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Killing The Fun - Cheating In Online Games
Thanks to the San Jose Mercury News for its story discussing the ever-present problem of cheating in online games. One of the issues discussed is cheating on Xbox Live using Action Replay-like devices, with a Microsoft spokesperson suggesting: "We didn't go into this with the idea that no one's ever going to be able to exploit this... But we absolutely take this stuff seriously and are taking action on it every day." However, noted FPS player Dennis 'Thresh' Fong laments an unfortunate side effect for the dextrous: "Because there is this perception that everybody cheats, people that are good are not recognized for their skills. When I play online, I'm always accused of being a cheater."
I thought the word for someone who didn't cheat was "n00b"
Jay | http://oldos.org
Take for example the olympics. The "arms race" to build the ultimate undetectable performance enhancing drugs closely mirrors the battle between online game cheaters and cheat detection.
It's a sad fact that when the more there is at stake, the greater people will be willing to go in order to obtain a win.
all you could see were 3 colored axis lines of the player X,Y, and Z
However, noted FPS player Dennis 'Thresh' Fong laments an unfortunate side effect for the dextrous: "Because there is this perception that everybody cheats, people that are good are not recognized for their skills. When I play online, I'm always accused of being a cheater."
Did you ever think people might cheat because they might not want to deal with the "dextrous" players who play 4-50 hours a week?
Online gaming needs match making and player rankings built into their in game browsers.
As someone who released the first aimbot for unreal tournament, and coded a few different cheats I can tell you why I, cheated. To grief people. I never cared about looking 'uber'. I was a good player in my own right. I cheated just because I wanted to grief the mindless, shitball, cliquey clannie fuckheads that played that game. I *liked* the fact that they knew I was cheating.
Other people in my clan/grief group botted for other reasons. One guy just liked looking uber to noobz. Another just throught it was funny.
Seriously, if you're so good at a game that you're consistently being accused of being a cheater, just laugh it off and say to yourself "damn, I'm good". Don't get me wrong, it sucks to have people not trust you, but in the end YOU know the truth, so how much should you really care about some insecure loser's paranoid opinion?
Why is it so easy to cheating at online fps games? Can some of you l33t h4x0rz put some effort into cheating in online casinos. Make that roulette wheel show up 00 every time. I'll split the winnings with you halfway. With that kind of money you can hire the world champion of counter-strike to play for you. Win without touching the mouse even!
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I'm also wary of MMORPGs for the same reason.
Cheating being possible at all is a side effect of having the client know too much about the game state -- the position of other players, collision detection, etc. This is presumably done in an attempt to work around the lag introduced by the network. This means only real-time games are susceptible to cheating; turn based or casino type games cannot be cheated in. It also means that faster networks should enable game makes to validate inputs and make more of the decisions on the server side, thus making cheating obsolete even in FPS games. Until then, anything you do to stop cheaters is just a temporary stop-gap in a never ending arms race.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Simple solution... ever play Yahoo games? There are beginner, intermed and expert rooms to choose from. This might be something to consider in games. I find that the rooms are pretty honest in skill level. Sure, someone could troll the beginner rooms if they're good, but, from the Yahoo example, it doesn't happen (much). If you're #4 ranked, but in the beginner level, that's not much respect.
I know BF1942 has the new "punkbuster" program. has it worked? I'm usually right in the upper-middle part of the score rank, rarely at the top, so I never notice if the #1s are awesome or cheating. Just wondering if u guys know...
But that isn't a reason to cheat is it? How many "casual" gamers do you think cheat? If I had to make up numbers, I would guess that most of the cheaters, hell I would guess a vast majority of them play the game in question as much as the ubber-1337 players do. There is this tendency for people to assume that people that cheat suck or have no skills and that is why they cheat, I think this is just something we tell ourselves when we lose to a cheater ("if he wasn't cheating I would own him!") People that cheat are people that either don't want to lose, or they are doing it just to ruin the game experience of others. I would be very surprised if you could find me a below average player that uses a couple of cheats to level the playing field.
