to be above reproach and will threaten and verbally abuse anyone else who cheats as they do. So all game servers will be infested with retards squawking at each other.
Looking further into the future...
An arms race of cheats is almost inevitable. As with a real life arms race it will continue indefinitely until someone comes up with The Ultimate Cheat. By analogy with real life, we can see that this Ultimate Cheat will probably consist of submitting a link to the game server to Slashdot, causing it to be turned into a molten pile of slag and driving everyone playing bonkers. Then no one will play the games any more because of the risk of their computers exploding and I will be happy, for then I will have other freeciv players to play with.
Then someone develops a wallhack for freeciv, and the cycle starts over again...
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
i used to run a Q3A server that turned God mode on on all the players when it detected a cheater.
that pissed off everyone!
Half-Life mods have alot of cheaters.
In other surprising news, Microsoft continues to make software with security holes.
Cheating has always been a problem, and always will. The only way to deal with the problem is ignore the cheaters and play on LANs or servers you _personally_ trust. Lamers will always want to install hacks that allow them to cheat their rear ends off and pretend to be l33t.
Pack when I played Quake 3 quite a bit, I didn't mind the cheaters. I looked at it as playing against an enemy with an unfair advantage. And while I might have lost more often than not against a cheater, I'd still be honing my skills against them. Plus if someone else won the deathmatch, they'd be pissed out of their minds, which was always funny.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
One issue, as I see it, is the architecture of the game servers themselves. Half-Life, for example, feeds information about the location of all players on the entire map to the client. You can add all the signing and checking of client side binaries that you want, but someone is going to figure out a way to creatively intercept that data if it is there.
The long-term solution is to just not have the data there. While it would be more work on the CPU to make the game engine instantly draw a character on-screen from no previous information, I would think most multiplayer gamers would give up a few FPS to play cheat-free.
I'm not familar with any back-end changes for games like HL2 and Doom3. Is anyone out there thinking of this? It just seems common sense. If people are exploiting data, just remove the data.
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
...well, assuming I were a cheater. Which I'm not. Really. But anyway...
I'm a big fan of the cheat which allows you to tweak its effect. There's an example given of a BF:1942 cheat which will double your fire rate and driving speed. This suggests something interesting; the incremental cheat. Just use the cheat to up your fire rate and driving speed by 5% to start with. If no one responds; up it a bit more, and more, until someone starts calling you a cheater. Then you can turn it back down and then tell them that they're making false accusations, whilst still having perhaps a 20% advantage over other players.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
Cheating is stealing. Similar to Spam.
Why do people cheat? Because they like stealing.
There is currently no real protection against dishonest players.
The only real solution is to play with people you trust.
Sure cheaters are stealing, and are therefor degrading themselves and diminishing their ability to live a real life.
But that is no relief to the players who are cheated.
The group that provides a secure client for playing Q3 will become wealthy.
Not all client hooks are cheat programs though. There are a few good examples of non-cheat hooks like sparky's utils for Team Fortress Classic.
Also, opengl wrappers/hooks can do more than just remove walls. They generally can also sniff the memory structures from the game client and do most of the stuff client hooks can do as well, whereas the article seems to think they can only remove walls.
bananas like monkeys.
Take a look at the security area. Before RSA style encryption (using public keys to encrypt and private keys to decryt information. Practically unbreakable!), one of the best ways of keeping your encryption method secure was to keep the source closed - so people couldn't see what technique you were using and come up with a way to beat it. If the source was opened up, at first people would cheat the living hell out of it, but then other gifted and inspired coders would come up with really secure code.
And, besides, what currently popular game would any company release their source for? It took years for the doom and quake source to come out, and the only ones playing quakeworld anymore are people who just refuse to let it go.
then am I better than I think I am. When a new FPS demo/game comes out I am always at or near the top of the score list, then as the game "matures" I find myself averaging in the 3rd to middle spots. I don't know you can spot a cheater other than the blatent aimbot frag from across a map?
I've heard rumors of touch-screens being used to make headshots.
:)
As a recovering minesweeper addict, a habit I picked up before I discovered UNIX during the windows 3.11 days - and no, GNOME mines won't cut it, I'm starting to twitch.
I already have a pretty good best score (76 on expert, though these days I have trouble getting below 100), a touchscreen coupled with a keyboard binding for both mouse buttons, would be a distinctly unfair advantage! Hmm.
# init 5
Connection closed.
Oh...
Hey, I'm sorry, I used to love computer games. But there is wayyy to much cheating - especially CS. It's ridiculous. I'd rather crack some beers and play some Halo with some buddies at home.
They don't *really* cheat..
they are simply 14 years old and spend all day online playing games and it jsut seems like they cheat..
Thinking of the last time I went into the arcade and played against this little kid who walloped me in a game..
*sigh*
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
The only cheat I use involes being able to empty an entire clip and not hit a thing.
Thus, my favourite FPS becomes Team Fortress, Yay HWG.
Seriously though, how much satisfaction can you get out of killing someone with an 'aimbot' and a wallhack. Personally i'm extatic (too lazy to check spelling, prob spelled wrong) when, in Couterstrike i have 1 kills and 12 deaths because hey, with pure luck i just killed the top player on the other team. Top that Mr. Cheat!
