Infinity Ward Fights Against Modern Warfare 2 Cheaters

Faithbleed writes "IW's Robert Bowling reports on his twitter account that Infinity Ward is giving 2,500 Modern Warfare 2 cheaters the boot. The news comes as the war between IW and MW2's fans rages over the decision to go with IWnet hosting instead of dedicated servers. Unhappy players were quick to come up with hacks that would allow their own servers and various other changes." Despite the dedicated-server complaints, Modern Warfare 2 has sold ridiculously well.

Comments

VAC

[roguetrick]

They decided to use VAC instead of Punkbuster on the PC. Like many of their decisions, this one wasn't well thought out.

Re:VAC

[roguetrick]

Also, this says alot about the uproar over no dedicated servers:
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.joystiq.com/media/2009/11/gam_boycottfail_580-1258143415.jpg

Re:VAC

[OverlordQ]

PunkBuster is just as vulnerable to being bypassed and disabled as VAC is, so saying they should have used PunkBuster is a cop out.

Re:VAC

[roguetrick]

I don't know the specifics of it, but I was under the impression that the guys running punkbuster had more experience with the underlying platform.

Re:VAC

[sopssa]

Not only that, but PunkBuster actually listens to people. Valve explicitly tells everyone not to to submit info about cheaters, but just says that "VAC will ban them". Of course, that only applies to the public hacks that they can make signatures for.

Re:VAC

[dyefade]

That shot showed 833 members.
The game has sold how many copies so far?

Re:VAC

[Narpak]

They decided to use VAC instead of Punkbuster on the PC. Like many of their decisions, this one wasn't well thought out.

I personally feel that the only system I have seen so far with a reasonable rate of success is dedicated servers with some sort of permaban of accounts caught cheating. While by no means a perfect system; my personal experience (with TF2 as that is the only FPS game besides MW2 I have played over the last few years) was that I found a gaming site that ran servers for a variety of games. An extended group of people frequented those servers, creating a community of sorts, and I personally never had much problems with cheaters (that I can recall). Either they were banned/kicked swiftly and effectively, or they never logged on that particular set of servers; or possible a combination of the two. Though it should be mentioned that over the last two weeks, or so, of playing Modern Warfare 2 I haven't really seen a lot of players that I could confidently claim were cheating; though I have seen a few that were ridiculously good. Perhaps that is just me not really paying attention.

Cheating or no cheating, sales or no sales, I personally feel that despite Modern Warfare 2 being a really great game at its core, I won't be playing much more than I have; as it really feels impersonal when all the other players are random. And there is no forum for me to hang around talking some trash between matches and evenings. This of course isn't helped by the fact that Iwnet seem to have about a 30% (number I pulled out of my behind but it is how I have experienced it so far) failrate; disconnects, game closings, kicked from a lobby before you have connected to it, random ping, and people leaving games because a map comes up that they don't want to play (Highrise and Estate seem to see half the "group" leave when they come into rotation) leading to lobby's closing most of the time.

Re:VAC

[mister_playboy]

That would make a nice sample image for the "Gallery of Wrong" in this article.

Re:VAC

[Anonymous Coward]

WHOOSH! You missed the point. Those are members of a group calling for a boycott. Most of them are playing MW2 (indicated by the status under their avatar).

Re:VAC

[Bakkster]

But Punkbuster has its own issues. Many players were not able to play on Punkbuster-enabled servers in CoD4 because some driver or other bit of code caused an incompatibility.

Really, any anti-cheat will eventually be defeatable. The bigger issue is that since IW is running all the servers you have to depend on them to remove any cheaters, rather than being able to play on a server with a good team of admins keeping them away. It's possible IW will do an even better job of this, but I think it's that choice that people want.

Re:VAC

[FictionPimp]

Plus most of them bought the game anyways I'm sure.

I've just come to the conclusion I'm the only person on the planet who stuck to my guns and didn't buy this game.

Re:VAC

[PopeRatzo]

I don't know what the press release says, but I see from the "Top Sellers" chart on the Steam portal that MW2 has already dropped to number 3 behind a bargain basement Mirror's Edge and a bundle of older THQ games w/ Red Faction Guerrilla.

Something tells me MW2 is not meeting Infinity Ward's expectations despite all the whistling past the graveyard. I'm sure it'll be a money maker, but god-willing, it will be a disappointment for them considering their willingness to crap in the face of the loyal customers who made the COD franchise successful.

.

Re:VAC

[Anonymous Coward]

The bigger issue is that since IW is running all the servers you have to depend on them to remove any cheaters, rather than being able to play on a server with a good team of admins keeping them away.

What servers? Was there not some huge stink that blew up just before release was when it was announced that there were not going to be any dedicated servers.

Re:VAC

[Aqualung812]

The point isn't the 833 members, it is that almost all of the 833 members of the "boycott" group were playing the game. It is pretty easy to assume based on that image that even if 2 million people boycotted, almost all of them would still buy the game.

Re:VAC

[Eraesr]

Actually, the PC version sold very well. See http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=104549

Re:VAC

[sopssa]

Even if there isn't dedicated servers, there still are listen servers.

Re:VAC

[Angeret]

Heh, you're not alone. There's a bunch of us who wouldn't pirate it on PC or console, let alone buy it. Personally, I wouldn't install it even if made compulsory. A shame really, I purchased COD 1 & 2 based on my enjoyment of 4 in both single and multiplayer games - the only mistake I made was buying COD5. And this turkey? All the reasons given by others as well as not wanting to gun down (or at least participate in) the massacre of civilians. A personal moral decision if you will.

Re:VAC

[Grimbleton]

I don't let anything running Punkbuster anywhere near my system

Re:VAC

[halcyon1234]

PunkBuster is just as vulnerable to being bypassed and disabled as VAC is, so saying they should have used PunkBuster is a cop out.

You're right. They should have used Cop Out instead. Every other company uses it, and it has predictable and consistent results

Re:VAC

[PingSpike]

From most of the comments I've read about this game and the uproar about it, most people now consider "Pirating with Righteousness" the no-lose alternative to boycotting. It is understandable. I mean, how can we expect some one to live without something so vital to their very survival? It would be like boycotting food! I'm pretty sure there aren't even any other FPS games out there available so what are they going to do?

Re:VAC

[sopssa]

Now I ruin the joke for everyone, but Steam shows all of the playing users in start of the list and non-playing/away/offline members in the end. So the actual amount of users playing is a lot smaller percentage.

Re:VAC

[sopssa]

Too bad, you're actually missing a lot of fun. The single player is quite cool, but the fun just begins when you're co-opping the extra missions with a friend or playing multiplayer. The leveling and perks system make it really fun (perks actually adjust your character and playing style a lot) and IWNet works really well. Dedicated server support would of course be nice for those who need it and to keep cheaters off the server, but it's also nice to just jump in the game. And if you're playing with friends, your party will always go to same side and you see each other in game as different color.

Re:VAC

[AstrumPreliator]

Assuming for a moment that this sample size of 21 people, 11 of which are playing MW2, is an accurate representation of the total population (it probably isn't) there's still a few problems. Just like in the Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott group I'm sure there were people who supported the game and were not boycotting it but were a part of the group*. That's sort of like presenting the chance for a male to get cancer and including the results from women in the calculations. Even if this isn't the case there's still a sampling bias. Steam groups are organized by Administrators, In-Game Persons, Online Persons, and Offline Persons if I remember correctly, feel free to correct me. That picture shows the first 21 members of the first page which shows the admin and the people in-game. This isn't a very random sample of this (sub)population.

I've seen this picture thrown around quite a bit and it irritates me. Not because I think the boycott worked, given the Steam statistics I'm pretty sure it didn't, but because the picture is quite disingenuous.

* The group is invite only now, I'm pretty sure it wasn't earlier, but I could be wrong.

Re:VAC

[KalAl]

You don't have to participate in it, there's an option to skip the sequence right before it, as well as any time during it.

Re:VAC

[GameboyRMH]

+1. The rootkit approach to anti-cheating is stupid. The anti-cheating app should be a regular service the user has full control over. There is no need for a rootkit - if the anti-cheating service crashes or throws an error, the game closes, it's that simple. Any other problems are due to poor game design and lack of decent cryptography. An online-playable game has to be secure, if people can mod the game files or interact with the game in any unauthorized way, that's a security flaw. A little server-side checking would go a long way too. Is player run speed greater than X, jump height greater than Y? BAN. Aim doesn't match signals from the mouse/joystick (verified by anti-cheating service)? BAN. No direct access to the hardware to check that? Have fun playing offline.

Re:VAC

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if there isn't dedicated servers, there still are listen servers.

Well of course. They're hosted on a user's machine which is naturally going to be a listen server.

The post I responded to said:

The bigger issue is that since IW is running all the servers you have to depend on them to remove any cheaters, rather than being able to play on a server with a good team of admins keeping them away.

Infinity Ward isn't running any servers. They may be running matchmaker servers (or perhaps Steam is providing that part of the service too) but not the actual systems the game is hosted on.

So there's not really any way for Infinity Ward to swiftly deal with cheaters in the game. The only way cheaters will be swiftly dealt with on listen servers is via player kick votes.

And how players themselves will manage to keep cheaters permanently out of their games until a VAC ban kicks in, well I don't know if that's even possible in a practical way. So I'd fully expect that even if a cheater gets kicked out of a game he'll just hop into another one, and I also expect you might run into him in other games until such time as the VAC banhammer hits him.

Infinity Ward's removal of cheaters from games will be limited to cheaters detected and banned via VAC2.

Re:VAC

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the PC version sold very well. See http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=104549

Lots of people are clueless, yes

Re:VAC

[Xest]

"Really, any anti-cheat will eventually be defeatable. The bigger issue is that since IW is running all the servers you have to depend on them to remove any cheaters, rather than being able to play on a server with a good team of admins keeping them away. It's possible IW will do an even better job of this, but I think it's that choice that people want."

This is key, really on the PC the best option would've been to include an XBox live style setup so you can select a player as a player you wish to avoid in future. What happens then is when you start matchmaking it wont matchmake you with these players. If people cheat they will soon find a lack of people playing with them. If the feedback is sent to IW, then it'd be a good indicator for who to check for cheating to give account bans too as well, if someone has 500 players blacklisting them then it'd suggest there's probably something there to check out.

Re:VAC

[Angeret]

Which is another bone of contention - pay more money for less game to start with and I can skip a part of the game, therefore making it shorter? Pass, I'd rather go play Solitaire. I know a couple of people on consoles (who laughed at PC gamers' apparently pointless whining) who bought MW2 and wished they hadn't.