I see what you are saying, but I am not sure that there is really any relevance to the subject at hand here, I mean I don't think its fair that I own a crappy car, but does that mean you could empathize with me if I robbed a bank to buy a better one?
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
...isn't that the ENTIRE POINT of the XBOX Live "Optimatch" feature?
to late!
And you raise a question I asked a number of people, but didn't squeeze into the article for space reasons: Would you want to live in a world where you could never cheat? (For those of you following along, poltical scientists call this the lure of fascism: If you give me absolute control of your environment, I can eliminate crime, or at least unofficial crime). One facet of this question has do with things like ability; why shouldn't, for instance, people with disabilities be able to play a game with a handicap (no pun intended). A more interesting question has to do with control of the next electronic environment. Look at XBox Live as a test run of Microsoft's secure computing initiative. In this version, you can install Linux, which, as one Microsoft manager told me, was quite surprising to the guys in Redmond. You can bet they 'll make it much harder to do such things next time. And if they're successful at building a cheatproof -- or, more interestingly, hackproof system -- what does that mean for the future of computing, and for life in general?
Always pleased when something I publish doesn't get posted on slashdot with lots of "wotta moron" comments...
-dave
Dennis Fong misspelt "m4d sk1LLz".
Call of Duty multiplater games show instant replays every time you get killed from the other player's perspective/view. I think this is a cool idea. It would be nicer if you can record that too.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
[ELF]?
Just curious.
Its not like the cheats are a handicap where you can give yourself 30% extra life or money or something... They are all or none.
Cheaters are bad. But they are NOTHING compared to TKs.
At least cheaters you kick and they go cheat somewhere else. TKs keep coming back cause they enjoy it too damn much. Not to mention TKs have a sad history of coming back with different name.
At least cheaters are wanted by one team. TKs are hated by everybody. The team that win gets an unsatisfying victory. The team that lose gets abused.
As someone who released the first aimbot for unreal tournament, and coded a few different cheats I can tell you why I, cheated. To grief people.
So in other words, you're a sociopath. You derive pleasure from antagonizing others in a way that leaves them no recourse.
Let me guess - pulling the wings off of flies and burning ants with a magnifying glass are among your cherished childhood memories. Maybe you had "fun" with firecrackers and the family pet?
I'd hate to run afoul of Godwin's Law, but the senseless sadism exhibited by cheaters seems like it would fit right into some sort of guard/prisoner dynamic.
Back in the days of Diablo (1), one of the most cheated-in games ever, a few of my close friends from school decided to limit our gameplay amongst ourselves so we wont be affected by the cheating going on in the "real world". We managed to enjoy the game a great deal, none of us cheated. It's based on trust, really. If you can find a few people that you trust and play with them, it increases the enjoyment of the game enormously.
Same goes for first person shooters or any other game. Find yourself a clan with trustworthy members, and play.
Just because everyone else cheats, doesn't mean you have to expose yourself to their damnation.
- shazow
Cheats can be quite effective, especially to police those that DO cheat. Back in the ol' CS days, on my friend's server we had always suspected this one guy who frequented his server of cheating. Needless to say I found one of these "wall hacks" to monitor his actions and the way he played (just from ghosting around and observing through walls.)
It was quite effective to watch as he was able to predict exactly where everyone was (ie shooting through doors or being rather hesitant when going up or down the sewers..etc etc, I think if cheating is such an issue, there could be designated "Watchers" who get the ability to see through walls and observe, just there to monitor the play like referees at a sporting event. Fighting fire against fire so to speak.
But from what I remember anti-cheat software (is punkbuster still around??) has really progressed in the past few years, I guess the same can be said about cheaters tho.
*604x
I'm a good CS player - and by good I mean that I frag at least twice as much as I die and play by the rules (camp as CT and rush as T on de_ maps). I've also commited to memory most of the popular maps and know where people camp (and how to get them). I've also learned that walking is the best way to play (Ninja Mode as I call it).
