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Xbox Live Labels Autistic Boy "Cheater"
Jellis55 writes "Jennifer Zdenek, the mother of an 11-year-old boy who lives with autism, is outraged at Microsoft Xbox Live for labeling her son a 'cheater' and taking away everything he's earned online. She says her son, Julias Jackson, is so good at playing X-Box games, Xbox LIVE thought he cheated. She says her son got online last week to play Xbox LIVE and saw that he was labeled a cheater and had zero achievements. Microsoft continues to ignore her requests to take 'cheater' off of his account."
he just cheated?
Maybe he actually cheated... LOL. Naturally, the mother is biased in favor of her son.
Well, obviously 'Cheater' is the highest level of achievement in the Microsoft Universe. It makes perfect sense in terms of the One Microsoft Way.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Statistical Model, you failed my Outlier.
What do you have to say for yourself?
What has the fact that the boy is an autist have to do with this? Or is this about the old myth that all autists are extremely good in some thing?
IANAL, (and IANAUSC) but the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 may offer some sort of legal redress, if the mother (or son) are convinced that it is his disability which is affecting his game play.
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...to take cheater off his account simply because there is evidence of cheating. From @Stepto 's Twitter feed:
We confirmed there were cheated achievements and gave the parent the details. This wasnt a "he played too good" situation at all. https://twitter.com/stepto/status/30451173655838720
"I think everyone is an agnostic but just doesn't know" - Frazz
What if he's just a savant (at video games)? Then he'd be exceptional, to the point where it would look, to an observer, like a cheater.
Can someone explain to me how it's even possible to "cheat" in Microsoft's little walled playground? I thought that was the whole point of a closed console network.
There is a war going on for your mind.
What benefits do I get from gamer points? Does it give me extra Live hours? More M$ dollars points to buy add-ons? Prizes? A barrel of monkeys? More lotto drawings for free tickets to visit the Naked & Petrified Natalie Portman Exhibit at the Pimple Popper Expo?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
And agree to their terms. They get to be the final arbiters.
Don't like that? Don't join.
Whatever happened to the informed, rational customer who would walk-away from a proposal? Nowadays people are slavish consumers who accept anything that a corporation demands so they can have their shiny baubles. So, the corporations demand even more next time...
Given the relatively closed state of the Xbox360(some known exploits for rather old firmwares; but not much available for the newest ones and aggressive banning of detected modified units from XBL by Microsoft) and the Xbox Live service, what are the avenues of cheating that would motivate them to use what are presumably statistical outlier detection models?
Are there individual game glitches that are considered to be "cheating" if used? Are there third-party controllers that have some equivalent of the good old "turbo" button(and some game that fails to control max fire rates, now that actual computing power is available)? Is there, in fact, a reasonable population of hacked xboxes running modified binaries that allow any of the classic PC gaming cheaters' tricks(see-through walls, etc.)? Do the requirements of low latency over domestic connections mean that some or most games leave themselves open to packet modification tricks?
Has somebody gone to the trouble of building a machine vision +input emulation system capable of delivering mathematically optimal play for certain games?
I know Microsoft bans modded hardware, and I know unmodded hardware won't execute unblessed binaries or talk to unblessed peripherals(unless, possibly, the correctly emulate the behavior of blessed ones), so why is "cheater" a distinct category from "banned"?
I once played an online game where you could set the robotic factories to building robotic factories, and then after a while switch them over to building ships. In one turn you could produce a huge fleet out of nowhere. When I did this, the game designers were convinced I had cheated because "there's no other way you could get that many ships." They didn't understand their own game, or how exponential growth works. Explaining this didn't help, I was banned.
P.S. So in the next round I helped my friends actually cheat by hacking the game's database and producing written spy reports of enemy movements. Ha.
While we may debate if he really cheated or not,, really has true autism or not and so on, I think there's something else that is worth discussing.
Online games are played by millions nowadays and want it or not, this shapes the society a little bit in it's own ways.
In my experience, anyone losing to the superior minded in any game involving strategy (they almost all do, including FPS and "dumb" RPGs) will eventually call it cheating. I think everyone has experienced that. Eventually, if enough people get pissed and do not understand how it is possible to lose so bad to a legitimate player, they will label him cheater.
Admins and game masters are no different - usually they also play the game. They will find any so-called proof to dismiss the person and have it banned for breaking the rules, even if no rule was broken.
Examples:
- it's statistically impossible to have 60% accuracy, it's a proof of cheating
- it's statistically impossible to win 1v10, it's obvious cheating
- he's going too much damage
- he can't click that fast
and so on - mostly based on lose "stats" and no real reference
Sadly (well - this is human), people also tend to play such games so many hours a day that such reactions are seen also in their day to day offline life.
Incoming in 3 ... 2 ...
I don't get why "Autism" is included in TFA. Is the child's autism relevant here? Did Microsoft label the kid as a cheater because he was autistic? It's too easy to label this as a ploy to feel saddened for the mother.
I've got nothing against autistic children, but I don't like to see something like this thrown around when it's not necessary. They might as well have included, "Microsoft labels 4'8", 110 pound boy as a cheater" or "Microsoft labels bright A+ boy as a cheater".
1) The importance of this game in the kid's life has gotten totally out of control. "This is all he does." Creepy. 2) Kid thinks game achievements actually mean something; they don't. 3) Mother probably does not understand mechanisms for cheating. 4) Response from XBL was poor though.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
I doubt Microsoft was really aware they were banning an autistic child from their service at the time. Quite honestly, I'd imagine if you take that factor out of the equation this sort of thing happens all the time.
Unless, of course, the kid had "AUTISTIC" marked on his account.
I don't know if he cheated or not, but that seems a bit harsh, removing all of his achievements and branding him a cheater forever (or is it, i only play PC games). MS could at least show some compassion.
This is hilarious. A boy's mother complains about how he is treated unfairly by a gaming service. Don't these people have any real world concerns? Do we really need the next iteration of the soccer mom?
