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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.'"
Perhaps, instead of relying on yet-more-lawyers and yet-more-lawsuits, Valve should try to fix the FUCKING BUGS FIRST.
The vast majority of exploits and cheats are based on bugs. Fix the bug, you fix the problem.
Quit blaming other people for your own problems Valve.
What exactly gives them the right to shut down a website that distributes software that they don't like?
While I hate cheating, I don't know how they have the legal right to do this.
I take issue with these actions for the same reason that P2P shouldn't be outlawed. What if you are using/allowing cheats on private servers? (Note: I didn't see in the article whether or not the cheats work on private servers or if they are explicitly written for Valve's servers.) In other words, there are legitimate reasons for the cheats. If Valve wants to ban CD keys of users who are using the cheats, that's really their own business. But trying to get the cheats removed is rather unacceptable.
Exactly. We all hate cheaters, but mucking around in the legal system isn't exactly the best solution here.
Is distributing a cheat a violation of the (US and/or international) law? Nope.
The people who run the cheat website's haven't necessarily violated the EULA either.
The US and International governments are busy dealing with millions of starving people, wars, trade agreements. Your "cheat" isn't even a blip on anyone's radar...
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.
There goes their entire customer base. :)
(Just kidding, I'm sure there are very few people who cheat in CS.)
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
When I was playing PC multiplayer games on a regular basis, there were always games with cheaters in them. They (usually the cheater, otherwise the game) were easy to figure out. The solution? Switch to a different server. It ain't rocket science. The idea of suing someone for ruining an online game (specifically, a non-persistent online game with beaucoup other servers available) is ludicrous. The idea of a company suing people who make and distribute cheats - assuming they aren't breaking copyright law - is ludicrous.
There's an easy way to remain free of cheaters in online games. Make friends and then play with them. Not only will you be reasonably certain there's no cheating going on, but you'll probably enjoy the experience more regardless.
I mean, hell, if we're going to talk about lawsuits for ruining people's fun then why not go after spawn campers, consta-jumpers, loot whores, etc., too? How about suing people who are frustrated but remain in the game and on a team doing badly on purpose?
If you're taking online games that seriously, though, I would recommend first that you quit playing online games and stick with single-player - clearly, you don't have thick enough skin to deal with other humans. Either that, or start a service - or find a way to encourage companies to start a service - with pay servers. If people are so invested in these games it's worth tying up court time, then it should be worth $10 a month to have a bank of exclusive servers not open to the general public. I would guess you'd weed out 90% of the cheaters with that one stroke since they'd probably keep cheating on free systems.
PS- The next time you find a clause guaranteeing "freedom to be entertained" in a government's constitution, let me know so that I can snicker. Aren't there enough SERIOUS and IMPORTANT issues of freedom to deal with?
PPS- The type of person who would make your suggestions would be the type of person with whom I would want to play and punish with cheating - I'm just that kind of bastard.
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 - let us hear exaclty HOW you would implement an anti-cheat system that exists on a client compueter you basicly cannot trust?
My guess is that you are not a developer...
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.
I feel the need to add to this discussion, as the opening post is both misleading and untrue. I have not played CS for some time, but I currently run/admin an SoF2 server which is very similar exceot that the engine is two generations newer. From my experience with both games, they are very similar in the issue of cheating.
As an admin, I run into all kinds of cheating. Wallhacks, ballhacks, and aimbots are some of the worst and most widely known, although there are a number of other types that exist. However, just looking at these three most prevalent types, none of them rely on any kind of bug in the game to operate. The majority of cheats operate by writing hooks into the OpenGL data that allows them to obtain additional information about the game and then display that to the screen. That is how wallhacks are able to show players that would normally be occluded and ballhacks are able to display balls (or any kind of symbol) over all player's head no matter where they are in the level.
These specific types of cheats are just hooks, however. They do not rely on any kind of bug/issue/hole in the game as they are utilizing information that is contained within the OpenGL subsystem on the client machine. In SoF2 there are a couple of exploits that are based on bugs in the game, but these are widely known and fall into a "gray area" as they do not *really* give a player an advantage, but might in some particular instances. From an admin standpoint, there are tools (namely PunkBuster) that allow for easy observation of these types of exploits, and these same tools are available for pretty much all mainstream online FPS games.
The solution to cheating goes far beyond merely insulting the developers and claiming that all the responsibility is on them to fix these nebulous "bugs" in their software. This is an extremely difficult problem to surmount in every facet of the issue. While I may not completely agree with Valve's approach to the issue, I applaud them for actually standing up and taking some sort of action. IMO, cheating is one of the largest deterrents to online gaming today.