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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.
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.
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
For every cheater, there are at least ten players who'll complain that you're cheating when you kill them - sour grapes.
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
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!
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)
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.
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 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".
Cheaters don't want competition. That's why they're cheating.
Yeah, you would probably see a little traffic, but the primary drive for cheaters is to beat the other guy (and usually rub it in their face.) That doesn't work on a level playing field. Remember, those people who cheat are mostly (1) those who are hell-bent to run the fun of the legit players, and (2) those who want to win the game at any cost. This, unfortunately, caters to neither.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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".
Thats like saying "Oh, this virus that has the potential for taking down every major computing service on the face of the planet, but it's under the GPL so it's a Paladin compared to that black knight of an OS whose source is closed." Give me a fucking break. Companies need to make money. Very few companies (especially game companies) have found a way to be profitable using open source. Take Loki Games. They made some great games, but they died, because few people bought them. Valve releases the content code so you can make things like Counter-Strike. You can make new games with the game they made, but you can't touch the engine. I think thats pretty fair. id software releases their older games to public under GPL. Thats mighty nice of them. Think you can make something better than half-life, open souce, and make enough money to devote your life to it? Then fire up your editor of choice and prove me wrong. Yes open source is all well and good, but until a paradyme shift occurs (both on the business end and on the users end) I don't see open source prevailing as well as closed source. Most open source advocates think that free as in speech go hand in hand with free as in beer, and thats where the problem lies. They don't want to pay because they're used to the word free so it makes things automatically equate with zero price. Perhaps we should call it "Liberated Source" or "Disclosed Source" or "Buy me and get the code" source. *shrug* My two cents, I could be wrong, but so can you so think that one out before you mod me.
Viva La Revolucion! Buy a Mac!
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.
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...
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!
For Netrek, there used to be (dunno if there still are -- I haven't played for years, although I think I still have my .netrekrc somewhere...) at least one or two servers which had turned off RSA authentication. This way, you could use any Netrek client to connect, not just one of the precompiled binaries "blessed" as legitimate.
Therefore you could take, say, the BRMH client and add features such as a torpedo data computer, automatic updates of army counts on all known planets, keys to turn... you were still restricted to the limited information and abilities the server gave you, but you could work around the interface limitations if you chose.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I can't really follow your argument here, you say that the games are worse than the cheaters because the games are *payware* and the cheats aren't ?
Where do you think the next big game will spawn from, some late-night-hackers' bedroom, or a company that charges money...
Jeez some day I hope that even slashdot-zealots could figure out the simple little fact that everything in life doesn't come for free...
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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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!
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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.
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.
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".
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.
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
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...