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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.
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.
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
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!