Re:VAC

[Bengie]

I wonder if something like this would work.

Add someone to a personal ignore list. The match making would have a negative weight for people in your ignore list and try to put you in a game with fewer of those people. If someone tries to join a game and 50% or more of those people have that person in their ignore lists, the match making won't put them in that game.

Make this list server side and reset after 2 months. Enough time for VAC to kick in. If someone gets voted a second time after the reset by the same person, they would get perm added to that person's list.

This would make it so
#1. you'd be less likely to join games with cheaters or people you thought were cheaters.
#2. if enough people thought that person was a cheater, the cheater could not join their games

Any thoughts?

Re:VAC

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm one of those people who was personally effected. PunkBuster used to kick me at least once a day for absolutely no reason. It eventually got a little better when I disabled Data Execution Protection in windows, but its downright offensive to have to disable security measures just so a game can vouch for you not cheating.

Re:VAC

[kextyn]

I was sticking to my personal boycott of the game which was hard because I knew it was a great console game (PC and XBox 360 gamer here). My brother bought the 360 version for me as a birthday present so of course I have to play online with him now. On PC I'll just stick with CoD4.

Re:VAC

[Jaysyn]

Nope not alone. But I wouldn't have bought it if it did come with a dedicated server, I really just don't like reality-based war games. Not my cup of tea.

Re:VAC

[aj50]

I saw MW2 played at a LAN at uni a couple of weeks ago and I have to say I was unimpressed.

The lobby and matchmaking service is pretty nice, allowing you to form a party and then look for games where you can play on the same team, a pity it doesn't work so well in practise. You're stuck with the problem that a large proportion of people leave as soon as they see several people bearing the same tag join the game meaning that you have to go through the matchmaking process several times. Then there's the more technical problem of the game sometimes leaving some players behind when the lobby joins or leaves a game.

When you actually get into a game, there's a small chance that the dynamically chosen "best" host will be terrible and have huge lag spikes. (This while we're all connected through the university JANET connection.) Eventually the game decides to migrate the host, everything stops, a new host is chosen and then the game continues. Then the host quits because his team is losing and we go the the "Choosing a new host" screen again, and again.

This must be some definition of "works really well" that I was previously unaware of.

Re:VAC

[Thrymm]

I also didn't bother to buy it because of non dedicated servers. My view won't change either, there are other games to play, even though I really did want to play it.

Re:VAC

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, either play the mission or don't, but stop complaining in both cases.

Re:VAC

[Anonymous Coward]

IW doesn't run any game servers whatsoever. Only the matchmaking servers.

The players host the servers, the system picks based on a number of factors (latency between clients primarily), and has host migration if that player quits or it becomes severely laggy (in theory, in practice I've had several games where host migration didn't work out too well).

Re:VAC

[sopssa]

Last night I actually saw a dream where the "party" menu showed "join dedicated server" button too. It must be coming!

Re:VAC

[Ash Vince]

They decided to use VAC instead of Punkbuster on the PC. Like many of their decisions, this one wasn't well thought out.

Actually I think it was a brilliant idea.

Ever submitted a support request to evenbalance? (the makers of PB) I have and they are terrible, they reply 3 or 4 days later saying they will not help you or saying some stock answer that doesn't really answer your question. Steam's support department on the other hand are actually helpful.

The problem seems to stem from the fact that if I as a customer submit a problem to PB, and PB tell me to take a running jump there us nothing I can do about it. I am not able to influence a games developers decision to use PB, and the company will probably never even hear about my issue unless I complain to them afterwards. With Steam on the other hand they are also the people who sold me the title. This causes a slight change in the support teams helpfulness since they actually know they are customer facing. Evenbalance support on the hand is not customer facing, it is end-user facing instead and this makes the world of difference to their underlying attitude.

My other issue with PB is how the seem to value security through obscurity above all else. I have never like this approach from PB, especially when I have to run their software as an Administrator level process on my PC. To my knowledge, Steam does not prompt me for the same user privilege level when starting although I MW2is the first VAC enabled game I have bought.

Maybe I am just hoping that the VAC will be better then EvenBalance because I know they cannot be much worse.

Re:VAC

[Bakkster]

Infinity Ward isn't running any servers. They may be running matchmaker servers (or perhaps Steam is providing that part of the service too) but not the actual systems the game is hosted on.

So there's not really any way for Infinity Ward to swiftly deal with cheaters in the game. The only way cheaters will be swiftly dealt with on listen servers is via player kick votes.

And how players themselves will manage to keep cheaters permanently out of their games until a VAC ban kicks in, well I don't know if that's even possible in a practical way. So I'd fully expect that even if a cheater gets kicked out of a game he'll just hop into another one, and I also expect you might run into him in other games until such time as the VAC banhammer hits him.

Infinity Ward's removal of cheaters from games will be limited to cheaters detected and banned via VAC2.

That's what I meant to say. IW says who gets to play, and they're the only ones who can. A private group of players can no longer create a clean community and ban cheaters, griefers, bigots, and other undesirables.

I was under the impression that players themselves were limited as to how much they could do against cheaters. I thought there was no vote kick (though I don't have the game to check) because otherwise players would vote kick players better than themselves. But yes, there's still a lag, and any new cheater in your server will cause nothing but problems until they decide to leave.

Re:VAC

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't buy it either. I canceled my pre-order and that was that. I have no intentions to ever buy this game. It's pointless without dedicated servers.

At first I was angry because I was really looking forward to the game, now.. Now I just don't care. It's just another game, and in this case a crappy console port. There will be other games, and better games.

Re:VAC

[Bakkster]

This is key, really on the PC the best option would've been to include an XBox live style setup so you can select a player as a player you wish to avoid in future. What happens then is when you start matchmaking it wont matchmake you with these players. If people cheat they will soon find a lack of people playing with them. If the feedback is sent to IW, then it'd be a good indicator for who to check for cheating to give account bans too as well, if someone has 500 players blacklisting them then it'd suggest there's probably something there to check out.

XBox Live ratings (avoid/prefer) do not affect ranked matchmaking (to prevent people from just avoiding the better players). This is also ranked matchmaking, so I doubt they would let you avoid. The avoid is meant for annoying players, rather than those who should get banned.

However, there is the option to report those who are cheating or otherwise breaking the terms of service. That's the way players get identified for bans.

Re:VAC

[mrdoogee]

What are the technical advantages of using Punkbuster? I've never (knowingly) played a game that used it, although I have played VAC secured games and have no complaints.

Re:VAC

[mrdoogee]

It may have been just you and me. All of my friends who were all wound up about it and moaned about all the problems they had with it bought it for full retail on launch day and play it nightly. I never really liked the MW franchise so I never planned to buy it anyway. I just stick to TF2 and like it that way.

Re:VAC

[PopeRatzo]

When a company releases sales figures, they need to be taken with a grain of salt.

MW2 might sell better than COD4 and still not meet expectations.

Re:VAC

[Angeret]

You may have missed the point on that one. First you get a game where you are given a moral choice to make - I've already made my position clear on that. Then you find that due to the choice made, a game which has already been noted by many as being quite short in the single player mode gets shorter after PC players have clearly been ripped off by inflated pricing, removal of features, etc, etc.

So, it's not a case of complaining in both cases, it's a clear case of adding insult to injury, followed by a badly considered AC post. Glad it's not Monday. I don't like Mondays.

Re:VAC

[Anonymous Coward]

>> They decided to use VAC instead of Punkbuster on the PC. Like many of their decisions, this one wasn't well thought out.

Punkbuster it's a piece of crap, have you played quake live recently? absurd stuff like rails with 180 damage, almost everyone use wallhacks, so much people that they don't even care to try to hide it from the other players. and Id^g^g^gBethesda does not give a crap!

They just say: record and send a demo blablabla join the cue blablabla we will don't do shit because offending player is our buddy blablabla stop whining n00b blablabla.

Does anyone knows a good multiplayer FPS that IS NOT OWNED BY CHEATERS??

Re:VAC

[Anonymous Coward]

He's absolutely spot on in that you seem to want to eat your cake and have it too. I suppose the solution you'd want would be to have the option to skip the mission and have it replaced with one of the exact same length where you, I don't know, hug puppies or distribute cookies to Girl Guides.

Re:VAC

[KalAl]

While I can understand that concern, I know that for many people (including myself) the multiplayer aspect of the game is the selling point, with the single player being a nice bonus. Granted I'll be playing on 360 and not PC, but when I can only get one game this season it's probably going to be the sequel to a game that had incredibly high replayability for me in the past.

Re:VAC

[roguetrick]

There is no inherent claim that this is a representative sample. The picture is an example of a self selected group of the population who announced their desires to boycott the game. Then those people did not boycott the game, indicating a ton of noise but no substance. Your analogy would be applicable if you included people who never announced their intentions to boycott the game, but these guys certainly did. Its not as if joining steam groups is compulsory or done without the individuals consent.

Re:VAC

[Angeret]

Or, perhaps, an alternate storyline where you would do your utmost to stop the massacre from going ahead or at least minimise innocent casualties instead of joining in (some people just enjoy killing, don't care who or what or why), walking through without firing (as you can do) or simply skipping (less for more). It might change the outcome of the game if you got an alternate option or two, but life isn't particularly linear and these games are trending towards a real-life model. The only thing is that IW probably wouldn't have considered anything additional for the game unless it was something to make it shorter and extract more cash from the player.

What's the point of being one of the so-called good guys when you can chew your way through unarmed men, women & children - without consequence? "But it's only a game" is the standard response. Lemme ask you this... What would happen if a game was released from somewhere not too happy with the West that involved killing a large number of civilians in a realistic manner in, oh, say New York? That would garner calls for the big retail banhammer worldwide, if not stir up enough to get the troops out for a little visit.

If an alternate path was provided, I might have considered buying it, but the lack of that option (after all the other crap) was enough to make me think my interests would be better server by waiting for BC2. On the strength of the look of that, I bought BF2 - and wonder why I bothered with COD5 at all.

(And I'm glad someone knows the phrase is eat before have.)

Re:VAC

[Satanboy]

nope,you're not alone, I didn't buy into it either. My roommate has bought it for xbox 360, but I really hate FPS on the 360 so I will stand strong beside you and forever boycott this game. . .