Reminds me how a Warner Bros exec once visited the Netherlands, noticed cartoons were subtitled and demanded they be dubbed instead. Dutch kids can't possibly be that proficient at reading! They are dubbed every since.
Dumbass. Before dutch channels started to broadcast cartoons we depended on the British Sky Channel. No subtitles, no dubbing. Not a kid complained. Ever. And we all enjoyed it just as much.
I hope they sue and crush that crook! The feds couldn't fix him but be sure some angry mothers of disabled children will decimate him!
I can't WAITTTT to see that!
I say that as an antisocial mensa member with Asperger's that went undiagnosed into his late 20s.
After that rant, I can't imagine why it took over 20 years.
Well, apart from the smart thing; who should crush who and why?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
You sure put the "ass" in aspergers.
You realise that the entire point of Slashdot having a threaded discussion system is so that you can actually reply to the people that you're replying to, they can see your post, and you can have a discussion?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Picking on Microsoft because you're a mentally disadvantaged dickhead. It amuses me, you know, watching morons like you bitching about anything that Microsoft does without even RTFA. You just made me laugh, what a moron
And FWIW, Gates is known to have Aspbergers, too.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
David, is that you?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Because we all know "mentally disadvantaged" children never cheat right? RIGHT?
you cheated!
rewriting history since 2109
For the reporter to ask: "What's your autistic 11 year old doing spending all his time playing Mature rated games that revolve around killing people?"
Shift happens. Fire it up.
...isn't being labeled a cheater (if you didn't cheat) like getting the best X-box achievement EVER? All other achievements are beneath you, at that point - you broke the meter.
Microsoft probably doesn't use a heuristic approach to detecting cheating. They probably got tools on the console that can detect if a person's profile was edited using 3rd party tools. Microsoft doesn't want to reveal this process because it would make it easier for cheaters to bypass the system. It would be foolhardy for Microsoft to rely on a system that just flagged people for being "too good." Not even Blizzard, the king of banning people, does this. Blizzard has tools (Warden Client) to detect cheating and flag the account for further review. For example, Blizzard just doesn't say "this guy farmed 100 herbs a minute, he must be cheating". Instead Blizzard says "a known cheating program was detected on the system" or "he was herbing from under the terrain and using a memory hack to teleport from one node to another instantly".
Microsoft probably flagged his account as cheater because the Xbox detected because a process on the Xbox 360 detected the cheating, not that he's "too good" to have collected so many achievement points.
I think the mother is just being a mother and defending her son.
Who says autistic children can't cheat? Where is the evidence that supports that assumption?
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
"antisocial Mensa member"
Yup, that's why I never joined. Every single person at the Mensa meeting I went to were weird as hell. and being a Mensa member does not do anything at all for your career so why should I pay dues to a club that has zero value?
From my experience of being sucked into it by a friend for 1 year, Mensa has zero value for members other than nerd bragging rights. And a weak one at that.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You realise that the entire point of a threaded forum is that it is organised as a tree? The GP specifically said "To the prior responders" implying that he is replying to multiple different posts. Any ideas on how someone can do that in a slashdot discussion other than the way that he tried?
- smallfries (who has already moderated and might not see replies)
He "lives with" autism? What precisely does that mean?
I can't imagine he's a very good roommate.
-Styopa
Link is blocked at work/Link was slashdotted at home, mind summarizing what he did that was cheating?
I thought all video game addicts were mildly to severely autistic anyway? Isn't that what most of the American population is breeding to be these days, "functioning autistic"? All the autistic people I've ever met catch huge fat checks for being alive with autism. They're even allowed to have kids with other autistics. Those kids are born into the grand estate of autism, autism awareness, and quotes around the word "functioning". They get to play videos games and eat ice cream balls all god damn day long. The American Dreams, so, what else could their parents possibly in a million years want for them?
If the kid is screaming and breaking shit too much to handle since he lost his high falootin' shooter's awards and trophies for cutting peoples' balls off, she should sit the kid down and put it to him like this: they kicked Dustin Hoffman's "Raymond" character out of the casino in "Rain Man", they can kick you out of XBOX. Not everybody loves Raymond, and not everybody loves you. See the dichotomy? See the similar pattern? Good pattern, good pattern-solving little kid. Just hit the reset button and try again, it'll be like going back in time.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
I suggest you go away and read up on what autism actually is. Posts like yours do no more to help understanding of the condition, than the very people you rail against for self-diagnosing as autistic.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
What could this lady gain by suing anybody? She's already got it made. If the social security system keeping Autistics in suspended animation fails then whatever caused that would probably cause the life support maintaining the currency to fail as well, so even if she wins a multi-million dollar judgement it's not going to make her son's life any more secure. He's just going to have huge amounts of cash to flaunt, to spend on developing sadistic violent tendencies, and to coerce his genetic lineage into being.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
well, you simply must tell me where all these "big fat checks" come from, i've never received one.
I'm a Mac. Windows Vista was NOT my idea.
Reply to the first one that made the point: the subsequent people making the same point will be moderated redundant.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
And Gates' company is also known to frequently cheat ...
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
does even one word i said make it sound like i give a fuck about any of it? puhLEEZ.
and my user number is a fraction of yours. I'm not "going away" -- you go away, cabbage-head!
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Maybe he didn't, maybe he did. I don't know.
But the idea of labelling players with a "you suck" label forever seems extremely obnoxious. If people cheat on their taxes should they have a litlte holographic "tax evader" over their heads forever? It's just a really awful feel. Bad call by microsoft.
-josh
This makes it true HOW? A judge has regarded warrantless wiretapping constitutional. So is he right because he's a judge whereas if it were a shock-jock saying it, it would be wrong?
He could have cheated (I know many kids that do) and if he did he should have been reset. There are many ways to cheat (such as getting into cheater lobbies or using glitches) but Microsoft should inform the user why they are being reset. A simple error code would do. Very seldom if ever do they reset someone for playing with a modded control after all. I mean it's is only a game, but still you have a contract with Microsoft to a certain degree when you buy a Xbox Live account.