I see a lot of invisible players on Unreal Tournament 2003. Annoying as hell. You can usually find them by firing blindly w/ the flak cannon :)
This guy is way out there
Just imagine how much cheating there would be if most games were open source!
Anybody could patch anything they wanted. Sudder...
Open source games suck.
I mean, what are FPS designers expecting? "Hey, let's let the client process where they can see and where they can shoot to save load for the server" "Mightn't that increase cheating?" "Who cares? We don't want server admins bitch, do we?" "Um."
You talk as if you something.
The Xbox Live service is a cheat-free zone.
This seems quite easy to me...I play CS, I play FPSs, etc...and the simple and reliable solution that works for things like /dogmode (read godmode), etc. is ADD THEM to the game. Let these kids have their wall hacks, their aimbots, their stupid lameness...build it in, and let server admins turn them off. If you go to Gamespy right now and look hard enough, you can find a server that invites and serves cheaters...so why not? Build the cheats in and let most the servers be free of cheats, while the people who "want to go weeee but ain't got drugs yet" can yack off to their 42448ness (or whatever the hip number of the CTIME is).
Okay...obviously they could still create proxys and such that would try to let them cheat where they can't, as they do now...but I think this would honestly help deter the average guy who isn't creating proxies for the time and effort it takes to actually find a way to slip through the current protections...I hope.
-HobophobE
Nothing laughs forever.
NO. While there ARE godlike teenagers out there, the majority is worse at the game than me. So they resort to cheats. The key thing is a) the level of morality they've got and b) what they think they can get away with. Nothing more, nothing less.
Let's face it, people are not good. Literally everyone has his/her flaws, his/her dirty secrets. I never cheated in my life and the thought of cheating is completely anathema to me, yet there are lots of areas (illegal divx/mp3s for example) where I am just a dirt down evil low life like everyone else. Just learn to accept it : people are a lot more evil then you think. You just can't see them all the time so you think they're pretty nice, based on whatever part of their life you can see. If you insist on believing people are basically good, you're going to get rude wake up calls, day after day, year after year, the rest of your pathetic life on this rock. Let's face it. You're evil too. Just like the rest of us. Welcome to the club. Entrance fee is your soul.
IFAIC, the only possible way to spot a cheater is by spectating. Ignore how fast his reflexes are, and look at his strategy. Does he do a route that runs by all the pickups? Does he look behind himself a lot? Does he play smart? Then he's probably not cheating.
To get a cheat free server, admins should find players that visit a lot and arn't jerks and give them admin rights. Simple.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
This has already played out before..
Who remembers Netrek?
There were several clients to choose from to play the game. The trick? On major servers, you just had to use a blessed binary. Special permission to use RSA, and have developers responsible massivly cut down on ``borgs''.
If a developer was found to be producing clients that cheat, his key was yanked from the master server that all the game servers fed off of, and it revoked every client in the field.
Go Team Beer!
hahaha, that's so funny. you made my day.
Eat it you non-first posters! I have the first post - I took it away from you. You'll never be able to have the first post. You are all ridiculous loony birds.
I play a MMORPG called Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC). A major part of DAoC consists of realm vs. realm combat, where players from opposing realms clash in epic battles (a.k.a. lag fests). There is one well known form of cheating in DAoC, known as radar, which allows the radar user to see the positions of enemy forces in realtime before he can be seen himself.
The most popular radar program for DAoC is Excalibur, hosted by your very own Sourceforge. The troubling thing about Excalibur is that it does not fit any of the definitions of cheating, although it clearly gives players using it an unfair advantage. It does not modify the game binaries, or modify memory areas or graphical output when running. It does not interfere with or modify data streams between the client and server. In fact, it doesn't even run on the same computer you play the game on. Excalibur runs on a Linux / *nix computer on your local network, and works by passively sniffing packets, decoding them, and constructing a detailed overhead map of the player's surrounding area. Thus it is, and always will be, undetectable whether someone is using radar or not.
It really is a rather clever hack, but it's ruining the game for us honest players. (And no, I have never ran Excalibur, even to try it out.) The question is what can be done about? It would seem that the only two options are:
1.) Encrypt every packet sent between the server and client, which would undoubtably slow everything down.
2.) Send less information to the client, by implementing some kind of server-side clipping, whereby the server determines what objects are visible to each client and sends only those. Again, this would slow everything down, on the server side because it requires more work, and on the client side because when the player suddenly encounters the enemy horde, his computer will be forced to load hundreds of character models all at once.
So, any other suggestions?
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
A low ping is the first advantage one can have, but any tech edge is destroyed by the way game makers have to include the Rocket/Bazooka type weaponry that appeals to youngsters.
I stopped playing diablo2x on battle.net because of the cheaters. It was no fun. We created our own private realm (using bnetd) to have a cheat free environment. An added side benefit was our ability to implement our own game mods. I'll never go back to battle.net. Also, I won't ever again buy a Blizzard game because of their lawsuit against the bnetd project. They lost a good customer (not that they care).
-- Will program for bandwidth
I sure did.
do you have a mouse and k/b for your x-box? I doubt I could survive w/out the precision of a mouse or the reactions of a keyboard.