--just like I've done with Steam in general

o_0

Re:VAC

[__aamkky7574]

I don't know what the press release says, but I see from the "Top Sellers" chart on the Steam portal that MW2 has already dropped to number 3 behind a bargain basement Mirror's Edge and a bundle of older THQ games w/ Red Faction Guerrilla

Um, to be fair, those offers are absolutely steals (Mirror's Edge for €3? THQ's entire catalogue for the price of a single game?) so it's no wonder they're momentarily outselling a new game - don't forget that MW2's price on Steam is probably double what you pay in the stores.

P.

Re:VAC

[Anonymous Coward]

That explanation doesn't match what we can see in the screenshot... there's several offline users visible, one of which has been offline for 8 hours.

Re:VAC

[Anonymous Coward]

I like VAC... not because it's better at catching cheaters, but because it doesn't interfere with my game, or my computer when the game is off. Punkbuster runs all this shit in the background on startup, and you can't connect to servers unless that shit is running. In America's Army and CoD4, people were constantly kicked from servers for "Losing Key Packets"... whatever that means. Basically, PunkBuster takes anti-cheat TOO seriously, and I haven't played a game that uses PB in over a year because of it.

Re:VAC

[SBrach]

Oh IDK, how about LA.

Re:VAC

[Anonymous Coward]

Seconded, why is that punkbuster have to run as a "service" on start up btw? I think punkbuster is a SCAM maybe they leave all those holes so themselves (under another name/business) can bill loser fags that want to cheat. Have anyone been paying attention?

Re:VAC

[Anonymous Coward]

Not meeting expectations?
MW2 sold 4.7 million copies in the first 24 hours. It broke opening day revenue records for any form of entertainment release.

Re:VAC

[dave562]

Exactly. I bought the game for the multiplayer aspect. I just played through the single player to get acquainted with the controls and the game play dynamics. I think it was worth the $60 I spent. The graphics are spectacular and the game engine is stable and easy to play with. I'm constantly amazed by the lighting effects. The first video games I played were on the Atari 2600. It's crazy how much better games have gotten in my life time.

Re:VAC

[dave562]

Exactly. I bought the PS3 version of MW2 because after a decade plus of playing online games with hackers, I'm finally over it. There hasn't been a single anti-cheat method introduced that hasn't been cracked. The only way to get a clean game online is to have a server with dedicated admins who kick the cheaters.

Although for all of that, I'm sure it's only a matter of time before someone hacks the PS3 boot loader and figures out how to have hacks on the console.

Re:VAC

[Akral]

First of all, there are three users grayed out. Are they playing? No. Why are they on the first page?

Anyway, let's assume you're correct.
If some players are non-playing/away/offline, then they don't really count towards our "what game a user plays" statistics, right?
So currently out of 18 online and playing users, 11 are playing MW2.

Re:VAC

[Anonymous Coward]

Or that could be because Steam just ran a weekend sale where Mirror's Edge was $5, and that other bundle was also on sale for dirt cheap.

Re:VAC

[thetoadwarrior]

Mirror's Edge has recently only been £3.75 and runs on more computers. The fact it's a limited sale as well meant that people would have to buy it up now or possibly never at that price which would explain the spike in sales.

Re:VAC

[thetoadwarrior]

Except people are frequently kicked off of Quake live by PB for no real reason. It's happened to me. It says I have corrupt packets. I'm not cheating, my connection has just gone shit for a few seconds. This wouldn't be so bad if PB actually stopped real cheaters from cheating.

Re:VAC

[omgarthas]

The lobby and matchmaking service is pretty nice, allowing you to form a party and then look for games where you can play on the same team, a pity it doesn't work so well in practise. You're stuck with the problem that a large proportion of people leave as soon as they see several people bearing the same tag join the game meaning that you have to go through the matchmaking process several times. Then there's the more technical problem of the game sometimes leaving some players behind when the lobby joins or leaves a game.

Where is the need to all of you using the same tag?, just do as my friends and I do, use your usual nickname

When you actually get into a game, there's a small chance that the dynamically chosen "best" host will be terrible and have huge lag spikes. (This while we're all connected through the university JANET connection.) Eventually the game decides to migrate the host, everything stops, a new host is chosen and then the game continues. Then the host quits because his team is losing and we go the the "Choosing a new host" screen again, and again.

Which takes 5 seconds at most, YMMV, but in 40 hours of multiplayer gameplay, I had to leave the host TWICE because of having massive lag, and then, I was playing again in less than a minute

Re:VAC

[omgarthas]

Jesus, it's a freaking game, I just want to shot things on my screen, I don't care if they are civilians, bad guys, chickens or dummies...

Re:VAC

[Anonymous Coward]

Steam's support department on the other hand are actually helpful.

Are you Franz Kafka? The last time I had to deal with those idiots went something like this:

Me: My account has been banned. I reformatted windows and when I try to log back into steam for the first time it says my account is disabled.
Steam Support: We're going to need the credit card information you used to purchase something on the account to verify this is your account.
Me: It was a prepaid debit card and I don't have that information anymore. Just send an e-mail to the e-mail linked to my account to verify.
Steam Support: Sorry but we'll need your credit card information to verify you are the owner of the account.
Me: I told you I didn't use a credit card.
Steam Support: Without a credit card to verify I can't help you. We are sorry for the inconvenience. We look forward to serving you in the future.
TICKET CLOSED

They wouldn't even tell me why the account was banned without verifying it first, which of course couldn't be done. 300 dollars worth of games lost forever. Now I pirate whatever I want from Valve because they owe me. Fuckers. I will NEVER pay for another Half Life single player game again. They lost a customer for life. I don't hold the other companies that made the games I had responsible since they don't own Steam. I had DEFCON and Dawn of War too.

Re:VAC

[Anonymous Coward]

It does beg the question... why pirate something that sucks so bad though? Go play something better.

Criminal rationalizations ftw.

Re:VAC

[mjwx]

Something tells me MW2 is not meeting Infinity Ward's expectations despite all the whistling past the graveyard. I'm sure it'll be a money maker, but god-willing, it will be a disappointment for them considering their willingness to crap in the face of the loyal customers who made the COD franchise successful.

I didn't think that highly of MW1, it was an OK game but it had no replayability and multiplayer FPS was already dominated by Battlefield and Team Fortress. Modern Warfare added nothing to the experience for us PC gamers. I can understand it being a big thing for console gamers who have not been blessed with a decent system for playing shooters (and still haven't really, it wont be good enough until most people can play without auto aim).

The COD series went downhill starting with COD2, MW was a shot in the arm but I think it will continue the downward spiral because they simply aren't adding anything new to the FPS experience, not even a semi original story.

Plus IW overconsolizing MW for PC gamers is a serious drawback. The hype engine in overdrive also ensures that MW2 wont live up to expectations. I think developers are going about multi-platform development all wrong. Start with the most complex platform and work backwards, this means develop for PC then strip out complexity for Xbox as trying to go the other way never works out well. I'm not against multi-platform releases but there must be better ways of doing it without trying to dumb down the PC gaming experience or reducing the Xbox graphics to crap levels.

Re:VAC

[Anonymous Coward]

Well Gamerboy, you know nothing of what you speak so I'll put it in words perhaps you can understand. The only way to catch a rootkit is with another rootkit. But PB is not a rootkit nor close to it. The reason PB operates as a servide on a lower ring level is because the cheats are injecting into the OS to hide form regular ring 3 services. Cheat writers often use cheats based around rootkits. They base the way they hide the cheats the same way viruses hide. So PB must operate within the OS services or it wouldn't be able to catch them. If you only knew how bad these cheats are in not only damaging, making more vulnerable to attack and installing some nasty trojans on computers that use cheats you would have far more to worry about than PB. You should see some of the nasty stuff cheats put on comps, especially the pay to cheat ones you would crap your pants. PB is a legit method and product. Cheaters just like to put out a tempist because PB does work for a lot of the cheats out there. Not all but a lot more than VAC.

Server side checking is for most types of cheats completely worthless and will not work. By your example you have no idea at all what you are talking about. I sit here reading many ignorant people making comments about anti cheating but have no concept of how it works. I'm quite surprised so many on slash dot as I expect fewer here because so many claim they are technically minded. But whenever the subject of cheating comes up it must be every slash dot member that has no clue that happily jumps on this subject.

But to move on and to put in my 2 cents on Old Rob Bowling's comment. 2,500 busts is nothing. Considering the widespread cheating and availability of cheats for MW2, that number should be more like 10,000 busts and that would be a conservative number of busts. Even if they had hit only the common cheats circulating and without even a mention of the pay cheats they could have busted at least that number. VAC is worthless in nailing pay cheats. They simply have no record in busting pay cheats at all. PB regularly busts pay cheats. Unlike VAC, PB busts regular cheats daily and a public one is likely to be busted within a week of release, unlike VAC. Then on PB's delayed bans it also does, you still don't have to wait a month for even the most common ones VAC seems to struggle to catch. VAC delayed bans are a joke in comparison to PB delayed bans.

The problem I have is a lot of people here are the seem only familiar with CS and that uses VAC. So when they complain about PB their experience is often really about VAC and no real background on PB. Want to control cheating? A dedicated server using PB along with an organized admin system that has joined an anti cheat site like the largest one, PunksBusted.com (PsB) Those are always the best servers to play on and they are always full. There are thousands of them for the big title games. Sadly MW2 doesn't have dedicated servers and uses VAC.Infinity ward only wants to make more money down the road and that is why they have locked out the server, mod and map communities. Greed is a wonderful thing. But I guess everyone likes to pay more. IWNet is not about a playing experience and it isn't about piracy. It's about finding out how much is to much money. Charge whatever the consumer will bare. oops gotta run.

Re:VAC

[ToasterMonkey]

You're stuck with the problem that a large proportion of people leave as soon as they see several people bearing the same tag join the game

Uh, the problem is you and your friends showing up to a pickup match and the flawed logic allowing you to play on the same team.

If a bunch of dudes show up all at once to your free-for-all, after work, grabass football match with matching helmets, pads, and jerseys, they sure can play - on both teams. I guess I could see little children stacking one side with all the "good" players, but this should not be encouraged, or allowed behavior when the user base is spread across several maturity levels... or ever. Groups of players allowed to play on the same team should queue with similar sized groups, or face the risk of being split up. I would even go one step further and intentionally keep players with the same clan tags apart if they didn't queue as a group. I also think restrictions on team switching and strict team balancing are good ideas on top of a fair matchmaking system.