The modern way that cheating is detected is basically simple and yes it is accurate.
Microsoft has access to the internals of the game code while you play. Here are a few examples of how MS knows if someone cheated.
All the below are a few examples are checked while the person is playing online.
1) Look for the actual cheat code in the game memory.
2) Look for the specific altered values of game code that represent what the cheats modify.
3) Look for the jump point in the game memory, that the cheat code uses to hide the cheat outside of game memory.
4) Look to see if a specific file has been altered from what is expected and/or is impossible to have that value(s)
5) look at the supporting system files the game uses for specific alterations from standard.
The methods used are accurate in detecting cheaters. I've simplified the full explanation of some and left others out. I've just listed common methods that a lot of people are aware of already. My point here is if these or similar are the methods MS used, then the kid is a cheat.
It's been my experience that parents just don't want to believe their little Johnnie or Mary is a cheat. Some will once you explain how they were caught but almost as often the parent stays in denial. Denial won't change MS's view or decision however.
This woman's threat that she will cancel her child's account is a good thing. The first and obvious is that it will remove one more cheater from the on-line game community. It will teach her child a lesson. By the parent canceling the child learns a lesson that cheating has ramifications beyond what MS did to the account. Now the child will learn that just losing achievements was a more just punishment after all and by lying to his mom jut made things worse. Now he can't play online.
In my opinion MS should have permanently banned this kid from whatever game he got caught cheating in. MS should offer one redemption and that is to buy the game a second time and he can play again unless he is caught once again cheating. If the person does it again then make the ban permanent with no further second chances.
It's been my experience that showing the cheater that there are significant consequences to their actions, does work. Some are just a little slower on the uptake than others but after a couple of bans they get the message. My experience is based on what I do and it's represented by my /. alias.
I have no idea what goes on behind the scenes at Microsoft and how they detect and handle cases of cheating. However, for quite a few years during my postgrad days and early years of employment, I was involved on the admin-side of the (PC) online gaming scene, and spent a lot of time dealing with cheaters. I have a few thoughts based on that:
A ban for just "being too good" is highly improbable, assuming that MS have even mildly competent people working on this. Back when I was running a (major, UK-based) Counter-Strike league, the kindest description of my own level of play would have been "slightly better than average". There were players in the league who could have beaten me with their eyes closed. My admin team contained people who had a range of ability levels, but none of them were top-tier players.
Adminning top-division games was therefore something that had to be taken very seriously. Accusations of cheating were always rife in CS, though in my experience the actual level of cheating, outside of a relatively small proportion of badly adminned public servers, was never as high as it was commonly perceived to be. Making sure that average players were able to tell whether a top level player was cheating or was just plain good was, therefore, one of the main challenges for an admin team and one that was taken very seriously indeed.
We had a number of principles in place regarding accusations of cheating (or independent admin suspicions when no accusation had been made). These were:
1) Any flags raised by the Valve Anti-Cheat were treated as reliable. If VAC says a player is cheating, they are kicked from the match and the league immediately. They can appeal, but would need to show very convincing evidence that there had been a false-positive (nobody ever managed this, all we ever got was "OMG my brother installed cheats").
2) Knowing that Valve Anti-Cheat was, at the time, fairly easily defeated, admins were expected to know the signs of cheating and to watch for these. We had a library of video clips that all new admins were expected to study, some of which showed players who were using wallhacks or aimbots, others which showed clips that were just of very good players pulling off shots that looked suspicious, but which were recorded at LANs and verified as legitimate.
3) If an admin suspected that a player in a game he was refereeing was cheating, he did not stop the match or kick players. No bans were given at this stage.
4) Admins recorded all matches as a matter of policy (both for anti-cheating and because players liked to download the replays later). The admin of the "dodgy" match flagged a concern in private to the senior admins.
5) 3 other admins, including at least 1 of the senior admins (usually me) scrutinised the demo from the alleged cheater's point of view. There were reliable signs of cheating (as opposed to good or lucky play) that could consistently be spotted. One classic, though by no means the only sign, was an instant-flick moment of the crosshair to an enemy, completely out of line with that player's usual mouse-sensitivity.
6) If 2 of the 3 other admins (with one of the two being the senior admin) agreed that there was cheating, then the player was banned from the league and the results of games they had played in were overturned (subject to appeal). If there was no consensus, then the original admin who raised the concern was thanked for their diligence (there was no harm in privately flagging suspicious activity - I always encouraged it) and no further action was taken.
In around 75% of cases, all 3 reviewers would agree that there had been no cheating. In around 95% of cases, 2 of the 3 agreed that there had been no cheating. We averaged around 3 player bans per season, of which 2 were usually as a result of "technical" (ie. VAC) detections. I am confident that none of the "admin" detections that were confirmed were false-positives.
My point is that this is the degree of scrutiny we applied to what was, for most of its
1. Ideally you wouldn't do it like that at all, but have enough data transmitted and processed by the server to actually know WTH happened there.
E.g., if you have an MMO and do any money or item transfers in an atomic transaction on the server, then you just eliminated duping. And if you keep a log of who bought or transferred what, and suddenly an item appears that doesn't have such records, then you know some cheat was involved.
2. If someone did go with such statistical methods, they have the added disadvantage that
A) they don't account for flukes. As you probably know, having, say, 55% accuracy only means 55% in the very long run. Getting even 10 or 20 hits in a row is improbable but not impossible. When you have a million players shooting millions of rounds each, and more deaths per minute than at Kursk, one in a million odds will actually happen very often. You'll have several deaths a day which are the 20'th hit without a miss in a row.
B) being "that good" is actually a relative thing.
