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Meet Korea's Gaming Rockstars
PC Gamer has up a short piece looking at some of the big names in Korean gaming. The piece describes an event, and discusses the training regimen these console contestants go through. "I visited the A-team house, which is in a residential street in northern Seoul. Fourteen pro gamers live here, together with their team coach. It's half frat house, half sweatshop. Upstairs are the dorms. The team's top two players, Ma Jae Yoon (handle sAviOr) and Seo Ji Hoon (handle XellOs) share a room that's not much bigger than two single beds. The others are crammed into bunks in two other rooms. Ma, aged 21, is currently South Korea's number one Starcraft player and, according to Sean Oh, a millionaire. You wouldn't be able to glean this from looking at his bedroom."
1. Serve on a fishing ship, in the military or... as a professional gamer.
2. Endure austere conditions, long hours, harsh discipline.
3. There is no step 3
4. Profit!
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
Now I have an idea why their RPG's are such grindfests... These guys are HARDCORE!
http://coinmill.com/KRW_USD.html#KRW=1000000
Looks like a Millionare in Korea can barely afford a PS3.
Can someone explain to me the appeal of watching other people play video games? I just don't get it.
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I got invitationals from South Korea, but I just thought it was spam. I'm kicking myself now. But at least Starcraft 2 will come out soon. SK has lots of gaming centers and this used to make for refined strategy over creative strategy. And one thing that Starcraft has is psychology. If you know exactly what your opponent is going to do, they have no chance. I think SC2 will have more advanced players from the get go than SC 1 did because SC1 was one of the first competitive online games with a ladder system. I was able to kick ass in Wacraft 3 as #1 1v1,2v2 and 3v3. So I think I'll be able to do well in SC2.
The only reason I quit Starcraft was because of the map hack. People stopped playing on Battlenet, but I had no where else to train so I was screwed. I hope they punish map hackers in Starcraft 2. There are a lot of ways to do it. One way would be a report map hacker button: and when someone gets to the top 10 of reported maphackers, people at Blizzard could review a replay. Another way is to open up a ton(1,000,000) of memory addresses that allow map vision, and none are legit. If someone changes one of these values, they'll be reported to Blizzard and their CDkey banned. Anyway there are lots of ways of doing it. I look forward to Starcraft 2 as being my game of choice.
God spoke to me.
Or maybe the game could just be secure and not allow map hacking at all?
Before they die of exhaustion from a marathon gaming session!
keep playing video games 24/7 guys! More for me!
Monstar L
I've always enjoyed watching the Korean players go head to head in competitive Starcraft, cause they are the best at it. Nothing is quite as insane as seeing Slayer_Boxer go absolutely apeshit on someone with a few dropships and siege tanks. Some of the tactics and strategies they implore are so far from anything anyone else probably thought of in an RTS. It really makes for entertaining viewing. Some games obviously don't, I think really it comes down to more fast paced RTS games and obviously FPS games that make for great virtual spectator sports.
Aw Frell this
But it's never enough.
... but not that small. Also even if there are quite a few after a bit of debugging it wouldn't be too hard to find and identify the real one either. Even if you don't compromise the map data you can always just compromise the network data ...
A million map data sites? All having to be stored and updated? No, I don't think so. The data is relatively small
Data on a non trusted machine is not secure data, no matter how much you want it to be.
Data are not singular, no matter how much you want it to be. ;)
Or maybe the game could just be secure and not allow map hacking at all?
Go server side for everything and have the installed game be nothing more than a dumb client?