Anyway... I've never used a cheat in my life and now, in CS 1.6, it's really hard to cheat yet I've been banned from servers because I "cheat".
If I had learned to cheat, I would have never learned to play well, I can hold my own against most clanners in lan houses and I'm respected as a gamer despite being "old". Mind you, I play about an hour a day (when the wife lets me).
Cheating sucks, it really, really does.
Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul Ash nazg thrakatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul
FPS games do most of the work client-side, which is why its so easy to cheat in them (prevent it from detecting a collision between a bullet and a wall, and you can shoot right through them, change the rate that it updates your position, and you can move faster. Change the shot delay onn your weapon, and you can fire a rocket launcher five times a second).
Online casinos, and most MMO games do something else though. What you have on your end is basically just a graphics engine and input. The server takes your input, moves you around, handles projectiles, and then sends back what you're supposed to see, which your client program renders.
You could still wallhack, but that would usually require access to the server, and good luck getting the casino to let you run a few programs on their servers for a few minutes.
The main way to cheat in those kind of games is to macro. Some MMORPGs are suscptible to the same speedhack program people use in CS, which mucks with the computer's clocking instead of the program itself, but for the most part, there's nothing client side to hack.
I played Dransik Classic for a long time, and there were a lot of accusations of people hacking their stats. I wrote a program that could let you modify your stats, level, HP, and even the damage that you deal on attack.
The problem? It was all cosmetic. It may SAY you have 2.5 million HP, but somebody runs by and does 500 damage to you, and suddenly you only have 1500, because your REAL stats are on the server. Also, you can make it look like you're doing 50000 damage with your 15 gp daggar, but go out and hit a 10 HP Triddle, and it still takes two or three hits to kill.
The same thing would apply to an online casino (unless they're REALLY stupid). You may be able to make it look like you get ace-king-queen-jack-ten every hand, but the server knows you've really got nothing, and it's pair of threes beats you.
At its heart, I think this and similar issues (such as baseball and steroids, which I believe someone brought up above) are really just a reflection of our culture.
Somewhere along the line there's been a paradigm shift, and maybe it occured so gradually that no one noticed it was happening at the time. Winning has become more important than anything; this is a generally accepted value.
It may seem like splitting hairs, but I think at some point, the cultural value was more that you wanted to be the best (at whatever). Winning wasn't the goal, per se; it was just the natural consequences of being the best. Somehow that middle step of excelling has been lost, has become a vague ???? not unlike a failed dot.com business plan. Once upon a time working hard and becoming good at your chosen endeavor filled that gap, now whatever means that seems most expedient (including cheating) is permitted to suffice.
How or why that happened, I couldn't say.
Actually, if you are a good enough of a poker player this won't matter. It's all in how they act and what they tend to do in different situations and how well you read it. Besides, you don't have to win every hand to do very well.
Anyway, I believe that cheeting is a symptom of a logical game design flaw. Solutions are either a better way to implemet what they are exploiting, or a workaround in the game that makes it the cheat irrelevant to other players (somehow design it so that the other players don't mind that others are cheating).
The first is very hard because network games rely on sharing data and off-loading some of the work to the consoles. Even if every computation was done on the server and your computer did a remote GUI login, you could still figure a way to exploit it. (perhaps by sniffing the video packets for something that looks like a player's head and then having it automatically send the proper mouse/keyboard commands to aim at it and shoot). Trying to prevent it is a never ending battle. A more elegant solution would be the latter.
Have a system built into the game where the players not care if the others are cheating. How? Well, why do players get mad at cheaters? Because they are so much better than they are and never have a chance to do well against them. The same can be said for very gifted non-cheaters. The problem is not the cheating, it's the lack of balance between the players skill level, artificially enhanced or not. Therefore the answer is to build in a balancing system into the game, often reffered to as ranking. Rank the players according to how well they do in the game, wheither it is acquired by cheating or not, and make the rank public. In a short time it will be obvious which players are in your rank range and which are not. Each game will be more enjoyable because each party has a good chance to be victorious. It will be a fun challenge, not excersise in futility.
