Slashdot Mirror
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.
PunkBuster is just as vulnerable to being bypassed and disabled as VAC is, so saying they should have used PunkBuster is a cop out.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
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.
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
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.
-Woof woof woof!
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.
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).
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.
Anyone else think "MechWarrior 2" whenever they see the acronym?
It's called aim assist, which is basically the same thing as an aimbot
"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?
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.