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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.
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?
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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.
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".
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".
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.
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.
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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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
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.