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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."
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.
FPS games would be much more secure if they weren't so open and didn't allow for modding.
Listen, bud. Have you seen a pirated copy of Microsoft Office lately? Is that because it's "too open"? Adobe Photoshop? 3D Studio Max?
The reason online casinos have not been hacked is because the client DOES NOTHING (At least, in every intelligent casino I've ever seen). The client is a graphical display with a button, just like the one-armed-bandits in real casinos. You click a button, the CASINO does the processing, and tells you if you've won based on a random number generator. There's nothing to cheat. The only thing the casino trusts the local, client machine to do is to say "yes, I want to give you money". It doesn't EVER say "By the way, the wheel stopped on 00" and even if it did, the server would rightly say "I don't care what you think, I say it landed on 21. No prize for you."
Games cannot do the same thing because they have an assload more data to display and parse, and network latency is a major issue, not to mention the fact that due to the networking and processing requirements, any servers would have to be massively powerful and well connected to handle more than a few players on at once. Which would effectively kill 99% of player-run servers out there.
Random and weird software I've written.
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.
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).
Action Replay cheats on XBox are based on save game data stored on the XBox hard drive. One way of fixing this issue is storing the data on the MS servers using the encrypted transmission channel built in to XBox Live.
Note that there's a little sidebar on Action Replay cheating on XBox Live that runs with the Merc article.
-dave
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.
Can some of you l33t h4x0rz put some effort into cheating in online casinos
Having worked for said online casinos I can tell you that some of them do and nearly all of them get caught.
The other posters are correct, in that the client software really does nothing, but some of the leading casinos out there have stacked the odds only slightly in their favor in some games - mainly blackjack.
The only kinds of cheats you will find for casinos are auto-players. They play BJ 100% by the book and often come out winning big. Then they get a call from the casino and all those winnings disappear.
Of course, none of the cheat detection methods are 100% accurate for these kinds of attacks. Is it possible for someone to play 18 hands in a minute? Technically, I suppose. But to do that over 4 hours? Technically, I suppose. That's when the "offshore" aspect of casinos comes into play - they don't give you your money anyway and there's nothing you can do about it.
You hit upon an important point, people who are casual players can look at cheating as a way of levelling the playing field. This is often overlooked in the knee-jerk reaction of 'CHEATING BAD!' we see so often.
For about a year I ran a Counterstrike server. My brother bought me a copy so I'd run it for him but I ended up getting hooked on it for a while. I saw my fair share of cheaters but I took a relaxed approach to it - if the player wasn't ruining the game for other people I let it slide. It added a challenge from an otherwise uninteresting opponent. On the other hand, if the cheater was putting the beats on everyone else I told him/her to knock it off but usually had to ban the player outright.
It took a few months of pruning out the griefing cheaters but eventually the server produced a regular group of good players, either by skill alone or augmented by a cheating program. Some of the cheating players even dropped the cheats as their skills grew. We had a lot of fun...
There have been cracks out that defeat punkbuster since a few days after it was released on bf1942. A few of the hacks include:
There will always be some cracks, but Battlefield certainly became better off it, as it was kinda booming.
Either way, people will always cheat in some way or another, the thing is you just have to keep on fighting it. Blizzard is one of the examples who have a strict anti-cheat policy and don't shy away from banning people's accounts and the like.
So with starcraft and Diablo I play on battlenet to ensure not only I am watched but my opposers as well, and with battlefield I play on official EA servers.
They won't catch all, but at least it happens alot less then on non-controlled servers.
Dre
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.
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