Now, I do have friends and family I like to play with, but the simple fact of the matter is, if we played too well together, the other players would make us play opposite teams or get the boot. In real life, even the suspicion of unbalanced teams is addressed; by taking turns choosing players, mixing up teams, etc. If you really really want to play with people you practice with, you organize matches. I KNOW this game has facilities to arrange this. I don't know why Internet gamers think they're special or why game designers are so boneheaded, it's perplexing.

Re:VAC

[aj50]

With IWnet you have a choice between private game (i.e. you provide everyone who is playing) and pickup match and if you all join from the same lobby, you get put on the same team. A private match wasn't an option, there were only five people who had the game.

It's not that they were trying to stack the teams (we're not actually that good anyway!) but IWnet gives you no other choice.

Gone are the days when we could all just jump on a dedicated server and balance the teams. Gone too are server rules like "No team stacking".

IWnet really does leave a lot to be desired.

Re:VAC

[sopssa]

Exactly, and it's a great and fun game so I bought it too. Wouldn't have for 50 euros, but 3.99e is mad good deal.

Re:VAC

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, no. I've been called a cheater enough times that I'd probably be looked at by this postulated mechanism, and I don't cheat in FPS games. You'll end up with communities of 'purist' gamers who don't want to play with anyone but similarly skilled people who refuse to learn the nuances of the engine/game and blacklist anyone who attempts finds out tricks (such as bunny hopping, item timing, knowing spawn locations, easily defensible locations, coordinated teamwork, etc) to get the upper hand.

It's one thing to let server admins ban cheaters, but it's another to put the power of banning into the masses. I've been banned from servers before by admins who don't understand the basics of higher level play, but the accusations by everyday players are far more frequent. I highly doubt that I'm alone on this. You'd turn the game into a virtual witch-hunt.

Re:VAC

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus most of them bought the game anyways I'm sure.

I've just come to the conclusion I'm the only person on the planet who stuck to my guns and didn't buy this game.

You have at least one more person who refuses to be ripped off by this shit.

Um, no

[OverlordQ]

Specifically, Steam's VAC anti-cheat system is in place for abusers of the PC version, and this news is either proof that the setup is proving more efficient for catching cheaters, or proof that even with this arrangement Infinity Ward still can't get rid of the cheating problem.

Um, no. VAC2 is easily bypassed or disabled by most competent hack writers. They like to pretend that VAC is the holy grail of anti-cheats but it's just as vulnerable as PunkBuster or any of the league anti-cheats.

Re:Um, no

[NoName Studios]

Even if VAC detects the cheater, the way it deals with it allows hackers to go on. VAC detects, logs, and then bans the player two months later. The cheater causes two more months of grief to the player base. The only reason it waits two months is to make it difficult for the cheater to figure out which hack caused the ban.

Re:Um, no

[Xest]

That's because the PC is an open platform and just as DRM can't work, anti-cheating software like this can't work. The client is untrusted, anything on it can be worked around.

Re:Um, no

[sopssa]

This is on the other hand a good thing. Granted, the time should be max 1-2 days, or even 6 hours, but this gives nuisance to the cheater because he doesn't know what exactly got him banned from VAC. And it gives nuisance to the hack maker because he also doesn't know directly what got him and his hack banned. If the ban was instant with a clear message, they would directly know what caused in and either warn others or improve their hacks.

Re:Um, no

[Anonymous Coward]

That is actually a very bad design choice. See, with VAC I can attach a debugger, and at my own relaxed pace figure the game out. Or Vac, for that matter. They dont even care to make it difficult to attach a debugger. This way I will have my hack done with no hassle. If the account is banned in 2 months, fine, i will get a clean one.

Now with PB it is a different story, try to debug it carelessly and you will find yourself banned in no time, making debugging slower and generally more difficult.

To add, MW2 has a dated engine which everyone and his brother knows. It has been tweaked but not much. How about that: the game's player list is referenced by a static variable. And it's a straight, static array with braindead simple structure. The engine also offers flags like 'isVisible' which make lightweight, non-DX hacks a pure pleasure to write. No attempts whatsoever to make it difficult to hack the thing. Compared to RedOrchestra or even Battlefield series, COD was traditionally the easiest, by far easiest, to hack. If you reverse the thing you will notice the programmers did not care one bit to make it hard. To add some perspective: most hobbysts have had their hacks ready one day after launch, and a few days later mainstream cheating sites were filled with in-depth reviews of the data structures. It took few months for such level of details to become public knowledge for BF2, and for games as RedOrchestra it *never* became public. Looking at COD6 code I'd venture a guess the dev team was not treated very well and was all but motivated. Just my few cents.

Re:Um, no

[GameboyRMH]

I considered this, but anti-cheating software doesn't really have the same design flaw as DRM. With DRM you're trying to prevent the user from viewing the content under certain conditions but allowing them to view it under others - it doesn't work, especially since the key to decrypt the content is going to be on the users' machine somewhere. Anti-cheating can allow the user to look at the content all they want, you're preventing the user from altering it or faking certain inputs and outputs, which is entirely possible with proper cryptography, lots of client-side verification and a little server-side verification. Some of Windows' copy protection mechanisms work this way and are 100% effective - copies installed with generated keys can't be updated via Windows Update. Hacked games could be blocked from playing online the same way.

Also see my other post further up: http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1462144&cid=30283088

Re:Um, no

[Xest]

"With DRM you're trying to prevent the user from viewing the content under certain conditions but allowing them to view it under others"

This is really what you're doing in the anti-cheating scenario, just on a more abstract level. You still have to pass raw data to the graphics API or graphics card eventually as raw data. You cannot both render it with standard hardware and keep it in an encrypted format. Realistically though it's in a plain format before this because performing client side logic on encrypted data would be a nightmare, if even possible at all.

"Anti-cheating can allow the user to look at the content all they want, you're preventing the user from altering it or faking certain inputs and outputs, which is entirely possible with proper cryptography"

What sort of cryptography is "proper" cryptography in this case? The client has to know the keys and the algorithm to encrypt and decrypt and so the cheat program must surely always know it too.

"lots of client-side verification and a little server-side verification"

What's stopping client-side verification being faked? If it does a CRC check then why can't the cheat program just branch the code here to use the hacked content and forward the expected CRC? Even more complex checks involving keys sent from the server still end up in the hands of the cheat program.

"Some of Windows' copy protection mechanisms work this way and are 100% effective"

Really? How do people keep managing to crack it then?

"copies installed with generated keys can't be updated via Windows Update."

Why can't the user just keep an unhacked copy of the game and update that - which would work because it would be legitimate, and then re-apply the cheat program which must also be updated to point to the relevant changes in memory locations and/or logic too?

Re:Um, no

[Rich0]

Well, in theory you could prevent cheating by not trusting the client at all. That isn't generally practical. You can't stop macros, but you could design your game to minimize the advantage of macros. You can't stop somebody from having something that enhances the GUI a little (spotting bad guys and rendering them in contrasty colors, or aimbotting). However, you could make that hard by not giving too much raw data to the client.

Imagine if the game just streamed mpeg2 and did all the rendering on the server - it would be VERY hard to design cheats that could spot bad guys and aimbot them or whatever. Now, it would also have high latency, and it would take a ton of bandwidth, and it would kill the server. So, the trick is figuring out the best balance between trusting the client and performance. If you can at least filter out data that isn't needed that is a big start (don't send position data for enemies that clearly can't be seen, for example).

Ultimately, however, any operation performed on the client can be subverted in a completely undetectable manner. It is just a matter of how hard it is to do.

Re:Um, no

[zero0ne]

Ever play with the WoW client?

the good ole days being before Warden existed, and you had a huge community around WOWSHARP.

Man, I miss those days.

The destructoid article is wrong: no dedicated

[Tei]

the destructoid article shows the use of a patch that enable the console, to change game defaults configs to something insane (insane fun? the video looks like fun). It can be a step to dedicated server, but is NOT a dedicated server. Is still a machine hosted by a player logued and playing the game, it needs a GPU, etc, etc..

NOT DEDICATED.

Re:The destructoid article is wrong: no dedicated

[ProzacPatient]

Somebody I know said he heard a rumor that Infinity Ward is going to add dedicated servers eventually because of all the pressure from the PC community.
IMHO a snowball in hell has a better chance then that because publishers and developers lately are hell bent on fighting piracy and their solution is to setup big brother piracy protection under the guise of "match making" like; Relic Online, IWNet or Battle.Net.
Not only that but Infinity Ward would have to rewrite a substantial amount of networking code to support dedicated servers since the client/server model is very different from peer-to-peer.
So no, unless the planets are aligned just right and pigs fly I say there is no chance in hell that Infinity Ward is going to change this version of CoD.

Re:The destructoid article is wrong: no dedicated

[jgtg32a]

Or they just C/P from COD4, it's the same engine

Oh, AGAIN?

[Rogerborg]

For those not in the know, this is how the conversation goes.

• Developer: We need to design-in anti-cheat methods from the get-go, or honest players will get raped.
• Producer: And that'll delay my demo, right? Where's my demo? Show me a demo. Demo-demo-demo.
• Developer: But it'll save us time in the long run, and we won't have to play whack-a-hacker catch up after release, with all the costs and bad press...
• Producer: Yeah... but I'm only producing it up to release. And are you going to be relegated to the support crew, or am I going to take you with me to my next exciting project?
• Developer: Uh... I'll get on with the demo.

That's the best case scenario. A depressing number of devs don't even consider trying to design-out hacks, and think that whack-a-hack is a winning long term strategy, despite the decades of evidence that say it ain't so. I'm looking at you Blizzard.

Re:Oh, AGAIN?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Given Blizzard's sales numbers, I'd say that they have a solid decade's worth of evidence that what they are doing is a thoroughly winning strategy...

Re:Oh, AGAIN?

[Xest]

It's because, on the PC, you can't, without shifting everything server side.

Even then by the time we have the resources to shift everything server side we'll probably also have the resources client side on the PC to do in game pattern matching and have cheats that just match images sent to the client and respond to automatically aim at them or similar.

The idea of cheat free gaming on the PC is a fantasy, it can't happen, it's not a suitable platform for such endeavours.

Similarly though, I'd never want to see rid of the PC because it's openness is important in other areas. The issue here is that the PC's biggest advantage is also it's biggest disadvantage for things like online gaming.