I tried once, and broke the stick of a joystick from trying to move "that much faster". A grove was well worn into the front bumber as well.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Seems to be what you're saying. It's pretty well known that doesn't work. And assuming the source does open, it'd be much easier to cheat than to prevent it.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
If cheating is any form of changing a game, then I am guilty as charged. I have modified the skins in a game where the two teams have characters that look very, very similar. The teams now have some kind of identifying mark.
However, the picture in your minds right now might change when I tell you that I am significantly visually impared. I make sure that my skins would not allow me to see anything any normal person wouldn't be able to see, it just allows me to avoid killing my own teammates.
If you consider this to be wrong, tell me why you think that.
Since I was willing to put my gaming WAY ahead of my studying, I got REALLY good at QuakeII, Tribes, Tribes 2, and recently UT2003. I was CONSTANTLY accused of cheating in Q2 and T1. But more than that, I never had a problem getting first place even when other people were using the most blatant aimbots.
Also, I've never had problems finding public servers with no cheaters. Maybe I just never noticed them, but I don't think cheating is the massive plague that makes public multiplayer games impossible to enjoy. 75% of the "problem" is probably just people whining when they get killed.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
While in optional mode, players are checked for a running C-D client and will rename the player if they don't have C-D currently installed and running. For optimal protection against cheaters, servers can be configured to only allow players running the C-D client.
Unfortunately, the C-D anti-cheat system is incompatible with VAC secured MODs. As of v2.2.0, C-D can work with VAC supported MODs as long as VAC is disabled. Otherwise, C-D will shutdown if VAC is detected.
VIVA1023.com | Political Fashion.
Ok, ok, I promise never to cheat in multiplayer games again, just for love of god change the color scheme on this page.
...I'm just bot-camping the sewer system.
graspee
I don't care WHAT the article says, chocolate is NOT bad for you!
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
We could use a system to "rate" where players stand in the global community of online, multiplayer games.
Cheater's would sift to the bottom like trolls on slashdot.
Fragged teammember || NO WOOFIE FOR YOU!
What could possibly go wrong?
surprised no one has mentioned 640x480 resolution cheat(ok not really)... yeah in CS its not hacking... but after playing in 1024x or larger for a while go back to 640x480 and see how LARGE everything is
Seems statistical analysis could find cheaters, the same way Baysean Filtering finds spam. It doesn't look for particular known signs (Viagra or a .dll mod); it analysizes trends in general.
If an auto-shoot aimbot is used, the time between when the enemy is on the perp's screen and the time the gun is shot should be nearly constant -- by screen I mean either entire screen or some radius of the pointer. If it's a human making the decision, that time would have a wider distribution with a larger variance.
For auto-aim but no shoot, take notice of when the pointer moves across the screen rapidly. Yes, there'd be type I and II errors (both not catching all auto-aims and recording simple things like turning around), but with enough analysis, it might be doable. Further analysis could be done on mouse movements prior to headshots. If a significant number of headshots (or killshots in general) came immediately following a rapid mouse movement, than an aimbot is rather statistically likely.
For wallhacks, consider a graph that connects all hallways to other hallways... if a player is consistently converging on enemies out of view, ie the shortest distance between the two players is constant or decreasing, statistically speaking, a wallhack is likely.
Of course, for all of these, the confidence intervals could be set arbitrarily close to unity -- and so it would give server admins the ability to risk overall Type I or II errors. This insures against being lucky some of the time, or doing the logical or rational thing in certain situations.
While cheating could overcome these methods by introducing errors (intentionally miss sometimes, walk around randomly some of the time, etc.), it would reduce the impact the cheater would have on the game, thereby making it less interesting for the cheater... perhaps to the point of not worth his while.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Templates. I play America's Army, and on some stages one can shoot a 203 (rocket launcher) into a window that is obstructed by some intermediate object. Blindly firing into a window that the enemy is likely to be inside due to its strategic importance from the other side of the map -- blindly -- clearly detracts from the game.
The easy fix: introduce random errors in the map draw. Make the location of trees in an area a function of a random distriubtion. Make hallways marginally shorter, longer, wider, or narrower, in an effort to prevent people from using natural markings as methods of aiming (ie put your thumb three pixels below the lowest tree leaf to throw the grenade into the hole in the ground from maximum possible distance away).
It's not a cheat (no modifications, etc) but it clearly is in conflict with the spirit of the game. Game developers -- fix this!
Support a few technologists in Washington.
I love infiltration but I hate playing against humans (they're all better than me, sob). I get a huge amount of enjoyment from playing against the bots, even though they're fairly predictable. I recommend the 'Chasm' map - I can play that for hours on end, with and without the various mutators.
# init 5
Connection closed.
Oh...
I always cheat when I play video games. If I don't cheat I team kill.
It is so fun to watch people get mad and angry. The players when I team kill get really pissed off, and this just fills me with joy. They have worthless lives if they care so much about video games, and I'm having fun being a bully. That fact that people put alot of work into servers and the game, and I can come along and distroy the whole thing and make all his work useless is very fun. They usually can't even kick me because I know a hack, a real hack, no script but and explot that I figured out involving that fact that an l and an I look the exact same in half-life.
As Jeeves says, "consider the psychology of the individual." There is no technological fix. So is there a social fix? I think so. There are certainly a small minority of hardcore cheaters who will cheat no matter what, but there is a larger number of casual cheaters.
