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Turn Your FPS Skills Into Cash
Game|Life is posting about a new agreement between Valve and an outfit called Tournament.com that will allow for an official Counter-Strike/Half-Life 2 Multiplayer game competition service. It sounds a lot like online poker tournaments, where players ante into a pot and the winner walks away with the results. "Another option is a perpetual, ongoing game that players can drop into at any time. If you get killed, you lose $1. If you kill another player, you get $1. When your virtual 'wallet' is out of money, you're done playing. Until you add some more funds with a credit card or PayPal, that is. For now, Tournament.com is strictly small stakes. Entry fees for the example tournaments were $3.60 for each of six players, with an $18 pot split between first, second, and third place. Company representatives said they're considering high-roller tournaments, but want to make sure the service has been fully field-tested, and potential cheating methods blocked off, before big money starts getting thrown around." One of the findings of the SOE White Paper was that some people are perfectly happy making money off of their gaming hobby. How long before we see similar livelihoods via this service?
I don't care about this at all as a gamer.
As a computer scientist, I'm fascinated by the research potential of creating AI with for-profit motives. It even has some turingtest-esque features. "Did you just get fragged by billy or Stanfords KillBot version 3.2?"
I'd play it differently. Spread a trojan that sends you info about infected people playing, then match you against them, sending you screenshots of their hands all the while.
I mean, nothing's easier than seeing through a bluff when you know your opponent's hand.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Unlike MMORGs which are controlled almost entirely by server side user agents, first person shooters very vulnerable to cheating.
.txt filed associated with enabling this trivial hack!)...
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There are, even now, dozens of "hacks" that work with counterstrike - the most inventive give on screen itinerary information about players (which you can see through translucent walls) a la Deux Ex!
Allow me to ramble...
COD similarly suffers from cheaters. A sponsored (paid!) COD2 player was recently "discovered" cheating after a commercial hack manufacturer had their website's database exposed via a phpbb (iirc?) vulnerability. The happy-hacker was an admin at a gaming forum and compared the email addresses gleened from the site to ones registered on his forum... and tada, one of the biggest names in COD2 was a known cheat user... he even PAID $200 for it. (private cheats are almost always undetected)
Anti-cheat techniques often fail. VAC (now VAC2) - the Vale AntiCheat plugin - is notorious for being easy to sidle past. Other commercial varients such as Punk Buster either no longer support the games you want to play, or offer only a small degree better detection than the game manufacturer.
I was on a COD2 server last night, and Punk Buster kicked in doing a check, and the number of players went down from 20 to 3.
I may be wrong here, but the BF2 patches, compared to the release client, have seriously stepped up the anti-cheat detection. Alt-tabbing out of the game or running background processes on a single processor machine can make BF2 unbreakable as PunkBuster threads kick in to scan the system.
Most attempts at tracking and hashing memory have failed - there's too much ram on PCs nowadays! Without OS-level write handlers its very hard to track subversive programs. And I'm not even going to mention game-based "hacks" such as enabling the alpha channel on Valve textures (vtf files have a
Then there's always the driver. Seeing as there are so many ogl implementations and extended vendor drivers (ie: NGO drivers for nvidia hardware etc) it would be impossible to market a game that requires signed drivers!
Lets talk about the UK counter-strike scene for a sec...
C4U - See For Yourself - were, by all means, a talented clan. However, they fielded two known AND CAUGHT hackers for some time, Kritical, and Willzooo (less the l33tisms in their handles). I went to the UKs biggest lan event a few weeks back, as a gamer, only to find in none other than the counter-strike tournament, Kritical and Willzooo... To make my disgust worst, they were PLAYING for the UKs formost and successful sponsored team - Team Dignitas! http://www.team-dignitas.org/ - they're sponsored by Intel and Creative, and I can assure you these guys get a monthly salary for playing computer games (not to mention the hardware)...
So there you have it. Cheating is interlaced within the gaming community, ex-cheaters who have been banned from competitions and ridiculed by the community are forgotten about in only a matter of months, and later find themselves paid to play games.
There is no incentive not to cheat. It is ludicrous to bet on something where you cannot tell if someone is cheating or not.
Matt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PunkBuster
http://www.ggl.com/index.php?controller=News&meth
http://www.ukterrorist.com/news/wilzooo_hax/
The scammers will go where the money is, leaving the local games pure again.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
You know, if they made you wait a full week to redeem any money you put into the system, it would HEAVILLY discourage botters. Because, they'd spend, lets say, 20$ on their bots, have them go earn some money, if the bot gets discovered in the first week then they not only lose the 20$ they spent, but whatever that bot earned in that week and the time spent with the end machine running said bot.
I enjoy fragging some chump as much as anyone else, but if they lost money every time I got a good shot in, I'd actually start to feel bad after a few shots.
... glitch... (not a hack, not really a cheat, just a bit of a glitch), expected to only use it once or twice before people clued in and stayed out of that room, and instead I got this chump (or chumpette) who just went batty that I kept headshotting them when I couldn't see them. I laughed my ass off, so did my friend, so did most of the other people playing.
:)
Quick story: A few years ago, was playing Quake 3, Weapons Factory Arena mod, at a friends place. I discovered that when you turned on Player Name Labels, if you passed your crosshairs over an area that you could shoot through but couldn't see through (like a curtain over a window), the player name would pop up when you went over them, even though you couldn't actually see them.
So, I did what any good sniper would do. I found a hole to hide in, pointed my gun at the window, and waited for labels to start popping up. A few shots later I had the exact height for headshots.
Some chucklehead started running in there. I shot him. He ran back. I shot him again. He tried to sneak back in. I shot him again. All headshots. He started doing nothing but running from the spawn point to this room, trying to find a way to avoid me. He'd duck, he'd run back and forth, he'd bunnyjump. All the while he was cursing me, accusing me of cheating, and going completely rabid and foamy-mouth. I must have headshotted him 50 times before the timer ran out.
I thought it was hilarious. I'd found a small
Now, if he lost a buck every time I nailed him... I'd really feel bad. Sure, it's his fault, but still, $50 lost and you don't understand how you lost it? That would suck.
Also brings to mind the old Descent days. We used to play v1 multiplayer in the university LAN. It was awesome 8 of us rippin it up. Thanks to my ability to think 3D (vs most of the other guys who all thought in terms of "flat"), I was the resident sniper, hanging nose down over doorways with homing missiles ready, jumping out of pits or corners in the ceiling, and of course, hiding out while they all fought, and then wiping out the winner.
All perfectly acceptable in a winner-take-all game for fun. But if I mega-missile someone up the ass because they went blasting through a doorway without looking, and then nail everyone who comes for their loot, and then nail the respawns who come looking for a powerup... well, it just doesn't sound as fun when there's serious money to be lost for everyone.
We've all had those days when we just can't accept that we're losing, and we have to keep trying (I did that yesterday in WoW... stupid spider queen). And while that's all fine when it's for fun, or when there's a 1-time bet on it... if you suddenly have a crappy night and are $200 in the hole because of it... I just wouldn't want to be the cause of that. Whether they deserved it or not.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.