I'm sure developers understand this, that if you want to deal with cheating then cat and mouse is the only way, at best you can just play whack-a-mole with the worst hacks. Perhaps the biggest improvement for the likes of Blizzard is that people need accounts to play their game, and if they do play whack-a-mole they can at least ban accounts and convince players not to cheat based on them possibly losing hundreds of hours of investment in the game.

Re:Oh, AGAIN?

[Narpak]

I would, with little evidence to support my claim, say that cheating in level 80 PvP isn't really a big issue in WoW; at least not that I saw when I played it last. If you get caught cheating in WoW you risk getting an account ban; which means losing a lot of hours, sweat and blood; invested in the game. Of course gold farmers will still try to hack and cheat as much as they can, but at least they don't run around doing it in PvP.

Re:Oh, AGAIN?

[Rogerborg]

You realise that you're enumerating design decisions there, not immutable laws?

If you decide to give up control of the servers and design your game in a way that allows clients to win just by sending the right "I did X" packet, then it's game over as far as anti-cheating is concerned. But there's nothing forcing you to make those decisions.

Re:Oh, AGAIN?

[Rogerborg]

Mmm, fair enough, it's true that Blizzard are succeeding despite their best efforts to design in problems.

They could be winning more though, if they didn't have to spend support money on playing whack-a-hack, and cut off players (and their revenue streams).

Bear in mind that whack-a-hack is forever. You can only stop doing it when your game becomes so unpopular that nobody is hacking it any more.

Re:Oh, AGAIN?

[DamienNightbane]

People didn't need to cheat in WoW in the first place aside from buying gold. Twinking in the level 19 battlegrounds and raping people with your leet purples pretty much accomplished the same thing for the most part.

Re:Oh, AGAIN?

[Vohar]

Now that they've added xp gains in pvp this doesn't happen as much anymore. You can opt to turn off all xp gains to stay at level 19, but then you only get matched with other players who have xp turned off.

So yeah, Blizzard didn't like that 'cheat' either.

Re:Oh, AGAIN?

[DamienNightbane]

So yeah, Blizzard didn't like that 'cheat' either.

Nevermind that they left that 'cheat' in for five years.

Re:Oh, AGAIN?

[Whalou]

What I liked about twinking wasn't the fact that I'd be overpowered, it was that there was a point where I could say: "I have the best gear possible for this level" and not have to constantly grind/farm to update my gear.

Having players who disabled XP gain matched against each others means that winning and losing is a contest of skill and teamwork. I see that as a positive aspect. Destroying outmatched people got old surprisingly fast for me.

Re:Oh, AGAIN?

[Xest]

No, it's not that simple.

Even if you don't give up control of the server you cannot protect against many different cheats. Player locations have to be sent even when they're behind a wall or whatever because otherwise they pop awkwardly into view. Models/art assets can still be hacked on the client to be more visible and similar regardless- even if they're not stored locally and sent every game session they can be modified in memory by a determined cheater.

Aimbots are always going to be possible because you can still alter the executable in asssembly. A guy known as nopcode did this as far back as Quake III writing an aimbot directly into the Quake III executable.

No amount of CRC checks, encryption can protect because the cheater always knows what CRCs are expected, and the encryption keys are always used by the client to decrypt content or commands so that they can be used by the client to render and so forth in the first place.

At best on a logical level you can eliminate cheating by severely limiting your game's design, but that's really not a solution- especially when closed platforms like consoles don't have to. There is no solution to the problem that on an open platform, whatever the client has access to, the cheater has access to and can modify it or use that data outside it's intended purposes to give themselves an advantage too.

Re:Oh, AGAIN?

[Tainek]

Which further goes to prove, The only good anti-cheat protection is a human admin.

Which is why I have actually stuck to my boycott of the game.

Re:Oh, AGAIN?

[Xest]

Have a look at my post here:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1462144&cid=30283336

It is possible to have human admins on the distributed system too.

Oddly though, whilst I play on the Xbox and never saw the issue with the P2P system because that's how it works on the XBox and because you don't really tend to get cheating as such there anyway (at least not aimbots etc.) I have to say MW2s netcode is fucking awful. It's the first XBox game where I've seen multiple bad hosts picked such that lag is an issue. It was never a problem in MW1 so effectively not only have they moved PC gamers to the P2P networking platform but they've broken the networking platform in the process. I don't know why they didn't just stick with MW1's network code which worked perfectly well in this way.

I actually thought PC players were whining about nothing, because on the 360 their net code always worked fine in this way, what I didn't count on was them fucking it up in the process of moving PC gamers onto it so it's now effectively just broken for everyone.

Re:Oh, AGAIN?

[PingSpike]

I agree with this. Cheaters ruin a lot of games, but complete eradication of them just isn't possible. It is harder on an open platform like the PC and still isn't possible on consoles. Couple this with less than perfect network connections which require some clever client guessing tricks to make the game appear smooth and playable and you're getting tugged in multiple directions.

People rag on VAC a lot for its delayed bans, and while Valve deserves being ragged on for many things I can't fault them to much for the way they handle it. VAC grabs the low hanging fruit of script kiddies using downloaded hacks, viciously permabans them and leaves admins to police everything else that slips through the cracks. They tacitly acknowledge they're never going to get 100% of the hackers, but it would be a fools errand to try. Instead they grab the 80% for 20% of the work and let the admins be the last line of defense. It ain't perfect (and neither is admin judgement sometimes) but it is about as good as you can get until people suddenly decide to stop being assholes.

Re:Oh, AGAIN?

[brkello]

Wow, when did they do that? I hated the whole twink concept for a long long time. Glad they finally addressed it!

Re:Oh, AGAIN?

[Rogerborg]

I didn't say that it was simple. I said that it was a design choice. We do apparently agree on that, we just seem to come to different conclusions about what it means for PC games.

Re:Oh, AGAIN?

[brkello]

The idea that you could make a game hack-proof is extremely naive at best.

Re:Oh, AGAIN?

[Anonymous Coward]

At best on a logical level you can eliminate cheating by severely limiting your game's design, but that's really not a solution- especially when closed platforms like consoles don't have to. There is no solution to the problem that on an open platform, whatever the client has access to, the cheater has access to and can modify it or use that data outside it's intended purposes to give themselves an advantage too.

You seem to use the term "consoles" in a context that implies you believe them to represent a utopia of cheat-free gameplay. And you use the term "open platform" apparently to mean the opposite of "closed platform", the former including PCs and the latter including consoles, in the sense that one is immune to cheating and the other isn't. How... quaint. To put it as nicely as possible.

Re:Oh, AGAIN?

[vux984]

Having players who disabled XP gain matched against each others means that winning and losing is a contest of skill and teamwork. I see that as a positive aspect.

Except that every non-'mmorpg' based team combat game ever released gives you exactly that type of fight without a monthly subscription.

Barely a start

[ifrag]

ONLY 2500 accounts? That's not even a drop in the bucket, the slightest slap on the wrist of the anti-competitive players in MW2. Based on personal experience of having an aim-bot user in roughly 1 out of every 3 matches I'd say 2500 isn't even a start. Maybe it's a lot worse in some game modes, especially the 16 player "big game" matches where it's more likely simply due to having more people in game (or more targets? I suppose the bots like having more victims). I don't even like having them on my team, even though it's usually a win because the bot ends up stealing almost all the kills, or they just settle for a 25 kill tactical nuke and end it. Maybe if they get up to 2500 accounts per day it'll make a difference.

Re:Barely a start

[Toridas]

I'm rank 42, I play probably 90% domination and 10% team deathmatch (not ground war) and I haven't seen a single person I would call a cheater, unless you count a few people who hacked their rank.

Re:Barely a start

[jaggeh]

the worst i have seen on the xbox is booster sessions, but nobody i would accuse of outright cheating.

Re:Barely a start

[thisnamestoolong]

Oohhhh... I see... you're that guy -- you know, the one who always yells OMFG HAXXXX every time they get killed. Aim bots are notoriously difficult to spot as there are a lot of people out there who are just ridiculously good -- I have a feeling most of the "hackers" you have seen are just people who are way better than you and consistently snipe you in the face from across the map. Is this annoying? Sure. Is it something that they should be banned for? No.

Re:Barely a start

[mike_c999]

Got to say this is so to the point.

Many time I've made some good clean kills followed by a lot of "OMFG nice wall hack/Aim bot/cheating...." and I'm not even that good.
There are far more competent player out there make far more constant kills than me and its not cheating, Its just good reflexes and hard work.

My comment is to just get over yourself and have fun.

Re:Barely a start

[MattSausage]

I would seriously doubt your stats on "aim-bot users".

First off, people pull off ridiculously insane and difficult shots regularly in the console versions of the game. I would submit that a vast majority of aim-bot users are simply 13 year olds with twitch reflexes that make you and I and our much more aged and rusty 20-30 year old reflexes pale in comparison.

Re:Barely a start

[AstrumPreliator]

Indeed. A lot of communities require proof before they'll ban a hacker, generally a demo. Shame communities can do neither of these things.

Re:Barely a start

[DamienNightbane]

I can attest to this. I've been called a cheater in CoD4 a fair number of times simply because I use terrain and cover well and snipe people, especially snipers, from clear across the map using an M60 with iron sights as a semi-automatic rifle.

Re:Barely a start

[roachdabug]

I've seen the videos of aimbots and the ability to see players' positions through walls.

As far as aimbots go, It's genuinely hard to tell if somebody is using one most of the time. Even my noob ass has pulled off some pretty unbelievable shots. If you're decent enough to get some of the better kill streaks, you can easily rack up a large amount of kills.

As far as wall hacks go, I HAVE had several experiences where opposing players have been practically supernatural.

In addition, I've had times where I'll plant 3 rounds square in the chest of an enemy without recording a single hit. It could be lag or extreme horrible luck, but my aim was spot on.

Even if IW manages to ban every hacker in existence, there will always be some very skilled players out there. It would be nice to know that some of the most severe beatings my team has received could be attributed to cheating, though.

Re:Barely a start

[MetalPhalanx]

Unfortunately, "That guy" is at least one third of the gaming populace, with a large overlap with the "Rage quitters" group.

I agree totally though. I semi-regularly get accused of hacking for some of the stuff I manage to pull off, and I don't even feel that it's really that special. But, it's the internet. And, no-one could POSSIBLY be better than THAT GUY at ... so if they beat him, they MUST be hacking, right?

Re:Barely a start

[flitty]

This is why I like COD's Kill Cam. There were many times where I thought "No way that guy killed me in 2 bullets with a SMG", only to find that there was a sniper up in a tower across the map who was taking pot shots at me too. The feedback you get about how people take you out is invaluable, and one of the reasons why I play COD Multiplayer more than most multiplayer games.