The current generation of multiplayer games are highly anonymous, like the web itself. For casual cheaters, this anonymity lets them abstract the other players as non-entities. They don't interact together in a socially meaningful way, and therefore things like empathy and reputation which inhibit destructive behavior in group settings don't function correctly. They are willing to hurt people online in ways they would never think of at a real life social get-together
While anonymous multiplayer games will always have their place, I think that less anonymous, more locally social games will alleviate many of the current problems. They will even provide new possibilities for games. Imagine a Quake III dating server, for example (with custom skins, of course). To allow for more realistic social interaction, this new generation of games will require people to give up anonymity in certain ways and probably interact with far smaller groups. The groups don't have to be geographically local, necessarily, but will have to be at least somewhat consistent over time.
The pitiful things that pass for modern 'online communities' can and will be vastly improved upon.
I actually began cheating at Counter-Strike because I WAS CONSTANTLY ACCUSED OF CHEATING. I'm a very skilled CS player and can't play anywhere without getting accused, even when I'm not. Bunch of whiners.
It's ALL of the problem. The only way to eliminate cheating is to rigidly follow two simple cardinal rules:
1. Place no reliance on the trustworthiness of players.
2. Place no reliance on the ignorance of players of any fact.
To adhere to these rules while ensuring fairness to all players will require that you:
1. Design the client-server interface such that no more information is provided to a client than you want any client and/or player to be aware of and take advantage of, including storing information for later recall.
2. Make the interface bullet-proof. No buffer overruns, etc.
3. Publish the complete interface definition. Hold back nothing.
4. Publicly announce and adhere to the policy that any and all clients are legal.
That leaves the really hard problem, one that will require great creativity and skill: designing an interface and gameworld mechanics that will prevent robots from playing better than human beings.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
this guy is spot on
I play poorly, in general terms am possessed of "suckage." But I don't cheat. What I do when my ass is being handed to me is find a server with less qualified and capable players. Usually I can find a group with skill levels similar to mine. Then we play--it's great...until the lamer cheater shows up (or the guy who's like god with a railgun.) Then I go find another server. I only wish there were a way to measure someone's ability beforehand and lock them out (for non-cheaters). UT tries this, but it really was subjective, anyway I never liked its ranking system that much. Gaming shouldn't be subjected to assholes, in the end I have to blame the creators of the game for not making tight code.
I have always found that when you cheat, you become weaker. So the person that goes againsn't the cheater becomes better since he/she has to fight harder to win, while the cheater doesn't have to work as hard to win.. So the cheaters are only harming themselves, but they still are annoying.
Try em out yourself... get them here.
Cheating in Multiplayer online games is one of the reasons why I rarely play against people I don't know.
I'm sure there will be those who disagree, but maybe Microsoft is on to something when they started Xbox Live. I've yet to come across someone who is cheating. The playing field is level and you know that those who beat you did so simply because they were better and not because they installed some hack.
?SYNTAX ERROR IN SIG
READY.
My favourite thing to do in QIII:
:)
I name myself "Low Ammo Warning" - when my oppontents mouse over me with the crosshairs, my name pops up on their screen. It usually throws them off just for a second or just for the first time, but it gives me a slight advantage when they hesitate
RM
He plays for the football team as well. Oh wait, this is Purdue we're talking about. Nevermind, you're right.
(lol, j/k)
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
If the game's designed properly all the important and sensitive stuff is done server-side so that patching your client won't have any effect. This would put more load on the server since it would probably have to do quite a bit more processing, but it would eliminate cheating if all the client did was send keystrokes to the server, which processed everything else. Then only the server admin could enable cheating.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
The article missed the most important and difficult to detect cheat method: proxy.
The gamer connects to a game server through a proxy he controls. This proxy will be able to snoop and modify the data stream on the wire. If you decode the network protocol, and can gain all kinds of advantages; sometimes valuable data may be sent that even your client ignores completely. Wall hacks and autoaimers can be based on these methods. If you see a shot event, modify it with a vecor to the nearest enemy model.
A less robust cheat of the proxy variety employs a simple sniffer to watch the traffic.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Why not make a server that acts like a honeypot for cheaters. Have the server silently detect the cheaters, and send them all to the same map, while the non-cheaters play on another map. Let the cheaters fight themselves!
As the article says, cheating is deadly on two fronts: It ruins the game when some punk hops in and wins only because he has a cheat running, and people will get accused of cheating by sore losers.
While the subject of modding X-boxes is a touchy one, I for one am glad that Microsoft bans anyone that mods their x-box or knowingly cheats on line. Bang, kiss your $50 x-box live membership goodbye. I think that if they keep an aggressive stance on these sorts of things, they wil be able to keep a lot of the cheating to a minimum. While most people would say that they are not Modding their x-boxes for any shady reasons, the truth is that a lot of people like to cheat and when I am paying to play a game online, I am not willing to put up with people cheating.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
>I always cheat when I play video games. If I don't cheat I team kill.
>It is so fun to watch people get mad and angry. The players when I
>team kill get really pissed off, and this just fills me with joy. They
>have worthless lives if they care so much about video games, and I'm
>having fun being a bully. That fact that people put alot of work into
>servers and the game, and I can come along and distroy the whole thing
>and make all his work useless is very fun. They usually can't even
>kick me because I know a hack, a real hack, no script but and explot
>that I figured out involving that fact that an l and an I look the
>exact same in half-life.
