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: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