Re:Barely a start

[PPalmgren]

Being at the top of an FPS community causes a lot of accusations. I was banned from a large percentage of old NS servers because of accusations, but unlike my competitive counterparts I didn't even use a pistol script (which was allowed in competitive play). Ignorance is bliss. If they were honest, they'd simply say they don't want people of a certain skill level on their server.

Re:Barely a start

[Anonymous Coward]

One in three? Yeah right. You're just not as good as the teenagers who live that game.

Re:Barely a start

[jaggeh]

Heartbeat sensor :D

Re:Barely a start

[jgtg32a]

It's called aim assist, which is basically the same thing as an aimbot

Re:Barely a start

[Ascagnel]

The aim bots could be MW2's excessively iffy lag code. I've seen quite a few reviews that mention unbelievable kills, and one that explicitly mentions banana bullets like this.

Re:Barely a start

[roachdabug]

Hah! There are days where I'm dialed in and tear things up, and then there are days where I'm tired or not quite with it and might as well run around the map backwards unloading entire magazines into the sky. Strangely enough, put a beer or two in me and it seems to boost my skills a bit.

Re:Barely a start

[PingSpike]

I'd say anyone who is even moderately good at a FPS, or even just had a few lucky days has had this happen. Let's not forget being banned for the grave offense of "Killing the admin." :P

I remember once turning a corner in CS:S, while playing as CT and finding 4 Ts aiming my direction. My response to this situation, understandably, was to hold down fire button while backing out in the direction from which I came. While the first guy that died was a fairly legit aimed shot, the other 3 that fell to lucky headshots during my wild blasting were mere luck. A kick/ban vote was immediately called. Considering their poor reaction time attacking me, I was surprised at how quickly they found my name in the list while screaming "Hacks!" But then, CS players have always been better whiners than players.

Re:Barely a start

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you know that's how it works? They kill you, they're a hacker. You kill them, they're a fucking n00b.

Get with the times, man.

Re:Barely a start

[ProfanityHead]

Getting banned by crybabies is why I refuse to play team games anymore. I'll stick with my hour or 2 of QW or Q3 dm a week, thank you. Sure, there is some crying, but the herd mentality is beyond my ability to cope.

Re:Barely a start

[Ifandbut]

I also really enjoy watching the kill cam. If there is one good thing about the way servers are handled in MW2 is that every game has kill cam on. In the latter days of MW1 it got hard to find a server with the kill cam on (one that had decent ping and played the game type I wanted to anyways).

Re:Barely a start

[ifrag]

It's pretty obvious when you watch it on the kill cam actually, the difference between human skill and what these programs can achieve has too large a gap. If the programs were made a bit more subtle then I will admit I would have a harder time telling the difference. Subtlety however, does not seem to have been the aim in designing these programs, so the distinction is clear, especially when you watch the replays.

Also, to clear up your misunderstanding, I've never even bothered accusing any of these players in game personally. A lot of people I'm playing with will try to call them on it, but I don't. Sorry to disappoint, but I'm not that guy. I do however know several people who are that guy.

Re:Barely a start

[ifrag]

I would seriously doubt your stats on "aim-bot users".

Do you even have the game? If so do you play "Ground War" for more than a couple matches in a session? Don't try to bring your pre-biased views on the actual state of things if you don't have anything other than your preconceptions backing it. If you've actually been in Ground War for a few nights then I'm actually interested in why you think it's not really that bad.

Re:Barely a start

[ThaReetLad]

I hate the kill cam because it gives away your sniper spot. In CoD4 I had some great spots where I could sit and take out enemies with a silenced weapon and they have little or no idea where I was. Kill cam defeats that and on the other side takes away the skill of locating and taking out a well concealed enemy sniper. As long as you're playing on a server where you have good admins and can trust that there are no hackers it's not a problem.

Re:Barely a start

[MarkvW]

I played DFLW before the cheaters overcame it. In DFLW the gamespace was huge. It was so much fun getting behind the snipers and sniping at them. They couldn't figure out how they were getting killed, so they would accuse me of all sorts of bad cheating things.

Ahhh..... the fun memories.

Re:Barely a start

[shutdown -p now]

Got to say this is so to the point.

Many time I've made some good clean kills followed by a lot of "OMFG nice wall hack/Aim bot/cheating...." and I'm not even that good.
There are far more competent player out there make far more constant kills than me and its not cheating, Its just good reflexes and hard work.

It's even funnier in Left 4 Dead.

For one thing, most Infected there produce a very distinct sound, and with a little bit of training, one can aim at sound alone and shoot through walls, hitting more often than not. With more experience you can hear that sound from quite far away.

Then there are bugs in the game engine which result in shadows "bleeding through" walls or roof at some spots, and occasionally even chunk of the model - again, leading to wall shots.

Finally, after playing for a long time, you learn the maps really well, and that includes all the typical ambush spots. At that point quite often you start shooting before turning around the corner, so that if a Boomer is there (probability 30%), he dies before he has any chance of barfing on you.

In all of the above scenarios, if you're the one doing the shooting, you'll get "OMG! wallhax/aimbot!" whines more often than not, especially when the other team is relatively unexperienced (or is being pwnd). I've been vote-kicked off servers several times because of that.

Re:Barely a start

[Anonymous Coward]

so one could say, you see, no one cheat, you simply suck.

the truth is very different however. cheaters plague EVERY SINGLE ONLINE GAME I KNOW.
people hide behind very convenient truth like the one you stated. CONVENIENT TRUTH is a plague by itself. I hate people using it.
Yes, the case you state DOES happen. But a large population actually DOES cheat too. An extremely innacurate value would be 5 to 20% of the players in each game with at least 5 000 players.

For the record i cheated in half the games I played, most of the time because if you wanna play you don't have a choice, else you're stuck at the lower end even with 24/7 hardworking. This way, you get to know other cheaters and realize just HOW MANY there are.
But I don't really like it. I don't think online games have such a bright future when we can't deal with cheats properly. Theres games I play without cheating, then fight against cheater and the fun sometimes reduces. I just tell myself not to imitate them when I have a choice and can still enjoy the game.

My list:

MMORPG: duping money, items, enhancing stats, making 50 000EUR reselling duped stuff? (yeah right that require a l ittle higher skills than average) CHECK
FPS: Autoaim, wallhack, what-not? CHECK
Flash games hacking, gaining free prizes? CHECK

Time played: 10 YEARS, 4H A DAY.
Time i've been caught: ZERO. NULL.

ffs so many people do it, it's not even hard. time to open your eyes.

Re:Barely a start

[BobMcD]

This makes me wonder why they haven't implemented some sort of a statistical spam filter. "'X' headshots in a row puts you on the list" where 'X' is significantly higher than normal. It can't possibly be that hard when you are controlling all the code and the servers.

Re:Barely a start

[Anonymous Coward]

Hack spellcheck to not display annoying red lines? CHECK

Re:Barely a start

[Anonymous Coward]

I would seriously doubt your stats on "aim-bot users".

Do you even have the game? If so do you play "Ground War" for more than a couple matches in a session? Don't try to bring your pre-biased views on the actual state of things if you don't have anything other than your preconceptions backing it. If you've actually been in Ground War for a few nights then I'm actually interested in why you think it's not really that bad.

*sigh* Yes, yes, we don't have anything other than our preconceptions backing our statements here. That and a decade and a half or so of multiplayer FPS experience that's told us time and time and time and time and time again that when someone comes in screaming HAAAAAAAAAAX!!!1!, the probability of them just getting pwned by someone better than they are is somewhere in the upper 90% range.

But no, I suppose you're right. Your case is special because your game and its players are magical, not-at-all the same entities as the other FPSes and the only way you can be killed in-game is by rampant cheating. It's of course not the fault of you not paying attention to the map, not taking cover, not looking before you go Leeroy Jenkinsing into the field, or just that other players have better reactions than you do because they've played the map before to know where you're going to be poking your head (or played enough against you to know you try the same damn thing every time). It's all their fault. We all know how l33t a playa you are.

Sit down and take your lumps, kid. You might learn something.

Re:Barely a start

[WeeLad]

I loved the map size on all the DF games for that exact reason. I'd spend 15 minutes circling behind before even seeing an enemy. And once you got a kill (or two), you could displace by a few hills and wait for them to come searching.

Re:Barely a start

[ozbird]

Snipers are COD's way of telling you to keep your damn head down. You might be a kick ass twitch gamer, but treat the game like a Sunday walk and it's headshot time.

Re:Barely a start

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that you, Neo?

Re:Barely a start

[PaganRitual]

The thing is that it's always a single event that brings out the calls of hackers, and it always has been. It's just idiot people that can't handle getting killed or that can't accept that there is such a thing as a lucky shot. I was having a pretty bad day on MOHAA many years ago, and I was about 6th or something, and with 5 seconds to go on the map I ran around a corner with my sniper rifle and trained it on a guy that was moving past a window, and I unscoped just as I took the shot, figuring I had no chance. It was a headshot kill, I laughed, the round ended, and the next map loaded. The dude spent the first 5 minutes of the next round calling out the dude that had finished in 6th on a DM map for using cheats.

Then I played on a map with a guy that was clearly using an aimbot, everyone called him out on it, everyone avoided him or teamed up on him, and he still won the map about 50-5 or something. Cheats are generally either blatantly obvious, or subtle enough that you can't make them distinct from good players or lucky shots. The big problem is these idiots that can't handle that they might be on the receiving end of a bullshit shot from across the map, or that there are people out there that are *gasp* that much better than them.

Re:Barely a start

[PaganRitual]

Or for a more classic example.

Quake 2. Can't for the life of me remember which vanilla DM map it is, but it has three unavoidable armor shards in a tight corridoor if you're heading towards the rocket launcher (I don't think you can get to it from the other side). And you can hear shards being picked up from a long distance away, and when you hear three in a row, you bolt to the outside area to get a shot on the rocket laucher and can time it well enough to smack people just as they come out. And get called a hacker simply because you know the map.

Hell, there are plenty of newer games that give the ability to move silently if you walk (although I'm likely thinking of MOHAA), and people blunder around full tilt with audible footsteps and complain about cheating when you're already shooting at the corner before they're visible.

The moral is that people are morons and that no one can comprehend the possibility that someone might simply be better than them. I suppose if stuff like knowing where items are on the map or actually listening for other players don't occur to you then you're more likely to put it down to cheating if someone uses those things to beat you.