Someone who thinks they're that good against random newbies in random matches, may be completely pwned when they stumble on a major clan's server. I had exactly that nasty surprise myself in UT. You'd think I'd manage at least one frag there, but it was like skeet shooting with me being the clay pigeon ;)
Conversely, someone who isn't even playing that good may stumble upon a bunch of complete noobs, and rake up a ridiculous score by simple virtue that accuracy against stationary targets is really that much better. I've had that kind of experience too.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The real question is why does this kid "has no friends" and depends so heavily on xbox ?
Why is he on Xbox Live (gold i presume) ?
Some people here seem to think the ADA or whomever else will stand up for this kid.. That might work if they can prove
that someone at Microsoft KNEW that he was disabled.
I've worked with several autistic children, and they are capable of cheating, trust me ..
Seriously lady, get your kid a book, read to him, don't just plop him in front of the Xbox and call that a "life"
One classic, though by no means the only sign, was an instant-flick moment of the crosshair to an enemy, completely out of line with that player's usual mouse-sensitivity.
Are you aware that most good bots, at least these days, can be tuned to whatever sensitivity you desire in order to evade detection?
I play tremulous occasionally, and one of the difficulties of an OS game with no built in anti-cheat is that you never know whos cheating. Is that guy cheating, or is he really able to take people out at close range with a sniper rifle (mass driver)? Is he cheating, or is he consistently taking out top level aliens with the weakest gun due to never missing a bullet?
You can spectate the guy (view game from his PoV), but you never know if he is turning the aimbot on and off, or tweaking its settings, or if he is really that good. You can accuse him of cheating, but the problem is its not wrong to be so good that you can flick your mouse onto someones head; its only cheating if you have a bot do it for you, and there is no rock solid way to detect that by observation.
MS did not declare this. They just responded with a very generic, we are right, you are wrong, and ms declared the fact that you might have cheated does not create a ban.
If he cheated, all ok, but MS has to give some kind of prove, if there is no prove or more detailed explanation, then marking some "cheat" is slaunder (?is that the correct english word?)
It looks like you're taking this from tournament play. This kid wasn't in a tournament, he was just playing the online game. There's a huge difference in the number of players to scrutinize here, and it's completely unreasonable to expect direct admin intervention. They're relying solely on automated detection systems at this level.
However, their apparent complete lack of appeals process is unacceptable, especially when the main process is entirely automatic and subject to false positives.
Several previous posts have discussed checking game memory for hacks... I very much doubt this was a console hack, judging from the kid. So lets just throw that out right now.
So with direct admin spotting and memory scrubbing off the list, that leaves two basic routes to get banned. Either statistically improbable scoring, or statistically improbable performance. (similar to your watching for uncharacteristic pointer sensitivity) Autistic kids are well known to live outside the statistical norm, demonstrating (usually mental) seemingly impossible stunts. (the public classics like memorizing sections of telephone books, but that's uncommon) This kid could very easily have an average head-acquisition time of half a second, and still not be able to tie his own shoes. Autistic kids tend to focus on a few or a single thing and shut most other things out, so they grand-master that skill, and are utterly fail at most everything else we take for granted. It's usually something totally useless, but every now and then they hit on something that's actually useful, it's just completely random that way and there's no choosing what it is. MS's anticheat system can't account for this, and doesn't. The fact that they have no serious appeals process is the problem here.
But that being said, taking it from the other players' perspective, there may be no observable difference between this kid and someone that's using an aimbot. He may also have a very powerful spacial memory allowing him to maintain a picture of the game map in his head, along with all the players, accounting for movement, in real time, which closely resembles a wall hack. For the other players, this kid may have a huge advantage, and for people that come to xbox live for fun, this may really ruin their fun. It'd be like going to the playground for a round of basketball and having michael jordan show up. Maybe neat to watch, but not really that fun if you still want a chance of winning when you play, and most people do.
So as much as people might not like it, MS may have actually done the right thing for the majority. I don't particularly like that myself, but there it is. I know I personally don't care to sign into a game and see a person on the opposing team that I know is just going to spank everyone on my team including myself for the entire game.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
This is true these days. However, I'm really talking here about the 2000-2003 time-span, when aimbots were rather less sophisticated. They evolved and improved over the time I was involved, for sure. As a league admin, you absolutely needed to stay on top of the cheating scene so that you knew what you were up against. However, at the time I gave it up due to work committments in 2003, it was still possible to spot Counter-Strike aimbots by careful scrutiny of replays.
Wallhacks were harder, as there was a good degree of psychology involved. For instance, good players generally knew which walls and crates people tended to hide behind and to scan accordingly. We only ever did one "admin detected" ban for a wallhack, in a very, very blatant case (in a low-division match) where a player was not only targetting other players through walls, but happily tracking them and following their movement. We had a few similar cases where the evidence just wasn't quite strong enough.
The Mom's twitter account has add'l info, including a claim that "Someone accessed his acct from out of state on august 26th.not clear on what they did yet"
ColdAssSunshine
The Xbox 360 allows you to copy a game to the HDD, significantly reducing loading times. In addition, the Xbox 360 has been hacked for a while using a JTAG to run unsigned code. Once someone hacks the game, a player can download the hack by using the xbox Media Center, a USB drive to transfer the files, or just by joining a game with someone that has the mod. (Modern Warfare, I'm looking at you!)
You can also do a combination of bridging host and running unsigned code to give you all kinds of control. (Bridging host = forcing XBL to give you host). For example, one hack was able to return all players in a game lobby to level 1. (Modern Warfare 2, players would lose all of the weapons and perks that they unlocked.) There were also "10th Prestige" lobbies that would automatically boost you to the max level, unlocking all of the weapons and perks in the game.
All of your typical Counter-Strike style cheats can be applied to XBL. Some studios have done a significantly better job at banning cheaters than others. For example, Bungie has done a great job filtering out the cheaters, but Infinity Ward was absolutely horrible at it. (A lot of cheating) Microsoft has done a decent job, but certainly not enough.
Yes, there are also "bugs", but exploiting a bug in the game won't result in a ban.
