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Epic Cracking Down On UT2K4 Cheaters Already
qasimodo writes "Gamespot.com is reporting that Epic has banned the first cheater from Unreal Tournament 2004. You can read the thread explaining this on the official Atari forums for the game. DrSin, one of Epic's programmers started the thread as a warning to fellow users, and so far everybody seems to be happy. I agree with that, we need to stop the cheaters before they ruin every game out there. But the question remains: How can they stop them completely? Surely, script kiddies will just stop and go somewhere else, but how about the guys who write all the tools? They won't stop so easily." Elsewhere, nerdb0t points to an ACM Queue editorial on the subject of cheating in online games, arguing: "Perhaps game developers don't realize they're enabling roving gangs of sociopaths who are effectively destroying the virtual world the developers have worked so hard to create."
Cheaters suck. I don't understand there mentality. I guess it's along the same lines as the trolls here on /.
By the way, FP!
I always wonder why they don't make two sets of servers, one with all kinds of cheats enabled, and a good set. The cheaters get to fight each other for best cheats, and the normal people enjoy a good clean game. Everyone wins.
It's good to see them enforcing their laws, but how could this new super-cool no cheating system fail so soon?
SAILING MISHAP
As has been discussed in length already, it is impossible to trust the client unless you send each frame prerendered to every client pixel for pixel. Because of this, the only real solution is to ban the cheaters. The way this works is that the people running servers and Epic trust each other. When a client tries to connect to the server, it will check the CD key against Epic's master ban list. If you are banned, you will not be allowed to join the server. Someone could hack the server code as well as the client code to make sure this check is not done (actually, it's configurable), but the cheaters will not be able to play on servers that do such authentication. And as people prefer to play in a cheat-free environment, these servers will natually be more popular.
Of course, someone can always come up with a better cheat or a new handle, but each time they are banned they will have to buy a new game to play again. That's an expensive mistake for the cheater. Making cheating economically prohibitive is the only way, as far as I can see.
Writing a cheat tool is not a perfectly valid strategy for playing the game. It's actually a perfectly example of violating the user agreement. It's a perfect example of a reason to ban cd keys. It's a perfect example of somebody trying to ruin the fun for everybody else because they don't want to spend the time to actually get good.
In fact, a new class of game would be to simply provide the world server and document the APIs, then allow anyone to write their own clients. People could oompete on how usable their interface design was, instead of just how nimble their fingers are. (Other strategies such as maximizing your own bandwidth while DoSing your competitors present themselves as well.) Of course, there is no profit to be made in doing an online game like that...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
You said it yourself...games SELL because of graphics. The game buying public speaks with their wallets that graphics are the most important thing. When that changes, and only when that changes, professional game developers (i.e. those who make games in order to make money) will start emphasizing other things.
I expect this to come around sooner rather than later, because the graphics arms race is reaching a point of diminishing returns. There's such a thing as "good enough", and "more complicated pixel shaders in your 3D" isn't the kind of jump that "now in 3D instead of 2D" was.
Sure there is. Run a ladder. Whoever wins is a damn good coder, hire him.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
If I had mod points, you would be receiving them. I think that would be a hilariously fun way to play. I wonder if that's doable with the quake2 source that's out there?
i use linux and windows oh god how can i have an opinion
I have a dream, that one day, man will frag and snipe without hearing the crys of WALLHACK, OMG HAXOR!!!! Contact your congressman about putting a stop to the cheaters. Paid for by the association of friends of elasticwings.
How about:
4) Selling for less that $50.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
In my opinion, writing a cheat tool is a perfectly valid strategy for playing the game -- a good aimbot or whatever isn't exactly easy to make.
I suppose you'd be okay with a boxer bringing weapons and armor into the ring, as long as he had built them himself?
Engagements -- whether sporting or gaming -- have rules. They have rules so that everybody can compete on an even footing, know what they are up against, and most of all have fun. They do not have rules so that annoying little assholes who use aimbots can ruin everybody else's day by not following them.
If the rules of a particular server allow cheating, then by all means go for it. Knock yourself out and have a blast. If the rules do not allow cheating, do everybody a favor and don't cheat.
This is just common fucking sense, people.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Blizzard set up 2 sets of "realms", an open realm and a closed realm. The closed realms kept the player's savegames on the server and while you were playing, all your character's interactions went through the server instead of straight to another player, while the open realms allowed you to play online or offline and kept your saved characters on your own local machine. Open realms also worked by the same system as fps's do, ie one player hosts the game, other players's boxes connected to it and none of the gamedata is sent to a secure server. It was a great idea and worked for a while, but cheats still crept into the closed realms from time to time. Of course, they were often patched quickly and the offending players banned, but that was little deterrent for others to try to cheat as well.
