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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.'"
Good timing being an election year. I'm sure they could bribe^h^h^h^h^h lobby for an amendment to make any cheating (or any enabling of cheating such as talking about cheating, linking to sites about cheating, even whispering the word cheating in a low breath) punishable brutal whipping.
Too bad DMCA already stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It would be a nice acronym for the Digital Millennium Cheater Act. Maybe it could be TATTLE (Technology Amendment To Target Lying game Enthusiasts)
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2B1ASK1
I loved the original Half-Life and most of the mods for it. Back in the early days, me and my friends on our land would quite often turn on wall hacks, aim modifiers, rapid fire hacks, and bunny hop scripts while playing with each other. We never would do this in the public games out of respect for other players. I don't feal it is Valve's place to say people can't make hacks. In effect they are stiffling the creativity and enjoyment of the other people. Adding this tactic of suing cheat makers with many of their other recent tatics I am seriously considering not buying H/L 2. They are becoming very dictitorial about their game which I don't care for either. I have not bought an RIAA album in over 4 years, nor have I downloaded song on P2P from an RIAA label because I do not care for their tatics or the crap they love to put out now. Now of course I have used P2P for obtaining opensouce software, or artist who don't mind P2P (and have even bought a large amount of their work). So adding Valve to the list is not that hard.
Reserved Word.
I am a proponent of anti-cheating measures & detection, however this seems like it could be bent to serve other purposes, such as attacking the creators of trainers for games. The difference between most of the cheating that goes on in CS and a trainer is that (usually) the trainer is used only for singleplayer, while cheats are used in multiplayer.
My question is, who draws the lines and where do they fall; is a trainer now considered cheating? I would argue quite heavily against someone who favored the illegality of trainers given that they are meant for a player to change a single-player experience more to their liking. Developers have mixed feelings about trainers, ranging from 'you can play the game how you like' to 'we made this game this way for a reason, by changing that, you wreck the entire game, we dont like that', both of which are understandable. Now, what stops a developer who is highly against trainers from hijacking such legalities to go after trainer developers & distributors. Are they drawing the line at multiplayer cheating only? Or are they going to go with the more artistic: non-permissible alteration of a game is not allowed since it ruins its original purpose of the game which the developer intended.
In short, is this the potential road to DRM-like measures in games, where your ownership is only partial and is dictated by the publisher as to what you can and cannot do to the game. I know my comments are somewhat off-topic and may seem a bit overly dramatic but this can easily lead in other directions, especially in the enterprising hands of companies such as EA whom are trying to further consolidate the market.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
i'd prefer that they get tough on people who use keygens that manage to generate LEGAL keys, thus making my legal copy useless since STEAM refuses to let me sign up with a key already used! thanks!
and it's only $10 to ship me a new cd! how thoughtful of you valuve. and FYI, this CD is 2 years old. i can't get the "90 day free cd".
- tristan
One non-technical solution is to remove anonymity from the online game world. If they required a credit card associated with your Valve account it would be much easier to ban people for life. Some kid may turn over his account, but it's much less likely he'll commit identity fraud.
This is basically how Las Vegas deals with "cheaters" (even if they are just counting cards or whatever).
It's absolutely %100 not possible. Untill servers have the power to render every player's frame and the bandwidth to stream these frames to all the clients, it is absolutely impossible to stop people from cheating. (Even by the time we're there, it will be likely that the clients will have the processing power to analyze the frames *still* be able to do things like aim assistance...)
/.er, but something really has to be done about this issue. Cheaters destroy multiplayer games for legitimate players, no question, which translates to sales which translates to employment vs unemployment for people in the industry. It's really not harmless.
The simple fact is that whatever the client is trusted with is vulnerable to cheating. There are plenty of things that can be done to make the cheating more difficult (and most games do at least *something* to try and slow down cheat authors), but the sad part is any amount of clever engineering can be completely undone as soon as a tool is made publicly available.
