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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."
To lose consistently to people who got better than you by playing six to eight hours a day while you're at school or worksome people cheat just to even the playing field.
Cry me a river. Perhaps you should try playing with people who are your skill level instead of wanting to be the Rambo of the higher leagues.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
you call them cheaters?
I call that bad map design.
My stance on cheating in video games is that its only cheating if you modify the client app or take advantage of something that other players can't take the same advantage of.
Simply put, if the game allows it, it is part of the gameplay. It may not be the most obvious way to play, nor may it be how the manual TELLS you to play. As far as I'm concerned, anything allowed by the engine is totally fair.
There is no such thing as an unfair advantage.
The "hey, I'm just exploring new parts of the map that I have to glitch to get into explanation." Except that there's nothing stopping you from setting up your own game to play around with people of a like mind-set WITHOUT running roughshod over some other players.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
bingo. And the sence of community is great too. Knowing most or all of the people you're playing with is different from an anonymous game in the same way that online is different from single player. It's a whole other level of fun.
Tonight is my quake 3 threewave night (I know it's old but it's still fun). There are five guys that I've known for years and we all meet up once a week. If one of us is having a good night, he'll get congratulations and kudos from everyone else, as opposed to bitching and ranting on an anonymous server. If one of us is having a bad night, we'll all be good sports about it. A lot of times I'll even let someone kill me so they wont feel bad. As opposed to being called a loser and a noob on an anonymous server.
Playing with your friends rocks. It's the only way to go.
I used to spend a ridiculous amount of time playing Urban Terror , and frankly, some of the 'cheating' he mentions actually kept the game interesting.
I understand nobody wants to play against wallhackers and aimbots, but what is wrong with using avatar pyramids to gain access to higher levels? If the devs didn't want people to get there, why the heck did they leave it as a solid surface?
Good sentiment, bad execution.
This guy isn't talking about cheating, he's talking about exploiting holes in the engine. Thats not cheating, thats taking advantage of the world.
;p
;p
If you, or anyone with enough practice, can do it, then it's not cheating. If you have to modify the client, or the datastream (in a netowork game) then thats cheating. Outside influence = cheating, finding logic holes = exploring.
Sounds to me like he just can't do that grenade jump exploit, and is crying about it
Personally I love looking for glitches in games, just usually they aren't too useful when I find them.
For example, when the maps in halo 2 seem to expect you to get out of your vehicle (say when you go from a street to a hotel), try fighting your way in. You'll probably have to bash your ghost just right, but it can fit though those tiny doorways. Then you can enjoy trying to take down a scarab walker by jumping a ghost onto it
Oh crap, I'm on fire again.
Did it seem odd to anybody else that they talked about these cheaters as though they were robbing convenience stores or running drug rings out of their basements? Like cheating in Halo 2 is the new drive by shooting. The whole thing seems a little over the top.
I know some people value their game rankings, but please. They're not taking anything from anybody and they're not causing harm beyond the tang of frustration (although, believe me, I know how frustrating even the illusion of cheat can be). They didn't even touch on the people who use hacks to steal your account or personal information, or anything else that's actually illegal or harmful. Do we really need an "expose" on people using cheat codes? Come now.
You can do better than that.
A strain of paranoid prevention can be worse than the disease, whate'er the intention.
Yep, that's the way my UT2k4 iCTF clan handles it. We've found most of the anti-cheat mods out there tend to make the game lag horribly and don't even catch many cheaters anyway. So we've taken to just having a large group of admins around to keep an eye on things and hand out bans.
Social problem, social solution...
(Of course, why people still try to cheat when they see players with our tag around is still a mystery to me!)
The article seems to lump a lot of things into cheating, I'm not sure I agree with all of them.
Modifying client code, stream, etc. Obvious cheating. And the offeners should be banned for life.
Using a USB keyboard and mouse on a console. Not sure this is really cheating. Obviuosly the console is designed to utilize these pieces of hardware, and a controller sucks for FPS games. Though, some way to check and filter for this would be good. Still, I don't think that this is going to be cheating.
Gernade jumps, rocket jumps, stacking. These are not really cheating by themselves. If you are using it to get to a hard to access area on the map, fine. If you are using it to get outside the game world, then there is a problem. I don't play Halo so I'm not sure what the article is saying exactly, but using a friend and a gernade to get on top of a tall building hardly seems like cheating. If it's putting the player outside the world and allowing them to fire without receiveing fire, then ya, it's cheating. But if it's in the game world, it should be fair game.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Other gamers give themselves an edge by using a mouse and/or keyboard with today's USB-friendly consoles, which increases accuracy and cuts response time--it can be an insurmountable advantage. But, as one anonymous cheater explains, "It's not illegal--it's just using the best equipment available. Anyone can do it."
