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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."
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
This method assumes that no one comes up with a working keygen. With a keygen, swapping banned keys for clean ones would be easy enough. Of course, I'm sure something's in place to prevent this sort of thing.
Even sending every frame prerendered won't stop all cheating, for example aimbots will still be possible using computer vision/image recognition systems (which unlike in "real life", in the limited context of a game is an easily solvable problem.) The only real solution is to only play games with people who are physically in the same location as you, or people you already trust.
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.
It only takes a day or so of downtime for Epic's master ban list before all of the public servers stop using it. Who'd want to waste a minute or whatever to connect every time, while the connection times out.
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 :/
"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.
Actually Halo PC actually uses this type of netcode. What the netcode does is require all client information to be sent to the server where it will then be double-checked before it is actually intiated in the game. This way if you were to send double packets (speed hack) or send bad video rendering infomation causing you to see a wireframe of the map (see through walls hack) the server would immediately recognize it and kick you from the server. The problem with this method is lag.
With all of the data being sent back and forth from the server (and god forbid its non-dedicated) games with more than 8 players in Halo PC are lag filled to the brim. Anti-cheat effective? Very. Gameplay effective? Hell no, especially with Halo PC's insane hardware problems.
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.
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!
I realized your dream once and it's on topic since it was with the worst camper I've ever seen.
s o let's talk"
The game was action quake2 and at that time, meaning pre counter strike, nobody would scream "camper!" because someone was actually sniping. Also because you just couldnt snipe without moving or die very soon.
No, camper were, and still are in my opinion, someone who would stay at a spawning point in deathmatch and just kill spawners. Taking their ammo from time to time to go on camping.
So this guy was a camper, and he knew all the good spawning points of all maps, and would stay there for hours, usually above the spawn point and in your back (so that by turning around extra fast you missed him anyway), its aim right at the head level, headshotting everyone one after the other.
After a little time, everyone would just stop deathmatching and most of the players would just run around trying to find him to kill him.
But once, we found ourselves just 2 on the server. It wasnt funny for him to camp, so he was actually playing (which he was already doing you know, it was just an infuriating way of playing, and by the way, he was a good regular player too), but after a while, the game was pretty boring.
So i actually proposed to end the fight:
"let's stop fighting"
"what can we do then"
"let's meet at the fountain and talk"
"ok no gun"
"sure"
So we meet there:
"cool"
"yea nice"
"right"
"hehe"
"hehe"
"cool"
"sure"
"
"yea"
"cool"
"hehe"
"hehe"
At this point he took his gun and tried to do me. But couldnt since I had done it BEFORE him. Nice headshot i did.
Yes you can think I shouldnt have shot first, but hey! The guy's nickname was lucifer: should I have trusted him to play otherwise? No way!
Camper!
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
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.