I don't know how to mod this: it's complete flamebait, but at the same time an insightful glimpse into someone's mind.
I've lost a couple of SAN points after my glimpse inside the mind of this juvenile fucktard, but I guess you can't win 'em all.
I had the honor of participating in the beta of MPBT 3025. It was both an eyeopener and lesson in the problems of online gaming.
For those not in the know MPBT 3025 hnceforth BT, was an online version of the battletech boardgames. You have a space faring civilization that has fallen from its golden age. There is much lost technique and technology. Not the least of which is the political organization that allowed all those people to live together. The game was organized along the lines of the 5 major successor states. It consisted of the successor states battling for control of the known universe. The States or Teams had at various times upwards of 3k players and intense rivalries.
The game had a long history having been out and in development for over 10 years. The latest version having been do real soon for nearly 8 years. I am not certain but I believe it was the complete inability to resolve community issues related to the various forms of cheating that first killed interest in the game by players and finally caused EA its last owner to kill the project.
Imagine quake capture the flag with 5 sides and 2 to 4 thousand players a side. Now imagine "responsible players" being tasked with controlling the behavior of their teams, and having nothing but the power of persuasion to do so. This was the community of MPBT 3025.
Needless to say the game became every kind of a cesspool you can imagine. There wasn't just one level of cheating but multiple levels of cheating and betrayal. The base level was what The tom's article speaks of and is the most minor of cheating in online gaming. The hacking of the connection, game engine, weapon data files was something both obvious and by and large easy to deal with. The experienced players could spot the game behaving freakily and would ostracize the cheats or find ways to harrass them. It was something that was annoying but easily dealt with.
The higher levels of cheating were most likely what did the game in. The next level involved multiple accounts, various point transfer schemes, and impersonation. This is where "Cheating" showed that violationg the social contract produces truly disgusting results. There is very little that can compare to participating in an online world, and finding yourself betrayed by people you felt were your friends. In other online games theres similar problems, i.e. people in multiple guilds, people in multiple nations in the smaller empire games. But, in bt, with 5 large nations and virtually no way to keep track you had betrayal as the purpose of the game. Almost all combat was team combat, and towards the end everything revolved around planting ringers.
Cheating is bad, betrayal by supposed friends is a catastrophe for a game. I can't say this loudly enough, and it is something that will either limit the scope of online games or limit them to weird survivor/lord of the flies knockoffs.
The final and worst form of cheating was, the players who volunteered as honorary staff to gain a leg up. As bad as regular betrayal this was worse. In my mind it was the last nail in the coffin for the game. Its, also the great lesson for all online games to come. Make certain that you have automated checks built in before the game even starts. That way, you can not only watch the players but watch the watchers.
How dare you hack a file to cheat at Global Thermal Nuclear Warfare!
I don't take the matter too seriously, if I dont like what is happening on one server I will find another to play on. They are a dime a dozen, and any real broadband connection with decent bandwidth wont have any worries finding one. Sometimes people just have to be fucked up, so go where they aren't and do yourself a favor. I personally play games to have fun, not point fingers and get wrapped up in politics and all that garbage. If I wanted my fun to be ruined I would unlock my gameroom door and announce to the old lady that I am going to be playing video games for at least 5 hours.
-1 Overrated (Too many big words for me to comprehend)
Best way to do it: call incredible shots - "nice shot sChmUcK sNiPP3r! Way to shoot me from behind you in the head while I was jumping from across the map through a crate!"
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
This only works on servers where the people have to sign up. When you sign-up are are giving a starting raking, say Rank:1. As you play the system keeps track of your success and if you're good enough ups your rank (i.e Rank:2). Then it only allows you to play against people of the same rank as yourself. So all the cheaters (Rank:17) get to play against all the other cheaters (and those rare individuals with God-like skills) and us non-cheaters can play against other non-cheaters (and really really lame cheaters). Everyone gets a challenging game and who cares who's cheating anymore...
You could even start a game (as an example) at Rank:7 +/-2, then people who are Rank:5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 can join.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
While I enjoy FPSes as much as most, my passion lately has been role-playing games. Cheating in these games is much more of a problem because your characters are persistent, and permanently affected by cheats. Trade hacks, leveling hacks, and RvR hacks basically define what can be done in Dark Age of Camelot, and it bugs me. I've spent hundreds of hours crafting my way to 'legendary' status, and others that I know have used cheat programs are taking orders away from me and my characters!
Unfortunately, there's a central authority--the game server admins--and they have to use their authority to stop this stuff. Sadly the policy for most persistent online games is "every player we boot off for cheating is a player who won't pay us money anymore."
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I used to waste my time trying to convince cheaters they're on the wrong path, cheating is evil etc.
Unfortunately it was all to no avail. Many are old and educating them is hopeless; others are still young, maybe, but, as a father, I know from experience it's very hard to pass on moral values. Inside the game, this is even harder.
Playing fair is a passing fad.
Everybody talks about only playing at Lanhouses... I'm too busy for that. Internet playing is my only option. Or better, was.
