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."

Comments

Article should differentiate

[th0mas.sixbit.org]

Between glitchers and cheaters a bit better, because, quite simply, what they wrote isn't really what's going on at all.

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The article is quite outdated.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 /dev/null.

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...