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How Cheaters Cheat at Halo 2
An anonymous reader writes "Built on a network that automatically bans gamers that have modified their Xbox, Xbox Live should be nearly cheat-proof. However, it's not, as anyone playing Halo 2 online already knows. How do cheaters on Xbox Live manage to artificially boost their rankings? What is Bridging? What is Standby? This article takes a look at what exactly is done when a cheater cheats, and what exactly Bungie is doing about it. It includes videos and some very funny letters from 13-year-olds that have been baned from matchmaking on Live and are desperately trying to worm their way back onto the system."
I was wondering what all those terms meant!
I remember a few months back me and my friends were playing CTF on Relic. We were up against some cheaters who got a flying warthog (the jeep for, for those who don't play). Well, there's nothing like the thrill of grabbing the flag, turning around and seeing a flying warthog right behind you. We ended up tying that game, and let me tell you, that was better than any win would be against non-cheaters.
(That of coarse isn't the norm. Getting "stand-by"'ed as they call it really sucks, and some cheaters make it so you spawn in the air and die instantally.)
The article sums itself up by saying that they don't understand why people would cheat and artificially inflate their rating.
Duh! To be at the top!
How many times do you see on gaming forums some clown posting "FIRST!" or "First Page!", like it matters. Just about every Blizzard post on their forums has that stupidity going on, and you even see it happening on non-competition sites like the forums for Order of the Stick webcomic.
It's all about having bragging rights, or as I like to call it, "showing off the size of your e-penis".
It's almost homo-erotic at this point. (Not that there is anything wrong with being gay, btw.) Before the computer game evolution, guys usually tried to have bragging rights in some sport, and a lot of the hot "cheerleader" type chicks dug the guy with the letterman jacket. The guys tended to get buff, be athletic, and do something worthy of praise. (They also tended to be morons, but that's besides the point.) They competed with each other to gain the attention of women, mostly.
Now, we have the same behavior going on, but with computer gamers. They have to be the best, be the coolest, etc. Except, there aren't a lot of chicks out there that will drool all over them. What they get is other guys wishing to be like them, instead of chicks wanting to be with them. There isn't a big call from girls to date the guy with a high Halo2 ranking, but the H.S. quarterback still gets a hot chick more often than not.
I don't know about you, but when I was in H.S. or college, I didn't want the adulation of other guys. I wanted to be noticed by chicks. But hey, that was just me.
Not only that, they aren't evening using any really nasty networking tricks. The article suggests they basically just drop packets at will. In the world of PC games we have (among other things) these nasty things called "aim proxies". Cheater's game connects to another machine under his control which maintains the actual connection to the server and monitors the game state as the traffic passes through. Every time he fires a shot, it changes the outbound traffic of what he was aiming at to say, the head of the nearest enemy player. Go ahead and scan his client/PC for cheats, its perfectly clean. Nasty.
What kinds of cheating is not technological? Stalking or harrassing a teammate instead of getting the token/bomb/flag, offering to tell opponents where teammates are in exchange for not being killed, teaching about the map (three players climbing a trail in a corner) in a public game instead of playing the game, quitting early so teammates quickly become outnumbered, screaming so nobody can hear useful information.