People who have been playing games since Wolfenstein 3D know what the best FPS controller is, and it's the keyboard and the mouse. If no console manufacturer chose to pay attention to what PC gamers have known for over 10 F-ing years now, tough shit.
As I've read in a review of Quake for the Dreamcast, which online could pit computer players against console players: "Playing with a controller versus people playing with a keyboard and mouse is a soul-destroying experience."
It's not my fault people want to use a shitty controller.
There is an article over at sirlin.net that discusses this. http://www.sirlin.net/Features/feature_PlayToWinPa rt1.htm
Here's a small snippet.
"You're not going to see a classic scrub throw his opponent 5 times in a row. But why not? What if doing so is strategically the sequence of moves that optimize his chances of winning? Here we've encountered our first clash: the scrub is only willing to play to win within his own made-up mental set of rules. These rules can be staggeringly arbitrary. If you beat a scrub by throwing projectile attacks at him, keeping your distance and preventing him from getting near you...that's cheap. If you throw him repeatedly, that's cheap, too. We've covered that one. If you sit in block for 50 seconds doing no moves, that's cheap. Nearly anything you do that ends up making you win is a prime candidate for being called cheap."
-- If you rocket jump of your friends shoulders.. that's cheap!
Except that - if the camper kills and doesn't move, those who he killed will respawn and remember where he is and come and tag his ass.
It's not a gameplay problem. Sure it's cheap but it's also not necessarily a great tactic that lets you run up uber kills. Moving and killing rather than waiting to kill will always earn you more kills if you are a reasonably skilled player.
Camping has been around as long as the genre. It's not a Halo phenomenon. Camping has been a tactic since Doom. In Quake 2 the known common camping spots became second nature to good players. You new without thinking that you were coming by a common camp spot and you changed your approach to adjust. Usually the result would be a quickly fragged camper.
Stop whining and get even.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, Bartle divided MUD players into: socializers, explorers, achievers and "killers". The twist being that "killers" doesn't mean PvP players, but people who actively seek to harrass, humiliate, annoy, and even hopefully drive people out of the game altother. (Others call that type of player a "griefer".)
Basically long after "online gaming" ceased to mean only MUDs, we're basically stuck with a signifficant portion of any online game's potential player base being "killers". People who _will_ go to ridiculous extremes to get you pissed off.
E.g., people have been known to blow real money on a new Ultima Online account just to scam some newbie. Reading some of the UO griefer sites was downright surrealistic. People were actually _planning_ to eventually get an account banned (i.e., also the money it cost) just to play it as disruptively as possible and cause as much grief as possible until they get banned.
So personally I wonder if there aren't better way to deterr griefers than even banning hardware ids. Like, if it's possible to make a game that isn't attractive to griefers in the first place. My theory, supported by my limited observation in all these years of online play, is that games can (and _do_) differ vastly in how attractive they are to each of the categories.
E.g., at one end of the spectrum, you have Counter-Strike. Now the game does have its merits, and there are some very good players playing it, yes. On the other hand, it also attracted arguably the highest percentage of annoying players. Why? Beats me. There is _something_ about its gameplay that suits the "killer" type very very well. (Maybe the fact that you can actually prevent another player from playing the game for a while?)
E.g., on the other hand of the spectrum you have games like the first incarnation of PSO, where it was pretty much impossible to harm a player in _any_ way. You can't kill them, you can't lead a train of monsters to them, you can't block their retreat, you can't do anything to them. So killers would come, whine a bit, spam the lobbies with pornographic "smilies" (e.g., I've seen some running around with a very graphic and animated representation of male masturbation), but pretty soon get bored and leave. So the average PSO player was a very nice and friendly person.
Other games, like the non-PK facet of UO, were also remarkably "killer"-free. Partially via not having much thing to do to other players, partially via Origin's policing the realm: the idiots who got creative and "tested the limits of the games and found new bugs" to harm newbies, found themselves banned to the PK facet.
And various other games fall at various points in between.
So basically that's what I'd like to see more game designers devoting thought to: how to make a game that isn't attractive to idiots to start with. Probably won't get past a publisher, though.
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