Of course, how do you do it in an MMORPG where everyone is interacting with everyone else? Well, fortunately in this case "everyone" is a relative term and can be redefined. I have seen implementations that keep users of different levels in different areas. Newbie areas, secret passages that cannot be seen until you are a certian level, etc. Mostly, the level difference in RPG's are not that much of an irritation however abusive PK'ing and griefing are. A couple of ideas. First, keep the people that want to PK away from the non-PK'ers. How? Different sever or different world. You can do the same for griefers too. Send them to a "grief" version of the world and let them grief themselves to their hearts content. This grief world could even be on their own client machine. A private hades just for themselves.
Why is it that in UT 15 kills is monster kill, In quake it is Uber kill and in Counter-strike it is Kicked By Console? No offense cheaters blow, look how many games have been ruined...
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
I remember suggesting somewhere a long time ago that HL servers could enforce aim-lines for spectators. In other words, if spectating, you can see a projected line from every player showing their direction of fire. Couple this with semitransparent walls, and I think it would be quite easy to identify both aimbotters and wallhackers provided a little patience and experience.
Good headphones in a game with footsteps are also useful. "Look! I'm Daredevil!"
I recently bought the PS2 version of "Need for Speed: Underground", and having had a blast playing the single-player side of the game (I'm now on the 90th mission, I think) and put together a fast car with all the upgrades, I shelled out a little more dough and got the Broadband adapter for the PS2 so I could play online. However, since NFS:U allows both PC and PS2 users to race against each-other (and offers no way to tell what system a given player is using), it seems that PS2 players are at a severe disadvantage - even with decent skills and a souped-up car, I get my ass handed to me every time by what I can only assume are PS users who have managed to hack their copy of the game. At first, I just figured I was just a lousy driver, but when you're driving a totally maxed-out car and still get lapped seven times before you can even complete one lap and the other drivers never once touch a wall, even in the sharpest turns while going several hundred miles an hour, one has to suspest that there is a serious imbalance in the way people on different platforms are using the game. So, I just don't play NFS:U online anymore. It's really a shame that such a potentially fun multi-player experience is ruined by a combo of poor thinking on the part of the developer and asshat PC users cheating their way to ill-earned glory. Oh well.
Good point. I can't think of any effective way of guarding against aimbots in software, since anybody with enough time and money could dummy up the mouse input. Perhaps a hardware solution would work... what if you required the use of a cryptographically secure mouse? Sounds like it ultimately still would be able to be cracked. Can anybody think of an effective way of preventing the use of aimbots, other than playing only with people you trust?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
The thing is, punkbuster is constantly monitoring and updating. you cant avoid it.
the cheats will be found and new ones will have to be made.
then those will be dealt with.
meanwhile it will be driven more and more underground.
cheaters will be in the extreme minority because nobody will want to publicize their hard worked on cheats.
your days are numbered cheaters.
you cheating bitches are not going to be able to cheat for much longer.
fucking cheating bitches.
bitches.
I've given up on multiplayer. Counterstrike, AA, BF1942 --- aimbots and Punkbuster hacks are all over those games. It really sucks the root to be shot through mountains, through buildings, by impossible shots. Cheats are used by kiddies to make up for their lack of skills.
I know a beta tester for a current popular game who told me they have found people cheating on the private beta game servers!
Online gaming seems eerily like life at times. It never seems quite fair, people already have their friend groups, and sometimes it feels like you're late to the party.
Tough. Life isn't fair. What you can do about it is either suck up your pride and accept the fact that you are going to lose, or leave. Skill is the reason people continue to play - they want to be like so-and-so, who is a legendary player everyone looks up to. You take skill differences out, you alienate the loyal customer base. Single player is where you can always be the important superhero who is given as many chances as possible to prove themselves. Online is entirely a different beast and in some games evolves to be something close to a sport. You have to learn your place in online gaming. And it probably isn't at the forefront.