In the end, there are a LOT of ways to cheat. XBL is not pristine, but it does have some controls to ban Cheaters.
Adding to the GP and P posts: I also play online FPS games, I am an admin with reasonable experience, and, most importantly, [b]I've had the chance to see autistic kids gameplay[/b].
And here's the thing: before I found out a player was autistic, their manner of play raised all kinds of warning flags for me. There were spurts of uncanny abilities, they wouldn't talk to anybody, they were focusing obsessively on a limited sets of actions (run this exact route, attack at these exact points), they displayed anti-social behavior (attacking their own team) for no apparent reason. My first reaction? What a cheater/asshole combo!
Has anybody considered how their repetitive/compulsive nature alone may cause autists to deviate from the player norm? Not to mention that about 1 in 10 autists show outstanding abilities ("idiot savant" kind) and about 9 in 10 exhibit enhanced sensory perceptions.
So I find it strange that most highly-moderated comments so far have completely ignored the fact the kid is autistic and how it may have affected his gameplay. My own experience tells me that unless Microsoft knows for sure he used an actual bug or exploit, I'd take that "cheater" verdict with a BIG grain of salt. I'm fairly confident that an autistic person can trip both automated and human cheater detection. They were designed for regular people.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
There seems to be the suggestion here that because he's autistic he couldn't possibly have cheated, and possibly also that because he's autistic he is thus better at gaming. While the latter might actually be true simply because of perseveration and focus, the former is not. A diagnosis of autism - even if correct - does not also exclude a diagnosis of cheater. Autistic people can cheat, though they may be somewhat less inclined to do so.
If everybody was at risk of being banned for mad skill useage, I would be the last person to receive a ban as I am utterly hopeless.
On Modern Warfare 2 I absolutely have to unload a whole clip at my opponent's feet before trying to inflict any significant damage.
When a knife is called for I am more likely to offer my opponent a packet of sweets that try to stick a knife through their stinking custom painted war face.
If mad skill useage was banned, it would only be a matter of time before I was King of the World. Shortly before killing myself with a cooked pineapple.
"Jennifer Zdenek, the mother of an 11-year-old boy who lives with autism," The mother has autism not the boy... which explains a lot. :P
Sure I can see that. My sons mastery of the ipad interface is down right scary.
Your post, and everybody else's ignores the fact that this child suffers from autism. Is Microsoft really claiming that an autistic child is savy enough to actually cheat? This child is not some kid hacking the system. Granted, his brain works differently than others, and that may give him an advantage in the game, but is that really cheating?
Modern history is full of people who have various mental afflictions, but can do some pretty astounding things. Is it possible that this is another one of those? And, if it turns out that he did cheat, what does it say of online gaming that an autistic child can cheat such a system--maybe Microsoft should hire him to find out how its done and to prevent it in the future.
Now, Rise of The Trial is rated mature.
Sweet. I should have replied to you instead. Yes, this.
My own son is becoming a gamer, and those patterns you're seeing are exactly, precisely why he plays games at all. He gets in the zone running the same loops over, and over, and over, and over again until he has them nailed down. That precision was honed by countless hours of repetition. (Variety is NOT his thing.) So in that specific skillset, he's going to eventually demonstrate a level of absolute mastery. Popping in another game would put him back to square one, but in his own element, he could really be described as superhuman in his ability.
There are two problems with that - there are several different settings for the order to sort posts into. Not everyone uses the same setting and so there is not a canonical answer for which post is first. The other problem is that not everyone makes a single point per post. Looking at the several people who the OP is replying to they all made several points in their posts, marking a post as redundant because it partially overlaps another is quite a loose filter.
Interesting comment. This thread made me search on call of duty hacks. If you believe everything you see there's an aimbot out there which also shows you in the UI where all enemies are and what looks like their current health (I watched a video on it). I didn't read enough to know whether there was a sensitivity setting, but in the video the aim is instant and to the head. It did discuss undetectability though, but looked as if it had something to defeat cheat detection apps.
All this to say I'm sure you're right... that would have to be an early consideration unless you, as the hack writer, want to alienate yourself from people who otherwise would pay you money for their iWin buttons. If you cause them to get their accounts banned, they're not likely to come back to you
What a mess though. But it seems as if 3arch could be doing some checksums to know whether or not their code has been modded or if something else is running at the same time that affects gameplay. Maybe I'm not thinking about it enough.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
Back in the CS days (I suppose it's still played, but I've not heard of any major activity lately), I also had experience with spotting hackers. What started out as my friend and I trying to find out what they were doing eventually got to the point where I could spot hacks and inform admins with about 90% accuracy.
Wall hacks and the like are common but easily detected. The other ways that people cheat are less common:
- They never waste ammo or shots. When the game detects the opponent's death, they instantly stop firing. The player also never wastes ammo/burns off a clip. The typical player will usually shoot the remaining 2 or 3 shots to force an auto-reload as it's less work than moving over to the reload key and hitting it.
- I'm sure you've played games where the instant your player crosses the enemy's line of sight (you can see the pixels of the enemy at all), it instantly detects you, turns around completely, and starts firing. Humans don't have reflexes like that. Specifically doing it from ranges where your character is a 2-3 pixel blob in the far distance while you both are are moving. Some of that can be luck, but often it's not. Doing it 20 times in a match is a usual tip-off. (usually this player has a better than 50% head-shot streak as well) (another type of auto-fire)
(specifically no recoil and no spread) Usually a slight twitch towards the center of the target typical of auto-aim as well. (the last 5-10 pixels would snap onto the target)
- The most common CS hack was impossible to detect by Valve and simply altered the game to show both teams on the radar. Perfect knowledge of other players position when it's not realistic. (eg - always making a bee-line for the one remaining enemy team member who is hiding without any searching at all) Also, most players will usually have a subconscious set of patterns for a map and places they like to hide and search. People running this sort of hack exhibit none of this behavior. They move from one enemy to the other in a clean and precise manner with no fear.(almost as if they had ESP - heh)
- The other one I saw a lot was a hack that made the players glow with a large halo around them.(turns enemy players to 3-4x the normal brightness for textures) If you turn down your brightness on your monitor, the effect could be described as being similar to the "eagle vision" in Assassin's Creed. Seeing through walls isn't required if you know where the light is coming from. Things like always shooting at the right crate, vent, or behind a door at the right time, but never any other time are an instant tip-off.
