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

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

[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.

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

[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: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.