The way I see it, anti-cheating measures work the same as bug spray on a camping trip. You can apply it as often as you like, but mosquitoes are everywhere and at some point you've gotta suck it up and realize that soaking yourself in it from head to toe won't keep you from being bitten.
I always thought it would be a great idea for a development company to design a game, may it be a FPS, RTS or whatever, that ENCOURAGES cheating. For example, with the purchase of the game, you are given tools, maybe some source code or something, that helps you actually DEVELOP your OWN cheats. The whole point of the game would be to see who could create the best cheats and dominate. You could share them, trade, etc. I know that already sort of happens with some games, but not on the type of scale as I am mentioning - I'm talking about a mainstream, popular-like title. Hell, make a series of them.. an FPS, RTS, RPG, etc.. if it would help get rid of some of the cheaters from the games I play, then I'm all for it.
this goes back to my theory that games have been g oig to hell since (insert system name here), with varying plateues from the NES up to Dreamcast. old games were hard. damn hard. why? because if the game wasn't interesting, there isn't a whole lot of excitement getting your green square into the red castle. in newer games, its get you n-polygons full motion character into the 100 virtual acre perfectly rendered castle... thats all you have to do, but damn its pretty.
Don't worry - its just stigmata. Pass me a napkin and don't you dare tell my mother.
First off, let me clarify, I hate cheaters. I run an ethics guild, and one of our rules is don't cheat. So I have no desire to see on-line cheaters flourish.
BUT
If you spent $50 on a computer game, only to have one of the major reasons you paid for it disabled by the manufacturer, wouldn't you be shouting bloody murder? Especially if they singled you out personally? I know I would be furious! Chances are, I would go down to the courthouse and file a claim in small claims court the next day.
Question is, is there a better way to handle this other than a permanent ban from the master server? (Someone mentioned a set of cheating servers. I think I would be OK if those were the only servers you had access to once you were banned/restricted)
Better yet, does the master server just work for browsing playable servers, and could you bypass it with clients like GameSpy, or is it more like how Half-Life used WON to check WonIDs?
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
Games should just support gpg and/or x.v503 for identification and verification of who players.
Optional ofcourse, ie not much use for FFA games, but for clan games it would quickly be a requirement if it was easy to use.
still reading?
I agree about spoiling the fun though.
At the moment, people who play online games 'seriously' tend to go to LANs or play in leagues - where cheaters are expelled. Could this trust concept not be extended with a web of trust? Vouch for your friend's setup as legit and then cryptographically sign it. To play in your web of trust, he needs to use that config. And if you suspect him of undetectable cheating anyway, you can revoke your signature. (Am I making sense?)
This scheme is decentralised, whereas the current anti-cheating schemes are presumably based on DRM-like centralised trust. Software-only DRM is sometimes said to be impossible to engineer. I'd rather play with cheaters than install Palladium/TC hardware though :/
Not to troll, but perhaps someone with some insight can answer this question- where is the satisfaction for these kids in cheating? Is it just to ruin the games for everyone else? If that's so, why not just attack the game servers en masse?
I am having trouble understanding where the usual sense of accomplishment is somehow not as valuable. Have these kids never experienced winning on their own? That's the only thing I can think of, because the rush from winning- that's addictive. I REVEL in manhandling an opponent fair and square. It's one of the best highs there is and the key component in my enjoyment is the knowledge that there's a level playing field. Hell, taken to an opposite extreme I don't know anybody who doesn't glean major satisfaction out of owning someone with a lower ping.
Insights?
Note to the people who replied negatively to and modded down the parent: He never said that kickbanning the cheater when you catch him isn't a valid response. I'm sure at least some cheat writers have most of their fun seeing how long they can cheat before they get caught. It's like a metagame that involves the cheater versus the administrator instead of player versus player.
Rob
"Engagements -- whether sporting or gaming -- have rules. They have rules so that everybody can compete on an even footing, know what they are up against, and most of all have fun."
In fact, this is the fundamental basis of game theory: a situation with two or more participants and a limited (i.e. non-infinite) set of available actions, with all participants trying to achieve the best outcome for themselves. Cheating breaks the whole concept of the "game" apart.
I wonder if cheaters know this? My guess is that they just can't recognize that disrupting fair competition is not a measure of their skill.
+++Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot.+++
"I'm sure at least some cheat writers have most of their fun seeing how long they can cheat before they get caught."
Kinda like shoplifting to see how long you can get away before you get taken away by the police.
IMHO cheaters fall into two categories, those who couldn't care less about playing well..they just want to win by any means necessary.
Those who want to cause grief to others and just ruin the game for their own amusement. I believe that most, from what I've personally witnessed, fall into this category.
It's a basic sociopath mentality... positive reinforcement through cruelty.