- Many players would also log into the server as two players/two accounts on different PCs. This was harder to check(though, seeing two nearly identical IP addresses doing this in conjunction was a big tip-off), but the effect was the same as the radar/info hack - one player would be mostly AFK - this was used as a radar/game map. The second that that mostly AFK player died(sometimes they would suicide to get info quicker), the otherwise normal player would switch to god-mode. CS's main glitch was that it transmitted the full game info to all clients in the background and when you died, you could see the other players on the map in real-time. By intercepting that data stream, modifying it and passing it on, you could use that background info without being detected.
- Turning off smoke and blindness. Normal players flinch, move in a random direction, stop, or maybe blindly rush forward. Hackers will not show a visible reaction. This was almost always on in every case. Every hacker that I have run across hates being blinded or smoke and chooses this option. Normal people will yell into the mic for their teammate to stop being a tool and throwing grenades in the wrong place (or when they mess up and it bounces wrong with the same effect/maybe blinds themselves a bit)
Microsoft knows all the tricks and also has workers run small localized games(micro-net set aside for testing/etc) with downloada
Why do you think that an autistic child cannot be savvy enough to cheat? There is a large range of autism, some people with autism are capable of functioning independently in society. We do not know what level of autism this child has. It is even possible that this child would not technically be considered autistic but is merely suffering Asperger's syndorme and the article simplified it to "autistic".
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
He's autistic, not Intellectually Disabled. (wait, that's really the PC term now? sheesh)
I used to track enemies in CS by sound, shoot them once they crossed a door. I did get accused of cheating once or twice though.
What does a 500 lb gorilla do?
until today, of course. after getting bitchslapped for morondom an entire day in gaming circles through here and other places due to news like these, im sure they will suddenly have an outbreak of common sense tomorrow. if they dont - well, more bitchslapping ...
Read radical news here
Cheat code eh? ON XBOX 360 EH? Seriously?
Guess what, xbox 360 OS, even though it's pirated like there is no tomorrow, isn't really compromised. You can't run homebrew, you can't patch stuff.
Only thing you can do is patch your drive to accept pirated (cogh "backup") disk copies.
if this is in a tournament, you just need rules like "no computer-assisted targeting, etc" and thresholds that you think are reasonable. people can debate them, and if people do cross them without cheats can usually prove it. if it's not in a tournament with such rules, it's all fine. a good keymap and lots of caffeine isn't a "cheat"
there's also nothing stopping a "are we all on the same version, and not running mods"-type check using public-key crypto techniques for ex, even for open source games... the open sourcitude has nothing to do with it...
on the other hand, writing the best bot can be a competition in it's own right...
> I was playing Wolf 3D at 11, killing nazis and dogs, you insensitive clod.
At age 11, all we had was Pong. And we had to play it in the snow, uphill both ways.
A ban for just "being too good" is highly improbable, assuming that MS have even mildly competent people working on this.
Hi ... you must be new here!
and my user number is a fraction of yours. I'm not "going away" -- you go away, cabbage-head!
Further proof that having a lower UID only shows that you ate the lead wall candy earlier
Baahhahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahhahaaa.....BBAAAAAAAAHAAAAAAHAAA....Im sorry did you say Valve anti cheat??
The only certain way to detect cheating is standing behind the players and watch their screen, everything else is bullocks.
Sincerely
A CHEATER...
Usually when you get reduced to cheater status by MS it's nearly always because of hacked achievements. The person got an online achievement when offline, they got all achievements for several games on the same day, etc. If they are cheating in a game with a hacked Xbox and they get caught that is always a console ban for life. My son is mildly autistic (Asberger's) and he has more than enough knowledge to hack achievements if he wanted to. This boy is not retarded, the autism has nothing to do with it. It probably encouraged it because people with autism will almost obsess over a thing and put all their attention on it.
When did /. become a home for microsoft's corporate shills? Do you really think they would ever admit their mistake?
> there's also nothing stopping a "are we all on the same version, and not running mods"-type check
> using public-key crypto techniques for ex, even for open source games... the open sourcitude has nothing to do with it...
Unfortunately that's absolutely wrong.
There is one basic principle with an open source game client: You can't, under any circumstances, trust the client.
If I can modify the client to my liking, then there is no way for you to verify anything the client sends
This ultimately also holds true for closed source, but being able to read the source and just recompile my own version makes things much easier.
There are only two ways to protect against cheats that sort of work in an open environment like PCs (aside from good admin coverage on your servers):
1) Security through obscurity as a basis and then scanning the client memory for known cheats.
2) Heuristics: checking player movement etc server side, easy to bypass and prone to produce false positives.
The problem with automation is there are fewer allowances for the exceptions to the rules, or the exceptional. Rue the day when all our systems are automated, the courts, our works, our play, and we either fit the system or are purged.
From the 80's: "The only winning move is not to play."
Even if the kid did NOT cheat, how did this news spread beyond their living room? It's mind boggling to think of all the filters this garbage has to pass through in order to get to the front page of Slashdot. Each point along the way someone had to say, "Yeah, this is worth another minute of my energy.. why don't I pass this on"?
They should give him command of his own starship!
I wouldn't say autism is always "suffering" - it does however change your view on the world, how you analyze and process things [sometimes much much better than others], carry out tasks, and in some cases think of new ways to scare the shit out of others. :D
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Microsoft Achievements sounds like an oxymoron.
This is Microsoft, excellence is punished here.