Re:Barely a start

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, wasn't the real skill of snipers to move between shots?

Re:Barely a start

[fastduke]

hmm that's why I play hardcore team deathmatch... friendly fire on, limited hud and no kill cam at least on ps3 it's an option

Re:Barely a start

[Spazztastic]

Wait, wasn't the real skill of snipers to move between shots?

This.

Take a shot, move a bit. Take a shot, move a bit. After a few kills, move to a new spot completely. Sitting in one spot makes it far too easy.

Re:Barely a start

[MattSausage]

I would respond but AC there has said it all. The VAST majority of "Aim-Botting" in FPSs is just you getting your ass handed to you.
In my earlier days I was often accused of using one, never did though. Sadly that doesn't happen much if at all anymore. Even watching the killcams at the end of matches shows how bullets bizarrely curve or shoot at odd angles. Often the match ending shots don't even match what was really happening on the screen.Lag accounts for a lot of that, often I'll fire four or five shots at a guy before I'm killed.. watch the kill cam and you don't see me fire once.

And I do have the game, i just play it on consoles.. I hate aimbotting bastards.

Re:Barely a start

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello Ifrag. Why is it that you seem to be one of the very few that understands cheating, vac and PB? I find is really annoying that on /. so many people commenting here have no clue even on the basics of how cheats work and how the counter measures work. I was under the impression the majority on /. were technical people or claim to be. Yet on this subject even the basic principles in hiding and finding cheats seems to fly high over their heads. The uneducated comments like those of gameboy are astounding.

I also agree that VAC as compared to PB is far inferior. PB is far more effective in managing the problem and also has a wel organized commuity of admins in comparison. I agree whole heatedly that 2500 busts is ridiculously low in comparison to what is out there being used in MW2 and I do have rough numbers from my data to back that up. I suspect Bowling wasn't really quoting cheaters as we think of them, but more likely the pirates that they likely shut down. That would seem to be more inline with both the numbers and the motives that IW seems to have. Bowling sadly considering his position with IW knows very little about the mechanics of cheating, but not unexpected considering he is primarily a console player and has a low attention span if judged by the number of games he owns. I often read IW staff rolling cheating and pirating together as if they are the same thing. It seems the only difference to IW and Act., is that pirating they consider to be one thing that costs them money. Cheating they really don't care about other than to give a certain amount of lip service to as a PR move. Simply because it costs money to fight cheating without a perceived direct profit back to IW, if they us PB. They don't believe a high amount of cheating affects game sales. I'm not the only one that believes game sales are affected but I'm also in a position, with the data, to support that position. That without good AC counter measures in place, it will affect the bottom line in overall sales.

The most annoying part of MW2

[bleh-of-the-huns]

Is that I have to open a bunch of ports and do port forwarding to my ps3 just to play online... their support forums say to turn on pnp on the wireless router, which is absolute crap, they do not really list the ports being used other then a wide range.. and anyone thats using linux/openbsd/similar firewalls and routers, have to play trial and error on which ports to open without removing all rules and forwarding all ports to the ps3....

I frequently get punted during host migration in the middle of a game.... since my natting is strict (according to their display, even though I opened up some of the ports and relagated the ps3 to an untrusted portion of my network)

Re:The most annoying part of MW2

[Nerdfest]

That happens frequently even with open NATing. They seem to have some problems with their networking and matchmaking. It used to happen occasionally in MW1, but it seems to very frequent now.

Re:The most annoying part of MW2

[Anonymous Coward]

Just curious. What happens when you enable UPNP on your router? Does everything suddenly work like it should? I realize that's far from the optimal solution for a number of reasons, but if it's the solution that works properly, then it's the one that works properly. And it doesn't require all their users to have networking certifications to set up.

Re:The most annoying part of MW2

[bleh-of-the-huns]

No, in fact it does absolutely nothing for me, because my wireless router is function as a straight access point, providing no services other then bridging the wireless to wired network, DHCP, DNS and routing all come from my various openbsd (gateway/firewall/nat using pf) and freebsd for dhcp and DNS. So enabling upnp on the wireless access point does absolutely nothing.

Not this time

[PopeRatzo]

Maybe the sales figures in the press releases are true, but there's no way to know how big the sales could have been if there had not been such bad word of mouth before release.

I know this much: The sales charts on the Steam home page showed that unlike Borderlands and Dragon Age: Origins, the pre-sale of MW2 didn't even make the top ten until just before release, where as the pre-sale of the other two went right to the top very early on.

The only way to deal with a company that ignores consumer wishes is to not give them money. Personally, I decided to spend my time and money with Borderlands and DA:O instead.

We'll see if the sales figures continue to grow now that the scene "demo" of MW2 has been released. I bet that one will allow for dedicated servers.

Re:Not this time

[Decameron81]

Maybe the sales figures in the press releases are true, but there's no way to know how big the sales could have been if there had not been such bad word of mouth before release.

IMHO, the true impact of this decision will be seen when they release the next game in the series. I purchased the game, not knowing about the lack of dedicated servers support. It won't happen again (it's unplayable online for me at 160 ms minimum ping).

The only problem is that probably they won't realize why people won't be buying the game as much next time.

Re:Not this time

[Anonymous Coward]

IMHO, the true impact of this decision will be seen when they release the next game in the series. I purchased the game, not knowing about the lack of dedicated servers support. It won't happen again (it's unplayable online for me at 160 ms minimum ping).

Do you live in a hole?

Re:Not this time

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you live in a hole?

Do you have a life?

Re:Not this time

[Anonymous Coward]

Borderlands online play is just as bad.
No dedicated servers. I bought it to play with 3 of my friends and the 4 of us can't be in the same game together because we're all stuck on 1.5mbit ADSL1.

Re:Not this time

[Draek]

Well, Dragon Age: Origins at least provided a plethora of pre-order bonuses, and I believe Borderlands didn't but it did had a price discount at least.

CoD:MW2? neither. Buying it an hour before release vs buying it an hour after it only meant you'd theoretically play two hours sooner (in practice, servers were swarmed so you couldn't play 'til next day or so anyways), in exchange for foregoing reading early adopters' impressions and problems beforehand.

Re:Not this time

[roguetrick]

Yeah, but considering the nature of Borderlands, many of us didn't think there would be dedicated servers. Left4Dead proved the small coop dedicated server style viable, but I just don't see people hosting public dedicated borderlands servers. Just seems to be a different situation than your traditional shooters.

Stats

[s1lverl0rd]

Are there any correlation statistics between pirates and cheaters? Are pirates more likely to cheat?

Re:Stats

[roachdabug]

I don't believe pirates are likely to even be playing multiplayer in the first place. Everything is tied into Steam this time around, even for those who bought the box off the shelf.

Re:Stats

[roachdabug]

Private server hacks nonwithstanding, of course.

Re:Stats

[Verunks]

I don't believe pirates are likely to even be playing multiplayer in the first place. Everything is tied into Steam this time around, even for those who bought the box off the shelf.

actually before the patches it was playable even with pirated copies of the game, now you get kicked after a few minutes of playing, but you can still use the older version even if it will take a lot of time to find out other people with the same version

Re:Stats

[mjwx]

Are there any correlation statistics between pirates and cheaters? Are pirates more likely to cheat?

Correlation != Causation,

I'll give you this, there are more cheats on pirate servers but this does not mean pirates are cheaters, it could be the reverse in that most cheaters need to pirate.

If your an honest (non cheater) multi-player then you shouldn't* need to use pirate servers.

* Shouldn't implies you live somewhere you can get a dedicated server and the developers actually made dedicated servers rather then consolizing the game and limiting matches to 16 players.

How about non USA/Europe players?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're not going to allow people to host their own servers, then you screw up Brazilians who don't get less than 250 ping. Ignoring a country with 150 million people and a project to bring internet connectivity to every home in a couple of years is a really good plan. Besides, we love being treated like a 3rd world country. Worry not, we'll remember this, when we laugh our ass off playing in a hacked server with a pirated copy of your game.

Re:How about non USA/Europe players?

[Ash-Fox]

Ignoring a country with 150 million people and a project to bring internet connectivity to every home in a couple of years is a really good plan.

I don't think they really care about a nation that pirates the majority of software products regardless. Pirates tend to justify piracy any way they can just to feel better about it.

Re:How about non USA/Europe players?

[Yamata no Orochi]

If you're not going to allow people to host their own servers, then you screw up Brazilians who don't get less than 250 ping. Ignoring a country with 150 million people and a project to bring internet connectivity to every home in a couple of years is a really good plan. Besides, we love being treated like a 3rd world country. Worry not, we'll remember this, when we laugh our ass off playing in a hacked server with a pirated copy of your game.

I'm reminded of a comic that makes it difficult to take this post seriously.

Re:How about non USA/Europe players?

[DamienNightbane]

To be fair, nobody wants Brazilians on the internet on the first place, let alone on our game servers.

By the way, Brazil is a third world country.

Re:How about non USA/Europe players?

[electricbern]

Well, although all my games are original, either bought or rentals, I have come to terms with the fact that I can't play online FPSs. It is kind of a chicken and egg situation since due to piracy it is unlikely for publishers to invest in server infrastructure in Brazil but due to poor online performance the motivation to officially buy the games is reduced. In any case, I find myself avoiding games with a big online part (or any online/multiplayer functionality). It feels so 2004.

Re:How about non USA/Europe players?

[Draek]

Worry not, we'll remember this, when we laugh our ass off playing in a hacked server with a pirated copy of your game.

As a fellow South American, I'd suggest you go play something else instead. You avoid benefiting them through Network Effect, you avoid making your country look like a haven for copyright infringement, and most importantly, you also avoid making a moron out of yourself.

I'd suggest Red Orchestra, personally.

Re:How about non USA/Europe players?

[Ash-Fox]

I don't really see how this is a troll. Why would you waste your time on investing in a country that generally pirates everything constantly? Where past attempts for investment lead to nothing? It would be a waste of money for Infinity Ward.

It didn't exactly sell ridiculously well...

[Runefox]

While it outsold MW1, MW2's PC port sold a paltry 3% of total MW2 sales - I believe that says quite a lot about it.