Everytime someone calls for a game to be ported for Linux, I ask myself: What for? I simply don't intend to buy any multiplayer games anymore. While I regret Loki's destiny, I can only blame people who make games for not acting responsibly -- at a very minimum!
Maybe you can put gore, amputation, beheading, ambush, camping, blasphemy etc. into a game... but you can't go without assuring fair play, evenhandedness and respect for the loser.
If game servers become more and more empty, as I have observed, and if this means the fading of the multiplayer genre -- it will be pity but well-deserved.
Cheating is now close to destroying entire gaming communities (Counter-Strike anyone?)
I normally play CS, DoD, and BF1942 online and I have not really noticed any cheating. I think that this quote is very much an exageration. I don't think cheating will destory anything. Cause headaches? Yes, but not destory anything.
SIGFAULT
all too true - check out this pic. i'm [moron]baki. a couple of people from my gaming community, people whom i respect and generally think well of, tried to kick me because they thought i was cheating :( just because i was using a different nick from the one i usually use. cheating-death is already implemented on the servers, what's missing really is *trust*.
if you can't trust the guy on the other team (or even your team) to be honorable and play fair, then we're never going to get anywhere with stopping cheating. people these days are just too good, too skilled. we'll end up finger-pointing at each other all day long.
It might look like I'm standing motionless, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away
The worst part is, even if this is a troll, this is the way t/k'ers and their ilk think. What I think is really telling is that they think other people have "worthless lives if they care so much about video games." Well, what does it say about the quality of their lives if they don't even have the wherewithall to enjoy the game itself.
That's why a well admin'd server is worth its weight in gold.
Cheaters are the reason I stopped playing PC games online. If it's not an aimbot it's a wall hack. If it's not a wall hack it's a skin hack, or a God hack, or god knows what. People hitting me from clear across the map with a weapon that's not even AVAILABLE on that map. People walking through walls and shooting me in the back of the head. Untouchable players who get hit with 5 rockets and are still at 100% health, who then blast you to pieces with a pistol.
Online gaming brings out the absolute WORST in people. And now consoles are going online. I can hardly wait for the twinks that use Gamesharks or Action Replays to start using them online and screwing everyone over.
Fucking cheater asshole motherfuckers.
If by some chance that you could cheat in real-life I bet you that 99.9% would. This is just a logical extension of that.
Just curious, but how hard would it be to confirm the physics of most cheating server side? I mean, wall hack for instance. Couldn't one easily build in some sort of check and balance to see if the shot is possible or not? Same with the head shot deal. Create a routine that audits "outstanding" players. Axer05 just got his 4th strait head shot. Audit program cuts in and monitors him for a bit, judging whether the shots are even possible. I imagine such an audit program could judge a great number of attributes on specific players if they bring attention to themselves, or even at random.
I specify one at a time as I imagine it'd take too much processing power to double check everybody, but the principle would be sound. No checking everybodies files, HD, whatever. Safe, non-intrusive and fairly difficult to spoof since the auditing relies on the server side mechanics, not the peer-hacked files.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
If you could see the target, it would be a difficult but certainly possible shot. Blind, it'd be near impossible.
It's called "indirect fire." Ask your friendly local Marine about it.
But seriously, indirect fire is exactly what artillery guys do. Yes, sometimes it's direct (shooting at things you can see), but frequently it's indirect. Ever heard of a forward observer? That's the guy out looking at the target and giving directions to the fire team to guide the rounds onto the target. Today, with modern weaponry and fire computers, a surprising number of rounds hit on the first try. Yes, "blind fire" does work.
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
Or, at least, I try hard not to cheat.
It's a way of life.
Set up a lot gameservers with broken or nonexistant C-D.. maybe with some drone players that periodically go nuts in order to make the cheaters happy... suck the cheaters aware from the real games.
Oh, and the other idea was to create more games where cheating is part of the game. I would think that games based on The Matrix should encourage "hax"... if you cant find the mod that makes you run fatser.. you lose. That'sthe point of the game.
nonsig. unsig. desig.
malloc()ing a humungous pile of memory (as you seem to be implying) wouldn't instantly cause a segfault. All it does is return NULL. Thusly, you fail it. Poohead.
A simple solution, at least for FPS games, would be to have invisible bots in every server, that don't shoot, don't get in anyone's way, and don't pick up weapons, health, etc...
This way regular players won't have any idea the invisibots are there. However, if a cheater should happen to have one in his field of view, his aimbot will take over and frag the poor unsuspecting invisibot.
If a player frags an invisibot, they get kicked.
It's not totally foolproof, but it seems to make sense. at least for aimbot cheats.
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
It was the lag! I swear! You cheaters!
"OMG [Supreme Court] HAX!!"
You're unlucky... if we lived in the same country we would throw some Descent 3 matches...but i don't think you live in greece :/
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
You forget most of these people cheat to:
1) Break the rules.
2) Annoy other people.
In a server where cheats are allowed, it's hard for them to do 1 or 2 so they don't get any satisfaction.
These are the sort of people who'd glue a soccer ball to their foot, and think they're being smart.
Multiplayer games are about playing with other people. People who cheat either don't comprehend the antisocialness of what they are doing or are arseholes.