> Unfortunately that's absolutely wrong.
get informed:
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~krasic/cpsc538a-2005/papers/baughman01cheatproof.pdf
distributed, "cheat"-proof/rule-breaking-detection architectures are possible. open source is no exception to that.
Let's not forget the tax required to be paid in Microsoft Points aka ca$h, for a new gamer tag.
Two ways to get a new gamertag.
- Sign up with a new subscription, thereby losing all purchased MS points and the rest of your current subscription. (little as a month or more than a year).
- Change your gamertag for 800 MS points (I think that is the right fee). I have no idea if this would actually remove the "cheater" label.
Console bans require a new console. $200-$400.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Vac makes mistakes http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/64897
If you even CAN cheat to get achievement, shouldn't that be considered a bug in the server software? I'm assuming he didn't modify the code running on his console. By definition, an "exploit" is simply taking advantage of a mistake made by the software developers. Fix the bugs, and let him re-earn his achievements!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I give you one of my experience.
There is this game called Power Soccer ( www.PowerChallenge.com) where I used to play. At one point I was having a 100+ win streak and consistently defeating opponents that are 40 levels above ( max level 99) and some clan has decided my existence has endangered their clan domination so they made up some fake screenshot, fake proof and so on trying to get me banned.
The "straw that broke the camels back" moment comes when someone mis-represented as me posted game hacks on myg0t. The admin used that as a proof and banned my account, tons of people protest and left the game as a protest, many of them stopped their subscription to the game.
New Economic Perspectives
Hey, lady, who gives a flying fuck about Xbox Live? Why don't you find a real cause to get behind instead of your kid's stupid gamer score?
People with autism-spectrum disorders are well demonstrated to be able to achieve hyper-normal ability in specific areas of motor skills. I had a 12 year old kung-fu student with Aspergers, and his formwork was really amazing (although he lost his edge when he came into contact with an opponent). I had other students for longer and with seemingly stronger basic ability who never *got* the forms the way this boy did. Now he's 17 and spends all his time playing X-Box.
So, did he cheat, or not? Maybe, but if he did, Microsoft really ought to give him another chance. The real problem here is that they refuse to slap him on the wrist and then clear the tag. Whether he's autistic or not, he's 11 YEARS OLD. A "no strikes" rule before permanently labeling a kid a cheater is really draconian way to deal with a child.
You should get him Super Meat Boy. You'll either never have to buy another game again or have an epic library of him defeating some mind-numbingly difficult levels.
Reading the 'article', I get the idea that it's the reporter messing with twitter, and the MS Rep communicating with said reporter via it.
The MS Rep never mentioned talking to the mother via twitter. It could have been by snail-mail letter for all we know.
There's no gain in banning a non-cheating autistic kid. I can see an automatic system doing it if it's screwed up, but human review should fix that.
I don't read AC A human right
The REAL question is "What KIND of cheat is he accused of doing?"
I don't mean that Microsoft Live has to give the EXACT cheat out... Just the type.
Cheats that he would have to KNOWINGLY do. Such as:
1. A program cheat that changes an ingame value.
2. An achievement that can ONLY be gotten by cheating.
Or doing a cheat he may or may not have known was cheat. Such as, doing an EXPLOIT that makes game play easier.
If the former then YES he should be labeled a cheat, but if the latter AND he figured out the exploit on his on, (being that he is autistic this might be true,) then they "Microsoft" should check if the child understood that is was cheating.
This is a pretty common scenario:
Somebody does something they should not have (cheats at game, plays with matches and sets house on fire, gambles away family car/wallet/credit cards, has intimate relations they regret afterward, etc)
They tell a lie to cover it. (They banned me, a man came in and set the fire, I was robbed and somebody carjacked me, I was kidnapped and raped by a black man)
They get buy-in from relatives, employers, police or media. Look at this poor victim, horribly damaged by their traumatic experience.
Media attention follows. Rewards are put up, things like houses, cars and money are donated to cover the losses. Manhunts for the arsonist, muggers, rapists. Posters get put up, fields get searched, etc etc. Innocent people are detained and interrogated or attacked by angry mobs.
Eventually good detective work leads right back to the "victim" who eventually admits that they cheated at the game, they played with matches and burned down their own house, they willingly traded their car/wallet/credit cards/intimate use of their body for drugs or money, had regrets, and concocted a cover story which ended up being believed. By then, it was too late to say "Hey, I um made this up. Here's what really happened." You can't do that when people are out searching fields and doing armed patrols looking for a rapist or robber who does not exist. What do you TELL them? "I lied." is something most people can't say in the best of times for a small lie, much less in bad times when it's all gone out of proportion.
Those who do these things eventually get caught by their own lies. Hopefully before someone innocent is caught in the crosshairs of false justice.
What should happen to this kid? He should be thoroughly interrogated to find out if he's really autistic. Odds are he's been gaming the system all along.
Sorry, not 'liable'. Libel. As in making public false statements about people in writing. They could use the "we thought it was true" line, but if it could be shown that they knew there would be false positives, it would seem that they knew they would be making public false statements about people.
A business posting that a person is a cheater as a fact, is in a different ballpark than cutting off someones access to the service. Calling someone a cheater in a private conversation is also a different ballpark than posting it for the world to see. How likely people are to believe it is also a huge factor. So, if you call me a cheater on Slashdot, it would not carry the same kind of legal weight as if MS calls one of it's users a cheater on their publicly accessible site.
You really think MS want to bother to pay a bunch of people to sit around and look at people's scores and say "That guy looks too good!"
Hell no, as big as Xbox live is they do it automatically, which means as the parent says, they check for cheat code. This could involve scanning the contents of the Xbox harddrive, looking at the memory of the program(s) running, watching the data stream going to the server, etc. You can search around for Valve Anti-Cheat, Punkbuster, Blizzard Warden and get some general information on how this shit works. None of the companies will tell you specifically, of course, they don't want cheaters to circumvent their stuff, but you can get a general idea of the kind of things used to find cheaters.
