More On Online Game Cheating

Build6 writes "The UK Guardian newspaper has an article on online cheating in games, with some fairly broad-ranging observations. These include ways to cheat, players who feel cheated by it, and an interview with someone who actually codes game cheats, in this case for Counter-Strike. He secretly gathers information from his users and claims: 'Did you know most cheaters come from France?'" We covered game cheating a few weeks ago, but this article focuses more on why coders would want to create cheating devices.

Comments

Don't ban cheaters

[Myria]

I'm a cheater-coder like the article mentions, and a very advanced one at that. Most cheater-coders are just newbie programmers learning Visual Basic for the first time. Only a few, like me, are experts. We're reverse engineers - the same kind of person as crackers, but not involved in piracy. We learn the intricate details of how games work at the assembly level and make cheats based on this. We can be very dangerous, sometimes able to crash players' computers, but we're usually not like that! Many of us, like me, take our cheating experience and use it productively to make our own unauthorized game servers (remember bnetd?).

I really think that the policy of banning cheaters forever is counterproductive. Cheaters are paying customers, and are obsessed with the game they're cheating in. Rather than ban them, what should be done is to make their cheating impossible. If they get caught cheating, reset their stats or some other appropriate punishment - don't ban them! And most importantly, *fix the game*.

Melissa <3