The State of Cheating in Online Games

Gary Mullins writes "GameApex has a nice article up meant to inform other gamers about the presence of cheating in online games. The article covers the types of cheats to be aware of, the type of person the average cheater is, and even includes plenty of information from anti-cheat experts from PunksBusted, United Admins, and The Cheat Police." From the article: "If recording a demo is not an option then you can always use screenshots. While these are not as effective they do work. Once reviewed by you, if you do suspect the player is cheating, forward the information to the server admin. This information is always in the listing of the server or even in scrolling messages on the server in-game. Speaking as someone who has been a server admin, when you have a player who you suspect is too good to be true make sure you check them out before immediately kick or ban them. Sometimes it is better to err on the side of caution and presume the player is skilled, than to assume they are cheating. If they really are cheating it will be proven sooner or later anyway."

Comments

Hardest cheating to spot and stop

[Anonymous Coward]

Buying MMORPG money/items with real money. I don't know where it stands as cheating but many games probhibit it and it feels dirty to me. If you can't really as playing succeed what is the point?

At the same time it is virtually impossible to weed away from the games because any effective resolutions would require extremely privacy intrusive techniques.

I play myself EVE Online and there are some 2500 in-game money grinders online 23/7. It seems that the company that runs the game is completely powerless to come up with any solution that really works. 9/10 of the grinders do not use macros or any other applications. Most usually it is a Chinese little kid in front of some 20 monitors pressing the proper buttons. They have studied all the means the CCP can use at this moment and have their ways around of them all. They seem to keep going and going undetected and handled for months and months. Monetarily it is very nice. I calculated that I could myself earn some 5000 euros/month by grinding Eve money if I wanted to, after all the expenses.

Re:Hardest cheating to spot and stop

[RsG]

Alternatively, designing a multiplayer RPG to be something other than a grind would also help. I suspect that it's the heavy reliance on time and money sinks that really screw these games over - for weak willed gamers, buying gold/characters/plat/whatever is the path of least resistance when compared to grinding for hours on end.

The problem is that the appeal of single player RPGs doesn't translate well into a multiplayer environment. Most developers try to fatten up their MMOs with grinding content, designed to keep players on a leveling treadmill for money and experience. As long as this remains normal, the games will likely suffer from gold selling and the like.

Also, a skills based system without character transfers would still be open to account trading, even if the EULA specifies otherwise - as long as the seller can trade a username and password for real life cash, they can't be stopped.

False accusations

[Jackmn]

I find that accusations of cheating tend to be far more prevalent than actual cheating.

I used to be in a CAL-M clan with a few mates in Day of Defeat. When we got together to pub (which was fairly rare) somebody would always end up getting banned for 'hacking' by a poor server admin, and we'd be stuck looking for a new server.