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

Publishers are too quick to wash their hands

[osgeek]

I found the one publisher perspective to be interesting: they look at cheating hacks of mature games to be a good way to get people to move on to the next game. I'm sure that works for some, but personally, I'd rather live without cheat-susceptible games than deal with the frustration. I'm done with first person shooters and network RTS games until reasonable solutions are found.

Like cheaters, publishers don't see the big picture. They prefer to see the selfish short-term game, to the detriment of the entire industry.


I think that the only viable solutions to online cheating are the same ones used in real life.

• Player Reputation -- There need to be permanent databases of players, their abilities, and their reputations. What if you had an online identity tied to your real-life one, maybe even with your real name. What if that identity followed you from game to game. Whether you played Quake, UT, or HL, you'd always use the same identity and people in those circles would KNOW who you are. Additionally, anyone could query a central database to see if there had been complaints lodged against you. How likely would people be to cheat when they might get caught and have their reputations ruined? You could then set up servers where only registered players with sterling reputations could play.
• Independent observers -- Some type of referee system would complement the above one and allow greater trust in the reputation system. If a player has a complaint logged against them, a referee could log into games where that player was playing and attempt to determine if the complaints were true.

Re:Publishers are too quick to wash their hands

[osgeek]

Those that do everything to disrupt games now will do everything in their power to ruin the reputations of better players in the future.

Hence the suggestion for a referee-like system whereby independent evaluators can step in to determine whether or not complaints have merit.

Look, this is the same as it is in real life. Do you think Tennis would be the same game it is if there were no referees and if players didn't have to behave themselves to protect their reputations? If tennis players were anonymous and unaccountable like on the Internet, the game of Tennis would be ruined as well.

That one is better, but those referees would either need to be volunteers (and there seem to be some organisations who try to do such a thing right now), or preferably people employed by the game companies (just like gamemasters in MMO games)

Well, the ideas go hand-in-hand. I agree that a free-for-all complaint system would rapidly degrade. I'd imagine that a business opportunity exists for an independent company to take the lead in providing reputation and refereeing services, sort of like GameSpy does with game-finding. Hell, Gamespy should take it on. Then, all game developers would need to do is add support for one standard, and they wouldn't have to pay to solve these problems individually. As you also mentioned, gamers would be willing to pay a nominal subscription for such a service -- especially if they only had to pay ONE subscription, rather than multiple ones for each game vendor.

Re:Counteracting cheating

[malakai]

Games like counter-strike have kick. The bots i've seen take the kick into account, about as well as a good player would. Shoot in burts, and know to pull down between burts bya certain amount based on your exp with that gun.

I agree the CRC'ing of the game, and the typical PunkBunster systems are inadequate. Giving the client only the information that is immediately needed and visible to said client is costly, and prevents lag optimizations from working.

Banning cheaters is good, if you have some sort of unique ID. This is one of the usefull things PunkBuster does do. Though for freeware games like Enemey Territory, you can regenerate a new PB GUID by simply deleting the fake cd key file.

Honestly, I know i'll get a lot of flack on /. about this, but this is one of the reasons i look forward to MS Pallidum/Trusted Computing. I could enable Trusted Computing for my games, and servers could require that it be enabled if you want to play in a tournment or such. This would make the client for all practicality, physically secure against cheats. You could leave in all optimization code, knowing that the client code will not be modified.

I'd buy a Palladium motherboard for that capability alone.

-malakai

ah ha ha, troll?

[malakai]

I'm quoting Mark Twain, and the article itself states:

Did you know most cheaters come from France?

Are we no longer allowed to talk about an article if it hurts a country's nationalism?

-malakai

DRM

[quandrum]

I know DRM is evil and all...

But isn't this the perfect application for DRM? Only a signed and trusted executables can be run while connected to game servers. I mean, I only have windows for playing games, so it's not like for me it would be a big deal. But then again I don't want to let all the evil in the door. I'm so conflicted.

Couple of thoughts

[BlightThePower]

First, I don't think we can without reservation slam people for simply creating these hacks. We are back here to the old hacking chestnut; for some people theres the intellectual challenge. In many ways its ideal; theres an "armsrace" ongoing which pushes the standard, you can't as yet be jailed for it, and kudos is available in abundance from grateful users. I don't want to be an apologist for cheating (it drives me puce with rage when I encounter it) but there is the other side here that geeks might like to consider. What is a problem is the distribution and the actual use of these things against people playing by the rules. My favoured solution would actually be to sidestep technical issues, and cut to the motivation the kiddies have for using these cheats (which may not be the same as the coders; see above). On the onehand, the Griefers (ie. Trolls) are hard to stop. Hell, take away their aimbots and they'll just spam abuse on IRC or walkaway from unfinished games of Yahoo Literati or something. BUT, the main thing seems to be individual scoring in games, even though CS and BF1942 are team based games. Thus I think a simple solution (or at least experiment) would be to can the individual score screens and just keep posted team scores. It won't defeat the problem, but I suspect it might cause it to abate somwhat. /rant [I have to be honest, the individual scoring thing is an annoyance to me, and seems to denature BF1942 even when everyone is presumably playing straight because it fails to reward tactical play (e.g., you might die 5 times and kill no-one, but if in doing that you've won ground/protected a flag/weakened the enemy etc. that may have been a more valuable contribution to have made than just fragging for the sake of it).] /rantoff

I've played that game...

[chriso11]

I know that when you a defending the Alaskan Pipeline, there is no sniper or fog. So either the report made up stuff, wasn't paying attention, or was being led on.

And cheating isn't as bad in Army Ops as they imply. Very rarely do I see something that is only explained by cheating in the game. Maybe someone wants to discredit it, so that gamers move on to a newer game?

Re:Counteracting cheating

[rhakka]

The visible client information will never happen perfectly. If the server didn't tell you that someone was behind that corner until they walk out from behind it PLUS your ping time to the server, anyone with a jumpy connection would see them just appear out of thin air. Players would be in uproar about that. They have to at least relay it a little early to keep gameplay smooth, which would still allow wallhacks to have some benefit.

And global banning is a nice idea, but whatever method you use will get false positives. How likely do you think it is that these companies would want to alienate honest customers by banning them in error because they have good aim? That alone restricts any such banning system in its usefulness.

Accuracy checkers are also a waste of time. Bots are often programmed to aim like players.

All these things would help, but not stop cheating, the big question though is, are the cures worse than the disease in the eyes of the customers?