Perhaps you should try a game that rewards twitch a little less and doesn't penalize death quite as much. I am loyal to Tribes in that you can be a highly effective player even if you have average fragging skills. I know an older woman who doesn't even shoot people much, but she enjoys turreting quite a bit, to the point that it seriously disrupts the enemy offense. Tribes rewards being in the right place at the right time and helping the team while still leaving room for individuals to distinguish themselves.
Also, consider joining a team, or forming one. Public servers will drain the life out of you in any game unless you can manage to not ever take them seriously -- which it sounds like you cannot.
You're right - not enough attention is paid to the fact that cheats would not be possible if the code were bullet-proof.
However... unlike people who write computer worms and exploit vulnerabilities in operating systems, there is no reason to cheat in a game other than pure selfishness and sadism.
When you control an army of zombie PCs, you can sell your services to spammers and the like. There is no financial incentive to cheat (well, except in a tourney, but those are tightly controlled events).
People are outraged by cheaters because their motives are so foreign to well-adjusted individuals.
d00dz cheat to be l33t, it will always happen and you cannot stop it. Forget fair play, geeks are antisocial, only think about themselves and will do anything that gives them an edge, they don't care about the consequences. Just accept it and move on.
Perhaps I explained myself poorly.
A wise man once told me that there is a solution to every problem, but sometimes the solution is to learn to live with the problem. You find a way to identify their cheat and block them, they find a new one. Move, Counter-Move. I appreciate your idealism and truly wish we could eliminate all cheaters from all games, but the fact of the matter is that we can't. While a cheat free experience is the Holy Grail for a lot of us, I'm afraid it's a wild goose chase.
"People *do* care if the person who just grind them into a fine dust is really a super-player, or if it's the teenage-kid newbie from down the block with a +700% health-patch."
With a ranking system and all else being equal, the health-patch kid will not be anywhere near you in the ranking system. The only cheaters you will play are the ones that *NEED* the cheat just to get to your level of skill. For example, the health-patch kid is so bad that your kill ratio to him without the cheat would be 7-1 (and he would accuse you of cheating). Therefore, he needs the cheat to be competitive relative to your skill. When he gains more skill, or finds a better cheat, he will increase in the rankings and you will be able to see this.
Also, I do not mean to say that there should be no effort to stop cheats. Rather that trying to stop cheaters is not the most elegant solution.
Basically, you as a person cannot tell all the time if someone is using a cheat or is just really good. You would have to run on a trusted server with trusted clients. In the long term, people using the uber-cheats will only be playing against themselves, with a natural uber-player mixed in here and there. The cheaters will move up in rank faster and higher than most non cheaters.
However, this all depends on the ranking system and how it relates to the servers. Perhaps the server is set up so there is a rank range, only players with a rank from x to y can join. You compete against people with the same rank, more or less. The better you play, your rank increases you have to play on the higher rank ranges. Kind of like baseball where you have A, AA, AAA, and the majors except here it will look like novice, good, expert, master, & cheaters :) Seriously, the very top level will be for the cheaters who keep upping their health from 10 to 25 or whatever.
I don't know how the ranking system would calculate ranks. Math is not my strong suit. However, it should probably be based on how well you did in a game, what rank the other players were, what level you played, etc. Things of that nature...weigh them in and calculate it over several games to produce a rank. Then work on recalculating it again. Stats can be show for that player like current ranking, max rank, average rank, rank over last x days/weeks. It would not be perfect, but it doesn't have to be....it just needs to be close. If what you are after is a clear 1,2,3,4,... then I would rely on an actual tournament.
"Who would bother spending a lot of time becoming the best possible CS-player if all that means is that you'll be able to compete successfully in a group consisting of the newbie from last week that upped his health to ten times the normal ? Would that still be a challenge and fun ? Even when you know that what you achieve with an extra half-year of training, the kid will compensate by multiplying his health not by 10, but by 25 ?"
Yes, it would still be a challenge. Because if "the kid" were that much better than you, via cheats or pure skill, then you would not be in the same rank. If you p