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."
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.
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.
Plus, if you're on a console and you see your opponent cheating, just reach over and yank his control out of the socket. Revenge is sweet.
Between glitchers and cheaters a bit better, because, quite simply, what they wrote isn't really what's going on at all.
.
/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
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!)
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!
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.