Valve Gets Tough On Counter-Strike Cheaters

Tycow writes "Valve is finally getting tough on Counter-Strike cheat creators, according to a post by Gabe Newell on HL2-Fallout, who confirms: 'We've started taking legal action against cheating (cheat-sites, cheat creators,...) both in the US and abroad.' The makers of OGC, one of the mainstream cheat software sites for online games, are apparently seeking legal advice. CS-Nation also has a story noting: 'This is just another front in Valve's anti-cheating campaign. Back in April, Valve began a significantly more aggressive banning methodology, that came as a byproduct of a rapid series of VAC updates silently distributed to all CS servers.'"

Comments

Re:And this is legal how?

[xenocide2]

Technically, cheat software like OGL can be considered derivative work. Under US copyright law, derivative works require permission, otherwise its a form of copyright infringement. Of course, the same can be said of all those console cheating devices like .

Furthermore, CS uses a key permission infrastructure to play online. Some cheaters use software to switch won IDs to evade bans and the like. This can also be used to find valid keys, which might qualifty as some sort of copyright protection circumvention.

While I don't like cheating, I'm not sure a non-techincal solution is going to work. The only surefire way to stop cheating like that is to only send data to clients they should be seeing or hearing. That eliminates see through walls cheats, a significant kind of cheat for CS. I've been accused of cheating when I shot through some permeable materials to kill people, accusations are nearly a big a problem as cheating itself. Hopefully Valve is taking as many steps as possible to alleviate this problem.

Re:Quit blaming other people for your own problems

[airjrdn]

While on the surface, I agree with you, it goes somewhat deeper.

Consider Unreal Tournament 2004 for example. Both a widely popular game, and an often chosen engine for other similar games. UT does MD5 checks to make sure the files on your system match the checksum amount they should match to determine if you are using altered files. However, via a fairly easy to find proxy, you can run a small TSR that will intercept the calls to run the MD5 check on your files and always send back what it wants to see...a valid MD5 checksum.

How can the developers get around that? If they check for the TSR, it'll only change immediately to something they aren't checking for. Whatever the devs do, the cheaters will find a way around. For the most part, it's the better programmers that find a way around the things, but they will often post their applications for any kiddie to use.

I don't know if legal action is the right action, but at least it's AN action. It's better than the company behind that $50 game saying what Epic says....it's up to the Unreal Admins to ban the cheaters.

Re:And this is legal how?

[zoloto]

Hey.

It's OGC now OGL.
Some cheats that I've seen in action were merely OpenGL hacks, that were a part of the operating system or video card drivers.

Since when is this considered a derriviative work?

OpenGL hacks are just that, hacks on the OpenGL subsystem.