Is legal action the best idea? I don't know. It's hard for me to jump on board and shout "Go get 'em!" because I hate the legal system medeling in technology it doesn't really understand as much as the next
Do people have a "right" to cheat? Good question. I couldn't begin to answer it, but I'd say that if that's the way teh law book bounces right now, maybe it needs to change. We all love our right to free speach, but can also all agree (unless you're an anarchist) that there are certain limitations, like going to see a movie and standing up and shouting through the whole thing is not cool. These people making cheats available are the equivelant of having someone standing outside of every theatre running some particular movie and passing out air horns as you walk in the door. Not everyone is going to go nuts, but you know there will be at least one ass hole in every theatre setting the thing off.
Well, since OGC does use code taken from the SDK, which is copyrighted material of Valve (and the OGC source code has those copyrights in it as well), Valve certainly has the right to say that it does not want to allow OGC, while still not requiring explicit consent for other mods. Either way, Valve should atleast ask the cheat makers to stop, before proceding with legal action (perhaps they already have, I don't know.)
They kind of do this already - you receive a CD key when you buy Half-Life, and you use that number to create your Steam account.
If you get caught cheating by the Valve Anti-Cheat system (VAC), your Steam account gets banned for some lengthy amount of time. You get a chance to argue your case* (against full logs of what you got up to), so if you really were cheating you'll have to buy a whole new copy of Half-Life.
Getting money involved often acts as a good deterrent. It's still pretty much anonymous, but when you've got to spend your hard-earned cash when you've been banned, you might think twice...
* You've probably heard tales of people being banned for installing new drivers or using Wine etc. I'm sure there's some truth behind a couple of these stories, but judging by the Steam forums, the vast majority of people claiming they've been banned unjustly are talking absolute bollocks.
You get the people claiming it's really, honestly their CD key that's been banned for being used on many, many accounts: 'it's my CD key from my CD!' - 'so why's most of Eastern Europe using it?' - 'a friend must have borrowed it' - 'can I see a scanned picture of this CD?' - 'we don't have scanners in my country, you imperialist pig-dog!'
Then there's the excuses. 'I installed new 3dfx drivers, and got banned!' - 'so why do we have you down as having used $CHEAT, $H4X and $TEH_UPLAOD_CODEZ?' - 'my brother/aunt/pet badger must have installed them!'
Hmm. This note's getting longer than my original comment. Better shut up!
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
I used to play CS but have stopped due to cheaters. I got a little fed up and created a fake aimbot/wallhack. Lamers download the hack, which is simply a batch file compiled to an .exe, run it, and get sent to an unlisted page on my website where their IP is logged and they're added to a counter. They are asked to share their thoughts in the forum.
So far I have logged over 900 (counter messess up every once in a while) to my counter, but my stats page shows 17324 hits, and the list of IP's I have logged is 31 pages long.
http://igogg.com/mrgrey/
-Tolerate my intolerance
It has struck me for some time that we shouldn't be so worried about whether someone is cheating or not, but rather: "How well are they playing". Right now detecting cheating software is somewhat easier, but imagine a day in the future when we will have webcams connected to software that generates 100% valid inputs into a 100% valid client that is 100% indistinguishable from a human playing the game. At that point you can no longer "detect" that it isn't a human, and the focus will be simply: "Is that person to good for this competition bracket?"
Right now it's very difficult to create a novice only server for beginners to learn a new game. Many griefers love to log into such a server and wreak h4v0c on the n00bs. But if we had a way to measure playing ability you could restrict play to that ability. Basically someone to who is consistently surpassing the metric for a period of time would be ejected or handicapped automatically.
Now before you assume that such a method is impossible (which it might be for some games), I can give a small example from Starcraft, where it might work. An interesting statistic often discussed about masters of SC is their actions per minute (APM). An average player does 50 to 70 APM, while a tournament pro can hit 400 APM. Why not allow that to be used by those who wish to as a metric for auto-handicap or server boot.
Sure a total novice could still use cheat software to move up a bracket or two by this metric, but as long as he's playing at the same level that everyone else in that game is, who really cares? And it wouldn't help at all at the highest levels of competition where there is no cap, but when there is money/titles on the line, shouldn't all those people be in the same room, or at least have witnesses/referees present?
Another benefit of such a system would allow for auto-handicapping so that an itermediate player could play against a novice and still have an enjoyable game.