Slashdot Mirror
Cheaters Under The Microscope
1up.com has a piece up examining the reasons and rationale behind the online gaming cheater. From personal pride to pure cynicism, the realm of the cheater has many ways in. From the article: "Using grenades and jumping on friends' shoulders can help you get ridiculously high and reach far-off boundaries in Halo 2. Players like Joe32 call it creative thinking. Victims of sniper fire that seems to come from another world call it cheating."
and stay there. For the games that I play, I find a couple of servers that are almost always full and have PLENTY of admins. So when you play, there is a good chance of an admin to be on. Once you find a server you like, stick it in your favorites and play there often.
Between glitchers and cheaters a bit better, because, quite simply, what they wrote isn't really what's going on at all.
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/dev/null.
First off: there a huge number of "glitches" in halo 2 maps that are there on purpose. Things like jumping onto a person's shoulders in order to make it somewhere higher is partially what makes it so fun. Bungie tweaked these levels unbelieveably well, and there is a lot of skill in perfecting seemingly impossible jumps.
The article is quite outdated. The new fad in halo 2 cheating is rather astounding. The new map pack that was released in the spring downloads maps from xbox live to the user's hard drive. People realized that while the maps were signed to prevent people from copying maps from xbox to xbox (this weakly protecting bungie's IP) they weren't really signed to prevent modification. So if you do something akin to deleting the signatures from the map the game defaults to letting you play the maps on xbox live. The result? People can use standard halo 2 modding tools to mod their maps, add autoaim, jump higher, etc..
Which brings me to the second, much larger and impossible to fix, issue with xbox live. You'd think that xbox live is a dedicated service providing servers for playing halo 2, right? Wrong. In every XBL game, a user is chosen to be host. That person is the server, and as such has much more control over the game. For one, it's essentially "their game or the highway". This is what allows people's modded maps to have an effect on the game, in many circumstances.
The modem-delay people do in games on purpose, as mentioned in the article (known as "standbying") is a direct result of xbox live offloading the hosting job to a client. Now the person who is host can filter the packets from an opponent, the game keeps running while that person is lagging out, and the host can run around lag-free killing the people who's packets are being routed to
The cheaters have added a new level of complexity: they get a routing program that can route by MAC, and selectively filter out specific players during matches (as opposed to the all-or-nothing pull-the-plug-on-the-modem approach.)
As long as the hosting is not done by microsoft themselves there is no real way to fix this issue. The maps issue is stupid; they aren't checking their own content sig's properly, but at least that's not an architecture issue and will probably be fixed relatively soon.
In all honesty the free portals such as xboxconnect and xlink kai are better, if you can handle not having an elitist rank next to your name...
twitter.com/gravitronic
This is true... for a while. The thing is, if you're dominating so much, the ranking tends to increase far more rapidly. It took me far, far fewer games to get to rank 10 in team skirmish than in big team skirmish, which I mostly started playing Halo 2 with.
In that sense, the rankings are working as good as can be expected.
Where it falls apart, though, is when you want to play with your variably ranked (and skilled) friends. In that case, the games can get a bit mismatched (especially if you're ranked by "clan" and not be individual ranks).
This is a case where the owners of the games decide what is cheating and what isn't. Probably, everyone could have exploited that bug, but in the MUD, you're probably not doing so much playing against other players as against the system. As such, you've gained an advantage that the system likely can't take advantage of (although the MUD I used to play on actually had a bug where MOBs could become invincible...)
/certainly/ wasn't breaking a rule or exploiting a bug. People were simply not playing the game the way the creators wanted them to.
/very/ short time required large amounts of roleplay. It's hard to create a system like this, of course, so the effective restriction was that if you gained levels too fast, you obviously weren't roleplaying enough and thus you were deleted. Again, it's a flaw in the design. If you want people to slow down their levelling, it's easy enough to code that in. There's no reason to force people to play the game in a way that's more restrictive than the game allows.
Sounds like the admins on your MUD were intolerant of bug abuse. The problem I have with this is where the line of "bug" meets "unintentional effect", which is where the Slashdot blurb implied that the story was going. For another MUD example, the same MUD I played on with the invincible MOB bug recently had a player wipe. Basically, they wanted to start over as there were some players who simply destroyed the economy with all their money/possessions. They also wanted to make some inherent engine changes, which required that they start over lest some players have a distinct advantage over new players.
Anyway, part of the reason for the wipe was the economy, right? As it turned out, there were numerous places in the game where items could be harvested free, with no fighting or monetary investment required, and very little time required. This meant that players were able to start buying back all the stuff they'd originally purchased and bankrolling money, which meant that the wipe had little effect on the economy. Given a few months of this behavior, we'd be right back where we started.
The administrators didn't seem to take too kindly to this behavior. There were threats of deletion, banning, etc. In the end, the items were simply reduced in sale price, and I don't know of any deletions. Nevertheless, it was absurd to even consider deletion in a case like this, for the very reason this subthread started. It was a part of the game, anyone could do it, and it
Another MUD I was on for a