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Cheaters Under The Microscope

Posted by Zonk on from the give-a-hoot-don't-cheat dept.

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."

1 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Game Features can reduce Cheating by Tenzen01 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Cheating because you don't have time to compete with the people who play 6-8 hours a day is a LAME excuse.

    Some people have natural skill and are gonna own you no matter if you are one who plays 6-8 hours a day and they only play it once a week.

    I find that in-Game features can reduce cheating in addition to providing better gameplay.

    The article mentions Halo 2 on Xbox Live, which as everyone knows uses a Ranking system to match teams up. Thus you are much less likely to be playing in a game with people 100 times better than you. I find that playing in games where the teams are evenly matched can be fun and thus reduces the "need" for people to cheat. Games that somehow balance the teams are much more fun to play in. Yeah we all like being on those teams where you completely own the other team... but you are also going to end up on the other side of that sometimes, where you are the team getting destroyed. And that's no fun.

    Another Game Feature I think helps reduce cheating is in Call of Duty. There is a feature that can be enabled in multi-player games called the 'kill-cam'. It shows you the last 7 seconds or so before you died from the point of view of the guy that killed you. I find that watching the kill-cam from time to time reduces the perception that it might have been an 'unfair kill'. "He couldn't have possible seen me!" "I shot him a thousand times and he didn't die!". etc.

    In addition the kill-cam helps reduce camping (since you now know where they were when they killed you) and it might even give you some tips on how to play better.