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

Re:Ayn Rand had a lot to say about this

[Purist]

What a load of crap.

A "superior player" doesn't need cheats any more than top baseball players or Olympians need steroids.

As a matter of fact....it's an easy argument to make that INFERIOR players are the ones who need to leverage cheats.