If enough people in the game think that doing something is cheating, unless you can convince them it's legit then it's cheating, even if it's allowed by the environment/server. Coz you're playing with them.
For example if there are a bunch of people on a CS server and they had decided to play knife fights only even though the server allows other stuff, you're an ass if you ignore them and mow them down with machineguns. Of course if you just joined and they didn't say anything then you're excused for the first time. The point is you want to play with them, you play by the "agreed on" rules. You don't like it, try convincing them. Sure you could convince them that playing "knife only" is not a good idea by being an ass, but that leaves them also convinced that you're an ass.
After all there are plenty of other servers for you to go. You might even be able to set up your own. But if no one wants to play with you and you have to go from server to server pissing people off, you're the one that has no life, not those who are "taking the game too seriously". After all, there are probably servers around which officially allow cheating (or set up your own), and if all the cheaters have to go to a "no cheats" server to cheat, that shows what sort of people they are.
In many games there are lots of rules (e.g. golf, football etc). There are also lots of unwritten rules. Often when an unwritten rule has to be written, it means someone has been an ass. Similarly, when added complexity has to be added to game servers. The players and the game suffer an additional cost.
Playing a multiplayer game is like setting up a mutually agreed reality. If you win by the rules of that mutually agreed reality, there is some honor. If you're the sort who can't play by the rules, you're one of the good reasons why people are not omnipotent. You'd self/mass destruct given an eternity.
I suppose Hell for these people would be being given God mode in their own reality, but nobody will play with them.
Many anticheats claim to be like Cheating-Death, but actually they are not similar. Usually they resort to scanning for known file or process names, sending filelistings etc. suspicious things. I'd like to point out that Cheating-Death never sends any information about the client to the server. Users' privacy is an important thing to maintainers of this tool. More info available from United Admins: http://www.unitedadmins.com/cdeath.php Cheating-Death coverage is now about 20% of all Counter-Strike servers, while more servers and leagues adopt it everyday.
This is one of the reasons why I am looking forward to WorldOfWarcraft. Blizzard has a good track record of not only cancelling the accounts/characters of cheaters but revoking their CDkeys for a period and/or permanently.
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
HAHA I want to see the look on your face when you see what your hot date form quake III looks like in real life!
Most windows user would be unable to udnerstand the concept of permission or execution level. PS: I am a pure windows user and only installed Linux one time to see what people here were speaking about. I was rebuted by the amount of stuff to learn and dewcided to wait 10 more years before trying again.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
This is among the many reasons I like to hang out in arcades, and why I mourn the seemingly inevitable death of the arcade in general (I'm certain there were articles on it before, but I'm too lazy to check). For almost any game in an arcade, you've got your opponent(s) standing right next to you. It's obvious to see if they're cheating or not (Whenever it's actually possible to cheat on an arcade box), and if they are, you have the easy ability to punch them in the face.
Well, okay, maybe not quite that, but you get the idea. You're live right next to the people, so they're far less likely to cheat.
You can keep your online games with your cheaters and the like. I much prefer arcades and other manners of live interaction with your opponents.
Okay... that got real preachy near the end. Whoops. Sorry.
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
I read this article a few days ago, and after reading it I was wishing that I had a space to praise the Tom's crew for directly confronting this issue.
This is a huge issue for online gaming that not many people have addressed, and it's great to see a major I-zine bringing the issue to the forefront. Nice job guys!
--x
Wallhacks and aimbots are actually very easy for hardcore gamers to detect. People who can aim well are not necessarily cheating. It's the people who can aim but not move who are obviously cheating. Moving in quake is an art. If you know how to flick and roll your mouse while jumping you can reach amazing places and speeds.
I think the more interesting online cheating question is where you draw the line between cheating and not cheating. Built into quake there is an FOV command which gives you a fish-eye view allowing you to see more of the world at one time. This is a huge advantage that most players do not know about. Is it cheating? GL_PICMIP 99 will erase all textures from the world allowing for much better visibility. Cheating or smart configuration? Quad timers? Faster computers?
Blatant cheats are easy to detect. Subtle and slight advantages that may or may not be cheating are the real problem.
After I read the article, I went Counter-hack.net and read the IRC transcript from the "interview" with [myg0t]g0d and it kind of reminded me of this.
All Cheaters are Fuckheads, but not all fuckheads are cheaters.
--
Adobe's anti-counterfeiting softw
I play Myth TFL and Myth 2, and cheating there simply does not exist.
Surely good design can defeat cheating? These games have done it.
Multi-player games are just another kind of human relationship. Agree on a set of ground rules (identical hardware and software, or not) and play. If anyone whines, it's their fault for agreeing.
The problem with online cheating isn't the cheating itself, but the anonymity and that it's impossible to agree on real ground rules. If you can get around that, playing online is fun. Find a server where everyone knows and trusts everyone else, and you're set.
That was the first post in a long that actually made me laugh out loud, haha
Banaaaana!
If someone is shooting through walls, then the server can detect this simply by replicating the action (player A in position X shoots player B in position Y) in its own trusted space. If A couldn't possibly have shot B from X, then A must be cheating. If server performance is a concern, then this check doesn't have to be done immediately or on the server. The server could spool all shots to a trusted peer which tries to replicate the action and detects cheaters.