I bet his brother installed the hacks and he had no idea how they got there... i have heard this happened to dozens of people in CAL, TWL, and OGL... im sure it is a conspiricy.
this is not a Sig.
The cheetahs are hard up, but I always say, cheetahs never prosper...
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
ALL NETWORK TRAFFIC MUST BE DIRECTED TO VMWARE
Players must subscribe to a dynamic DNS name pointing to the PC in gameplay
Would our ISP's be alarmed by this? This game is for consenting parties only, of course.
Anyone interested? crackers@hush.ai
I disagree with this completely. Every single player game is designed so that one person, i.e. YOU, plow through it steadily to keep your interest. When you lose you have to start over again, but YOU are the star of the show. For this reason, multiplayer games are very frustrating for players of primarily single player games. I don't think these people know or care that they are hurting others. They just want to win the game. (the ones who brag about it are excepted)
Is the post by the supposed cheater part way down the first page of that thread.
I say supposed, because that post could very well be someone making a joke.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
Studies show that people appreciate money they didn't earn more than money they did earn (dollar for dollar). It's the getting away with something, being above the law so to speak.
The whole bonus of cheating is knowing you're ruining someone else's good time.
A brutal problem. To kill it, or mostly so, the battle would probably have to be fought in the MS API's. Something like every physical user interaction carries a part of their SID to prove it, and for "program testing" software it would run with the permission of the users SID, but not same identity as it were, so for the software releases, publishers could lock that out and go people only, locking out pre-release version from the release version servers. Of course the clever will just come up with virtual devices after some fashion. But I imagine it would be considerably more difficult than it is now.
Hmm let's see... A 1024x768 or 1280x960 image, 24bit, 40 or 60 times a second. Losslessly compressed, let's say. What would that create, maybe a couple megabytes of data sent per user per second?! Multiply that by 20 users... and now it's at least a couple dozen megabytes per second. How many servers have this much bandwidth at their disposal? How many clients do?
And then the server's processing load... not only does it have to handle the typical non-graphics duties of a game server, but now it must render the game from around 20 different viewpoints... at 1024x768, 24bit, 60 times a second. Ok, unless the quality settings are set incredibly low, no video card and CPU combination will be able to render that many pixels at a decent framerate (unless you consider sub-single-digit, "decent"). With cluter computing it might be possible (30 AthlonFX-53 workstations, though there are better ways to use that much processing power), but not with anything powering a game server today.
Please... having all the frames pre-rendered by the server is completely impractical, bordering on ridiculous. I can't believe anybody could take such a solution to cheating seriously.
Actually some people just like to spoil the games and can do it without cheating.
During the ut2004 demo, on one server, a guy would come and stay HOURs just taking the raptor, and staying around his base, pushing players who spawned there and crashing it against them, killing them in the explosion. Then go back running to the raptor.
His team would lose everytime. After one week barely no one would go to this server anymore, because of him, which probably made him rejoice in the closet where he was playing from.
I could once neutralize him by going to the other team and taking the raptor to go the other base and destroy the raptors as soon as they appeared. That way he was forced to actually fight me in order to go back to his turf, but couldnt since he was really a terrible player. Which was probably the source of his behavior:
This kind of guys takes pleasure in a dreadfull and utterly ridiculous way because they are unable to take some in a simple playfull way like the others. Therefore the envy.
Other behaviors frequently met:
-killing teammates.
-killing hostages or destroying whatever important game goal.
-monopolizing important ressources for the team.
-standing in front of a door in a no teamdamage game, blocking the whole team.
-getting teamkilled on purpose then shouting "Team Killer!" and having a good player ban.
The worst case so far was a team of cheater, with aimbots, who invested a public server, went into the same team, and voted out every good players that would come to the game, in order to keep only newbies in the other team and frag them to death.
What was particularly pathetic was that by watching them play in spectate mode, they were again really lame players, barely able to move in other ways than in straight line. The game was et by the way. Even with aimbot, they were easily killable, so they actually banned good players!
In the atari announcement, i found this:
CD key theft is a crime against a UT2004 customer.
I'm going to buy this game next week, and while i would be extremely pissed that someone would use my key, that would NOT BE A CRIME against me.
It would be an ANNOYANCE, which i would hope, atari's support service would deal with.
Thank you for not overreacting over such unimportant matters, you're just adding to the already spoiled legal atmosphere.
...it should be noted that the context of "CD key theft is a crime against a UT2004 customer" is that cheaters and cheat developers often steal others' CD keys.
I have seen the problems this causes for individuals, because people with legitimate copies sometimes get banned for "duplicate" CD keys, "invalid" CD keys, banned because someone else is cheating using their own CD keys. Often when people's CD keys are stolen, it causes problems for the person with the valid CD key. I have never known someone to have their CD key stolen, find out it was, and be okay with it. Usually they find out about it because someone else's use of it is creating trouble for them.
