Valve's Battle Against Cheaters

wjousts writes "IEEE Spectrum takes a look behind the scenes at Valve's on-going efforts to battle cheaters in online games: 'Cheating is a superserious threat,' says [Steam's lead engineer, John] Cook. 'Cheating is more of a serious threat than piracy.' The company combats this with its own Valve Anti-Cheat System, which a user consents to install in the Steam subscriber agreement. Cook says the software gets around anti-virus programs by handling all the operations that require administrator access to the user's machine. So, how important is preventing cheating? How much privacy are you willing to sacrifice in the interests of a level playing field? 'Valve also looks for changes within the player's computer processor's memory, which might indicate that cheat code is running.'"

Comments

Ayn Rand had a lot to say about this

[BadAnalogyGuy]

What all these anti-cheating efforts fail to realize is that cheating is an integral part of the game, especially in computer gaming. Given that such a cheat can be performed by anyone, the playing field is *always* level in the aggregate. By removing actions that they consider cheating, they are removing key gameplay elements and ultimately changing the face of the game.

Additionally, it says a lot that they must resort to installing what is essentially a rootkit just to make sure someone isn't taking advantage of superior technology or extra knowledge. If these games are so unplayable with cheating enabled, perhaps the designers shouldn't have put those features in.

Crippling superior players is Communism.

Re:superserious

[FSWKU]

"Superserious" is one step below "superserial" which is, of course, a description reserved solely for the dreaded Manbearpig. That alone should tell you how much of a threat online cheating really is. It might not threaten us all as severely as Manbearpig, but that doesn't mean it won't kill you in your sleep. The sooner we stop online cheating, the sooner we become one step closer to defeating Manbearpig....

EXCELSIOR!