Map hacking occurs because the enemy player position exists within ram. By removing a fog layer or dummying enemy position graphics on top of the fog. The onyl way to truly avoid this is to prevent your opponents position from being distributed until they come into view. But the problem is network latency, limited server side resources, etc.. keep it from being very practical. The best you can do is a shifting array of ram checksums, obsfucation, banning, and statistics. Unless you make the entire load server side. Which is possible these days and network latency isn't as much of a concern but it's not an easy problem to solve.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
"limited server side resources" is crap. GOOD crap, in the sense that battle.net is free and Blizzard hasn't had to spend more than pocket change to keep SC and Diablo running all these years, but crap from the POV of cheating. Apply the FPS server model, dedicate a beefy machine to every 30-60 players, and you can do all sorts of wondrous things. The client doesnt have to be dumb, it just shouldnt be sent things it doesnt need to know. As to latency, for the game to be competitive you need minimal lag anyways, and how far is a unit going to move in 1/10th of a second? Sure, you have to send a *LITTLE* more data than the client needs, such as positions of units and projectiles that are [lag time]*[movement speed] distance into the fog, and that would be visible to a map hacker, but it would be orders of magnitude less trouble than now. EverQuest had to solve the same problem when people were sniffing the data stream to find NPC positions miles away, they just stopped sending that data, problem solved.
There is a problem with the FPS client-server model: if your server dies you're screwed. Let's face it, Starcraft and other RTSes do not need an environment with as low latency as, say, Counter-Strike. At the same time, CS is only fun with a fair number of players, necessitating dedicated servers, while Starcraft has more potential for quick pick-up games between random people.
Which is to say... Nobody wants to connect to a dedicated server for a quick dirty RTS match, and if the hosting player quits (all too common in RTSes) nobody gets to finish the game. The beauty of the original Starcraft was that a player could drop and the rest could keep playing as if nothing happened.
I think they could upgrade their dropped code too. If a player drops, he should be given the opportunity to rejoin the game. This is critical to top ranked 2v2s at the beginning of the game when your partner drops and you just conceed the loss because your partner messages you from the chat room,"I got dropped(duh), I'm bored, lets get another game, your odds of winning are extremely low anyway so quit"
God spoke to me.
A million booleans that if you toggle them the map hack is engaged, and your CDKEY is marked for bannage. Sure, you don't need a mil, 100k would do the trick too. The key is there are a lot of anti-hack tricks you can pull when you know the tools the hackers are going to try first. The interesting thing is that Blizzard doesn't have to ban it immediately. They could let the hack distribute so all the hackers get to a saturation point, then Blizzard bans them all at once.
God spoke to me.
ftfa..
Korea's #1 Starcraft Player: I would like to have a good car and a fancy girlfriend.
um.... isn't it supposed to be the other way around?
...well, at least the ones who haven't dropped dead from 72 hour gaming marathons...
The South Koreans won't be playing SC 2. They'll be sticking with SC 1. The reason is simple: they're the only folks around who still play the game, so they can run around claiming they're "the best" at something. When SC 2 comes out they'll have *competition*, and that's something that any self-respecting South Korean hates - because Koreans tend to get creamed when they have to actually compete, whether it be in something important like business or innocuous like video games.
Mark my words: when SC 2 hits the market the Koreans will stick with SC 1 precisely because they'll be terrified of being shown up as being second-rate and second-best. They'll make up a dozen excuses for not switching to SC 2, and field another dozen complaints about how "grand conspiracy X" is seeking to "repress" the mighty-yet-obviously-racially-superior Korean people from video-game greatness, but it'll all boil down to the same pansy-assed fear that they'll get their asses kicked when real competition wanders on to the scene. And for a people who think themselves innately superior to everyone else on the planet, getting their nuts handed to them on a plate doesn't jive with the 'Korea-uber-alles' worldview.
Sir, I know this may sound strange, but you seem to have a skyscraper on your shoulder.
Yeah. And?
It's a fact of life. If your ISP dies, you're screwed. If your network card dies, you're screwed. If the batteries in your wireless keyboard die, you're screwed.
Not a big deal. Halo manages to create quick pick-up games with the simple model of, if at least one of the players is visible from the Internet, they get to be the server. Downside is that player can cheat, and no one else can -- but without the one server, everyone can cheat anyway.