Frankly, I'm fairly sure that's what they're going for - Cripple the experience on the platform that's easiest to pirate for, and encourage people to move to the locked-down platforms (360, PS3). At least, that's what it looks like to me. There's more money in the console versions, and the numbers pretty much scream as much. I can hear it now - "Why bother with the PC this time around? It only sold 3% last time and look at the piracy! Just focus on the 360/PS3". I wouldn't really even give a damn if not for the fact that controllers are absolutely worthless to me as far as first-person shooters go.

Re:It didn't exactly sell ridiculously well...

[roachdabug]

I've been looking for buddies to team up with online, but practically everyone I've spoken with has picked up a console version of the game. What struck me was how many of them actually preferred using their thumbs. Some of them didn't even know there was a PC version in the first place.

At any rate, I'm with you. I'd be fine with the consoles if they'd just let me plug in my keyboard and mouse.

Re:It didn't exactly sell ridiculously well...

[MetalPhalanx]

Unfortunately, the people making the decisions have probably never held a controller, let alone attempted to play an FPS with one.

Re:It didn't exactly sell ridiculously well...

[jgtg32a]

I have an it sucks, the only thing I like about it is that it is stupid easy to kill people, thanks autoaim

Re:It didn't exactly sell ridiculously well...

[Astronomerguy]

I've been looking for buddies to team up with online, but practically everyone I've spoken with has picked up a console version of the game. What struck me was how many of them actually preferred using their thumbs. Some of them didn't even know there was a PC version in the first place.

At any rate, I'm with you. I'd be fine with the consoles if they'd just let me plug in my keyboard and mouse.

Take a look here: http://www.splitfish.com/ and look at the Frag FX and their newer products. I'm a PC gamer as is one of my buddies. We also own PS3's, though I use mine mostly for media streaming. We're big COD4/WAW players on the PC. He used a FragFX on his PS3 and was accused of cheating on his PS3 games because it was so natural to his PC gaming style. He was kicking serious backside. Like me, he hates the PS3 controller for FPS games. Once he told them he's a PC gamer and what he was using, the responses was "...oh.". It takes a bit of tweaking in setting it up to get it comfortable to your playing style, but once you do, it really makes the game fun. It's on my to-get list.

Re:It didn't exactly sell ridiculously well...

[roachdabug]

I wonder how the feel is compared to an actual PC FPS. The console games certainly aren't set up for a mouse. I'd imagine there's a bit of techno-wizardry involved to translate the speed of the mouse movement into the corresponding right thumbstick position to feed to the PS3.

I wouldn't be surprised much if some of the nuance was lost in translation, not to mention that you'll potentially encounter a "max stick" speed where moving the mouse any faster will have no greater effect on screen.

Even if it's not perfect, I have no doubt it would improve your play enough to warrant some sort of ethical dilemma :D

As I am a 360 owner, I guess I'll never find out D:

Re:It didn't exactly sell ridiculously well...

[BobMcD]

I wouldn't really even give a damn if not for the fact that controllers are absolutely worthless to me as far as first-person shooters go.

Do those things still have USB ports on them? Bluetooth, perhaps?

Re:It didn't exactly sell ridiculously well...

[FlopEJoe]

Count me as one of the folks who was going to buy it on the release date. Without dedicated servers, I consider it mostly a single player game so I'll wait till the bargain bin.

Re:It didn't exactly sell ridiculously well...

[StikyPad]

Yeah, there's really no excuse for not having keyboard/mouse support in console games. Any of the modern consoles have USB ports AND wireless capabilities (unadulterated BT in some cases), and two of them have integrated web browsers! I can only assume that they feel the need to preserve the marketing BS that their unique, revolutionary, miraculous cancer-curing, baby-kissing, joy-giving controllers are so spectacular that there's no need for any alternative; a message that would be utterly obliterated if mouse/keyboard users were permitted to compete head-to-head in FPSes with controller-wielding kool-aid swillers.

Re:It didn't exactly sell ridiculously well...

[Hadlock]

On the contrary, I would assume most of the junior management played Halo 1 in their frat houses all the time. Probably plenty of middle managers played Halo 1 in their off time while working on their MBAs. It wouldn't surprise me if most of them played a good bit of Halo 2 as well. Which would explain a lot regarding the recent turn towards console-based FPSes.

Re:It didn't exactly sell ridiculously well...

[troutinator]

Or because console gamers don't want to deal with those of us willing to play at a desk. We all know that a mouse is more accurate and that mouse versus controller isn't a fair match. So, the people who sit on a couch or what have you with their controller playing on there 50" plasma tv would have to move to a desk with a keyboard and mouse to remain competitive, which, they understandably don't want to do. Each method of control has its benefits, I certainly wouldn't want to try and balance a keyboard on my lap and attempt to use the couch cushion beside me for my mouse. So, the controller is an all-one-in input device useful for not tethering yourself down by needing a large flat surface. Still, I'm a PC gamer, even if it means sitting 2 feet from my 24" LCD at my desk.

Re:It didn't exactly sell ridiculously well...

[secretcurse]

I completely agree with you, and I hate the strategy. I also wonder how many sales it has cost. I personally picked it up for 360 on release day, but I would've happily paid for a 360 version and the PC version (like I did with COD4) if the PC version wasn't a complete piece of afterthought shit. Sometimes I like to just grab my controller and sit on the couch playing with a handful of people and sometimes I like playing 64 player maps on my PC. Since the PC version is just a crappier port that will be easier to hack than the console versions, they only got one sale from me. Sure, I'm not boycotting the game completely, but I would've spent $120 instead of $60. I know at least a dozen of the guys that I regularly game with would've as well. I wish there was a way to independantly and reliably figure out how many sales they lost by not making a decent PC game that someone could rub a suit's nose in. Just like folks above have pointed out, the sad fact is that now the suits will just say that the PC isn't worth developing for at all...

Re:It didn't exactly sell ridiculously well...

[Runefox]

Yes, but there aren't any provisions in-game to make use of a keyboard+mouse control scheme - The PS3 does, however, allow for use of the keyboard/mouse to navigate its browser/XMB, but still nothing for in-game. Developers could likely fairly easily set it up to work that way, but unfortunately, the vast majority of PS3 users probably don't have keyboards/mice hanging off, so why bother?

Re:It didn't exactly sell ridiculously well...

[BobMcD]

Sure, but the technology is built on a standard, therefore products are quite likely to exist...

Google showed me this:

http://www.xcm.cc/index.htm

Re:It didn't exactly sell ridiculously well...

[Runefox]

Yeah, I've heard of those, but I can't say how well they work (especially given the amount of optimization done for the joystick inputs (this emulates a gamepad)) and, well, $100 price tag.

Re:It didn't exactly sell ridiculously well...

[Anonymous Coward]

have you spent any time trying to play a FPS on the xbox? I used to think the same thing, until I actually sat down and played it for a bit and learned the controls. Now I won't play FPS any other way. the xbox controller really works quite well IMO

PFFfff......

[Tei]

The game is reusing a old engine, that probably already has lots exploits well know, and his weakness well know.
But this time the attacker can run the server. So he can do anything to the server.

So you start with something that is weak, vulnerable and his problems well know, and move to a setup that make it more vulnerable, and remove any ability from the community to self-protect from jerks.

MW2

[kalirion]

Anyone else think "MechWarrior 2" whenever they see the acronym?

Re:MW2

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, every time. And every time I'm disappointed.

Re:MW2

[jaggeh]

Timberwolf beats your Stormcrow

Re:MW2

[PaganRitual]

I do. I really wish they would use simply COD6 or whatever it's up to now.

Dedicated server support

[Anonymous Coward]

Teknogods (who have a good reputation on releasing non-steam cracks) just posted about their progress here:
http://www.teknogods.com/
So dedicated server support should be coming in a few weeks.

Off topic

[Anonymous Coward]

I was considering buying CoD 42 (omg I missed 5 through 41!) and mistakely hit this site: www.steam.com

"This domain is not for sale."

I wonder who has been bothering them?

Zombies or people who are brand whores

[yoda589]

ya, and then watch that most of those sales that are "record Breaking" are by a few idiot's who got bribed by IW and Activision just to buy them, ohh wait it is those zombies who cant think at all and sold their souls to Infinityward and Activision...

there was no demo for MW2

[YesIAmAScript]

Because they didn't need one, they knew it would sell anyway. And they were right.

Please Boot Xbox Cheaters also

[whitedsepdivine]

I play MW2 on 360. I have been in games where one person has 30 deaths and another one from the other team has 30 kills in the first minute. I guess they are using tactical insertion. But then they nuke and the game is over. I report them when I see it, but it is just BS. Please ban people that do this also!

I love the kill cam.

[gknoy]

I love the kill cam in COD4. As you said, it helps me learn What I Did Wrong: the spots to watch out for, the places people can get to, the need to be wary of pre-emptive grenades, the value of having sights up all the time, as well as the value of a well-timed sprint.

I understand that many clan servers would turn OFF kill cam to prevent people from spouting intel to teammates over Ventrilo (or the like), and sometimes the mandatory kill cam is annoying in deathmatch, but I frequently get in a rut of "How the hell are they doing that!?", and can't find out because there's no kill cam on the server.

Dead

[Hellswaters]

Well this game is dead already. Thats the problem with no dedicated servers and mod support. People get bored of the same couple maps and toss the game into a box to collect dust.

I bought the PS3 version

[dave562]

After years of playing FPS games online on PCs (since the original Quake if you count LAN play), I finally gave up on playing against hackers. They just ruin the game. Even though getting adjusted to the PS3 controller after years of mouse and keyboard input took about a couple of weeks, it has been worth it. The game play is smooth and the graphics are great.

The only real downside is the match making. It seems that it is hosting the game on other people's hardware? Like other posters have mentioned, finding a match is a PITA. Occasionally the match will crash right in the middle of the game. I've only seen a host migration work twice, most of the time it fails. Other times the game will try to start a match, then it fails to find a host and bombs out. Often times once a match is over, enough of the players leave that there aren't enough left to play the next match. At that point odds are the lobby is going to close and you're going to have to go through the whole process again.

One of the reasons that I bought a PS3 is because the online play is free. From where I sit, I'm getting what I paid for. If I had an Xbox and was dealing with the same issues, I'd be right pissed.

I posted this story.

[Faithbleed]

I play MW2 and it's a great game. I've also signed the "Dedicated Servers Petition." However, I do see where IW is coming from, they want more control over cheaters, which is good. But they're doing that by using IWnet, which isn't nearly as enjoyable a system to use as dedicated servers would be. If it came down to dedicated servers with more cheaters versus IWnet and less cheaters then I'm rooting for the IWnet option.