While you may not care if someone is having a good time with your CD key, you might if they were getting in trouble with it.
The reason why it is more than an annoyance is because they are abusing your rights as a paying customer. You're right, it's not exactly a crime, but it's more than an "annoyance."
I know this is off topic, but its funny anyhow... I saw a screenie from UT2004 where this portion of a map (don't know which one) looks just like goatse...
http://www.imageshack.us/img1/5365/goatseUT04.jpg
I swear this is not a goatse image, just a map that looks like goatse...
I don't know the real sales figures, but UT2004 has a much better "buzz" than UT2003 -- and the only real difference is new/improved gameplay.
Well, it's been a while, and I don't know how much things have evolved...but when I was kicking ass in Descent 2, and someone came in and launched 30 earth-shakers at a fast click, I did "kick playername". There's also restricted games, where players have to get permission to enter. Or you can set up closed games with players who you know don't cheat.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I think Halo PC solves this problem by making everything serverside. I have yet to see anyone cheat on Halo, and it makes me wonder why more game's don't do something like this.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
...the graphics arms race is reaching a point of diminishing returns. There's such a thing as "good enough", and "more complicated pixel shaders in your 3D" isn't the kind of jump that "now in 3D instead of 2D" was.
I beg to differ.
Think back to the 90s. Think back to the days before even Quake. Remember when ID made that announcement, "Quake will be to Doom as Doom was to Wolfenstein 3D"?
I didn't believe that, because I couldn't imagine at the time how anything could possibly look much more realistic than Doom.
No, graphics aren't going to stop improving any time soon. It's hard to imagine tomorrow's technology today, but I'm fully convinced that in ten years' time we'll look back at the games of 2004, which you're describing as "good enough", and be amazed at how bad they look to our 2014 eyes.
Dr Sin is an Epic programmer, but he was just another gamer who wrote a mod for the original UT. The mod he wrote was CSHP (Client Side Hack Protection) to combat the first bots. Epic hired him to write cheat protection for UT, but it's not like the other programmers even care about cheats in UT. For Dr Sin to talk about a cheater then gamespot to say "Epic wages war against online cheaters"...it's not epic, it's just Dr Sin. Just like before Epic/Mark Rein/Whichever big guys don't care about botters, they just care about their money.
the fact that they hired Dr Sin, and Amateur programmer from the UT community also shows that no one on their staff has any idea about writing a secure game.
Kinda like shoplifting to see how long you can get away before you get taken away by the police.
As the consequences for getting caught shoplifting are far worse than those of getting caught cheating in a video game, this analogy isn't really valid.
Rob (Though I wouldn't exactly be shocked if some kleptomaniacs thought that way)
they don't stand a chance in court and are full of shit anyhow.
signing an agreement that indemnifies the software creator and even gives them rights OVER you based on the use of their software is totally fucking gay!
ut2k4 is $40, some stores sell it for $30
That was his point, going right over your head.
Him: The only way to really keep your house safe is to encase it in concrete. Which is insane. That's why a good alarm system is the way to go.
You: ENCASE MY HOUSE IN CONCRETE!?!? You're nuts! Do you have any idea how expensive that would be?? Plus how would I breathe? And that stuff isn't good for the environment.
Waaaaaait a minute... Are you the guy from the UT demo server last week who kept flying the Raptor to the top of the comm tower and leaving it there? I'm glad to see you've moved on to trolling. It's a lot more fun and you get to use big words like "impractical." Keep it up.
Dude.... what stores do you go to? :) EBgames is nice, but it's not a rebate, not even a gift card, it's a "gift coupon code"
presumably the whitelist is generated by an algorithm: would it be possible to break the algorithm given a sufficiently large sample of valid keys? Has this ever been done?
Presumably it would be easier just to get an insider to leak the algorithm - any idea if this has happened?
I have a dream...
Where black girls and white girls play with each other
You speaking from experience?
or pretty much any large online chain after a couple of months. No reason to pay $50 for a game.
I have no mod points today, but I'll give you a virtual mod:
+1 insightful
We've had this same discussion here millions of times, and this is the first that I can recall ever hearing that theory. I agree 100%.
I spend 20-40 hours "saving the world/universe/girl" in a game and then, all of a sudden, I'm told that I'm just a regular, everyday looser. I can see how that could really affect some people's perception of "fairplay" in terms of multiplayer games. Especially something as competetive as Deathmatch. I mean, you really can't get more competetive than killing someone, can you?
While I love the game (and will probably buy it when I get a chance to get to a store), it doesn't fill me with confidence about the anti cheat protection in the final product.