The beauty of a single server, dedicated or not, is that you only need one Internet-facing computer. The original Starcraft is pretty useless behind a NAT without some port-forwarding tricks, but everyone had to do that, not just one "server" player.
Oh, by the way -- try Natural Selection. It uses the FPS model, because it is an FPS -- but it's also an RTS. (Or, if you don't have Half-Life, try Tremulous.) It's not Starcraft, but it's an example of the direction this might go to support a more centrallized model.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
And it leaves Blizzard two choices:
- Host all games on dedicated blizzard servers, including all the 2v8 comp stomps out there. This results in far more security and reduced cheating, but can you imagine the cost?
- Allow one player to be the host, which introduces host cheating issues, but assuming the host is reliable it drastically reduces the odds of a client cheating. But, if the serving player leaves, the whole game goes kaput (and in RTSes, players tend to leave a lot)
- Do peer to peer networking (a la the original SC), which introduces vast cheating issues to be overcome, but games will continue regardless of player joins and leaves.
I'm a white guy living in Korea. I get to hear about the 'racially-superior' Korean people every fucking day of my life. Along with, of course, why Japan should be nuked off the face of the planet, and how all 'Africans' (meaning anyone with dark skin) are just dangerous animals in human form that need to be exterminated.
Hitler would've loved this place, if he could've gotten past the slanted eyes.
Yes, "limited server side resources" is a problem. If you apply the FPS server model, you aren't dealing with 30-60 objects : you are dealing with 300-600 objects. A typical 1-to-1 starcraft game tends to go all the way up to 300+ objects, and if you are thinking of 3-on-3 or something close to that, you are screwed. Now, multiply the 300 objects by the number of battle.net players. Suddenly, Blizzard needs to assign one machine per game (that is, approximately six players) and still cannot be sure if they can manage to do it. Plus, the players won't even be possible to play without insane amount of bandwidth and network stability.
What's worse, is that the reason the FPS/MMORPG server model works for 30-60 players is that the server doesn't need to distribute all the players' movements to all players. Only a small number of players (around a dozen) will be sufficient. However, RTS games tend to have a large number of objects within vision. Thus, the client side needs to track the movement of about 200 objects even when the total objects on the game is around 300.
I suspect the method that Starcraft (and I believe, Warcraft 3, too) uses is by transmitting every player's mouse and keyboard behavior to each other. Each player runs its own world with the same input. As long as the game is completely deterministic (with all random number generators seeded with the same number), they have the same behavior. If there is any inconsistiency, it's either software bug (which sometimes did happen on corner cases), or some kind of hack, and the player gets disconnected. Since it's unlikely to have a player generate more than ten operations per second, the network overhead is low.
One possible anti-hack solution is to cross-check critical data of the game, for example, once every five seconds. These critical data can be anything - unit position, amount of resources, fog-of-war, etc. If any player disagree, the game is automatically canceled and the replay file (which consists of all players' key/mouse movement) is submitted to Blizzard for further analysis whether its a bug or a hack. Combined with other memory-checking or whatsoever blah blah solution, strict banning policies, and some FUD, I guess it will be enough to scare away most people.
Remember even the maphack people are playing for fun, not for profit. If playing for profit, you shouldn't be playing on the net anyway.
Allow one player to host, and allow it to fail over to another player. Use a central server only to track the state of who's in the game, who's the server, etc.
Problem solved, and it helps a bit with the cheating.
If it took me all of thirty seconds to come up with that, why didn't Blizzard just do it that way, instead of making it hell for anyone behind a NAT? And this will only become more of a problem in the future; I have seen ISPs throw all their clients behind one massive NAT gateway, rather than, say, going to IPv6.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If you think about it, it makes sense that millionaires are usually cheap bastards. Unless you are a cheap bastard, you usually won't become a millionaire. All of the people I know who have tons of money retained their money not by clever investments or lottery winnings or something, but simply by not spending it for years and years.