This won't be able to stop certain cheats like those which change the texture of players to bright green or enable wall transparency. You'd need a trusted client for that, and that's not feasible unless (until?) PCs can run signed software that cannot be altered by the user, which isn't going to happen anytime soon (but may be possible on future consoles, as they may have hardware checks).
One thing you can't patch is the human condition. There will always be griefers who just want to ruin everyone else's fun. The best way to stop them isn't to lecture them on proper game etiquette or make them see the error of their ways, it's to make them accountable for their actions by de-anonymising them. Make them sign up with a credit card to get their name and address. If there is a clause that says your credit card will be charged $100 if undisputable proof is found that you're cheating...
Years ago, when QuakeWorld was popular, some friends and I were running a QW server. Skins were a new feature, so we installed the latest skin packs on our server and made use of them. At one point, we noticed that some players were using skins that were totally black or near-black camoflage so that they were virtually invisible in most areas of the maps. So I had a little idea...
I went through the skin packs and found all of these 'cheater' skins. Then I replaced each one with a custom skin I had made. It was 100% glowing white with a big glowing red target on the front and read "Kick Me" on the back. I passed the updated cheater skins to all of my friends and installed them on the server. Now, all new players, my friends, and I would see the glowing skins while the cheaters themselves thought they were using the black skins.
It was beautiful! They were so easy to spot and aim at. :) 90% of the time you'd see these glowing-white shapes hiding out in the deep dark shadows of the map camping out for us. Hiding in the corners, glowing white, they were just that much easier to blow away with rockets. They would say things like "cheaterbob> How did you see me?!", and "cheaterjoe> You guys must be cheating!".
Sweet, sweet revenge...
"Communication among non-cheating players is important. One incredible shot is skill. 10 incredible shots in a minute is a cheater."
When I was in high school, right as Quake came out, we played it every day in computer science class. No one was yet using the mouse, remembering the painful experience it was with DOOM, and I was reigning badass of the game. Sixteen of us on the map, and we'd quit when I hit 100 frags, and the next highest was 40 or 50, and the bulk of the people were down in the 20s or 30s. Granted, once people learned how to use the mouse, they kicked my ass and I've never reclaimed what I lost *sigh*, but it isn't always cheating. I knew that the weapon that I wanted was under the stairway, and that the armor I wanted was on the corner ledge, and to mind the spawnpoint in the tunnel behind it, and when to turn and run backwards shooting rockets down the hall that I had just left, etc. It pissed off the other players to no end when I would make use of what I knew, but I wasn't cheating. Rather, I had no life and the fastest processor in my home computer, so I was always playing.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I cheat in online games, I'll admit it. And I'm also a jerk to everyone in the game whenever possible, and I'll tell you why.
I LOVE to see peoples rage. I love it when the people who are playing honestly and seriously explode at me, "OMFG MODOR N00B CHAETER". I love watching their inability to spell anything right in their rage. I love ruining the thing they hold so dearly and take so seriously. And I love mocking their seriousness with my friends.
I also love how superior to me it makes them feel to proclaim that "OMG U SUX SO U R A MOTOR" and how they've been playing that game since they were an uncombined sperm and egg, and that if I had been too I wouldn't be a "MODER N00B".
I love their assumptions that I am cheating because I lack skill. I do lack skill, sure, but I know that cheating doesn't make me skilled, nor does it make it up for my lack of skill. I don't care, that's never been what it's about for me.
Finally, I also love their contradictory proclamations of how great they are, which are followed by strings of one-letter online abbreviations. (i.e "U R a...") And their string of non-sequitirs mixed with ad-hominems regarding a wide range of topics. (i.e, my mother's sex life, my sex life, my lack of skill, my lack of intelligence(I can't count how often I've been called "DMUB" or "RETRADED"))
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't regist
I consider all on-line play to be purely practice for the *real business* of LAN gaming against my friends. I learn maps, learn tactics, and hone my aim.
Playing against cheats is good practice, because in order to be competitive you must become skilled.
I really don't care about my on-line kill/death ratio, because I can't know who's a cheater and who's not, and it's the LAN party that matters.
erroneous: look me up in a dictionary
I loved that anti cheating prog for Counter Strike. Can't remember what it was called but u couldn't play on a lot of servers without it. It made the cheaters glow. THat was sweet.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
The only proper solution is to design the game for multiplayer with the inevitability of cheating in mind.
Always assume that information sent to the client can be made use of by players.
Never assume that responses from a client are generated by a human being (as opposed to a bot).
Always make challenges that can be solved better by humans than by computer AIs.
With these limitations, there are certain games you simply can't make. FPS games where the challenge is simply aiming correctly with a mouse, is one of those.
WWIIOL's cheating problem is ameliorated by the fact that the company runs it's servers and doesn't have the server code out there. Nonetheless we do get speed hacks and the like.
The community has commanders in game that have the authority to take miscreants by the scruff of the neck and get their attention. Ultimately they can be kicked out.
Cheaters are deeply despised.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
"Sadly the policy for most persistent online games is "every player we boot off for cheating is a player who won't pay us money anymore."" That is a very good point. Maybe a more important question though, is which would lose a company like that more money, kicking off X number of cheaters or losing X number of players that get fed up with the cheating going on and quit playing because of it.