I am quite sure this is how MS locates cheaters. They may have a human step in and review when something gets flagged, but they certainly aren't paying people to go look for those that are "too good." Rather they have automated code that goes and looks to see if something is happening that ought not be.
Accuracy or fairness reasons for not using a human aren't really the issue, it is simply money.
and it is very possible he is indeed "too good". Autistic kids can be blinding geniuses at complex tasks that require conceptual thinking. First off, I doubt seriously the kid could manage the procedure to "cheat" since it involved downloading and installing. Their minds race all the time, and they would find this very frustrating to do.. But, they are all stellar at seeing concepts and patterns, and they can focus 100% on what they are doing, for hours at a time, and block out everything else. For example, I played a gig at a "Home for mentally "disabled" kids". A boy there, about 10 or so, was fascinated by the Hammond B3 we had. He sat on the edge of the stage, swaying back and forth for an hour while we played, lost in his own little world. We took a break, and the boy could barely manage a conversation, but he got across to me that he loved the last song we played, and wanted to play the organ.. With the OK of the B3 player, I let the kid get up and play. And he played back EXACTLY what our keys played played in that song, INCLUDING his solo. No mistakes, just as if somebody had recorded it. Perfect. Jaw dropping. And in an "aww" moment, the kid hugged our keys player, then he retreated into his own little world on the edge of the stage. The point is this: an autistic child can catch onto a game much faster then we normals can - they see patterns we don't, and they can exactly duplicate patterns they just did. like walking from their room to outside, in exactly the same footsteps. I will guess about they boy's success at gaming- the boy made mistakes at first, but saw some of the patterns in the game. He duped the patterns up to the point of the mistake, then figured out how the "enemy" behaved, since the "enemy" has a behavior pattern that the kid saw, and figured out how the game operated well enough to exploit anomalies we do not see. MS owes this kid an apology, and of they were smart, they'd watch him play the game. they might just learn something from an autistic kid. I did.
Republican leadership = Idiocracy
Years ago when I played RoN a lot I was a above average player. Good enough to be in some of the better clans and thus had recognition in the community but I still was not in the top tier of players. I had a few specific strengths that even allowed me at times to compensate in team games on a higher level than I would have been 1v1 but that is an aside.
In a RTS like RoN a part of the game was matching up 1v1 with people in rated games. And I did so often and as such played a pretty full spectrum of players in such a way. RoN while having its flaws was kept pretty balanced and most of the games that were played rated 1v1 were random civs and random land maps to boot keeping all the players on their toes. (I always would fight to play full random maps and thus force people to fight on the sea as well but anywhoo.)
In playing those games I would every now and then allow myself to be fodder for one of the high end players. One game in particular comes to mind. I had drawn a, this is in the context of 1v1, random strong civ and he had drawn one of the weaker ones. The map was pretty for both of us so overall I had the advantage.
He came at me early and strong. Microing his units well and forced me on the defensive while my early raids suffered because I had to spend my attention to his raiding. He leveled faster and boomed better than me. In short he outplayed me rather well and while I put up a good fight he won.
When playing such games I remember thinking at times, how the hell are they doing that!? And had I not known a lot about the game and the state of what type of cheating was possiable in RoN (very little to none) I think it might have been human nature to assume that my opponent was cheating. When in reality I was just getting outplayed by orders of magnitude.
And here is the kicker. RoN like many RTS games allowed you to record every game you played so you could go back and watch your opponent to see exactly what they did. When I would watch the records of the games I played vs the higher level players I could understand what they were doing but was simply unable to replicate it myself. They were better players than me and that was ok. But even I will admit that at times when I would be playing and see myself getting out played to a degree beyond what I even expected I would wonder if there was some sort of cheating involved.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
You can't pronounce "outlier" without "liar".
Couldn't an "instant flick" in aiming also be due to lag in the recording keeping up with the player? Granted, if this happened consistently and only while aiming, it would by pretty damning.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
My father to this day swears our old Atari 2600 backgammon game used to cheat at backgammon by rolling exactly what it needed to beat him!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Why do you think that an autistic child cannot be savvy enough to cheat? There is a large range of autism, some people with autism are capable of functioning independently in society. We do not know what level of autism this child has. It is even possible that this child would not technically be considered autistic but is merely suffering Asperger's syndorme and the article simplified it to "autistic".
I'm not saying that an autistic child isn't savvy enough to cheat. I'm just pointing out that everybody is ignoring that part of the story and it is quite possible that an autistic child did not cheat, but because of the way he/she views the world was able to play the game in a way that was unexpected and advantageous thus giving the appearance of cheating.
Case in point, my son who is autistic figured out how to beat Chessmaster 3000 (I think that was the version). How, because his view of game is different than who the game was marketed to. Therefore, the logic was not able to prevent him from winning, because the actual game engine wasn't sophisticated enough to deal with it. By the way, after notifying the company, they promptly thanked us and revamped their engine to prevent it an similar holes in the logic. All I am saying by this is that some would say that he cheated, by exploiting a hole in the game, yet it was through his autism that the hole was even found.
I do not know the individual involved in this article, however, is it not a possibility that his autism led to a style of play that was a) successful and b) appeared to be a cheat?
OK, so who cares about your achievements other than you? Seriously, are these guys trying to impress their friends with their bogus achievements? I can actually see an autistic kid doing this, since trouble parsing relationships is a classic symptom, but what's anyone else's excuse? That's just pathetic.
I don't have an xbox so please enlighten me.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
My point was that you dont call someone a cheater based on their performance, and it would be foolish to assume that MS, who has billions to spend and full control of the network, servers, and hardware, would use the same "spectate and look for deviations" method that an open source game uses.
Theyre not going to strip achievements without something more; I cannot believe that this kid is the best player in the world, or that better players than him have all been labeled cheaters. Pulling the "he has autism" card proves nothing except that his parents are prepared to use that excuse as a crutch-- and believe you me, that does no favors to the kid.
I do not know the individual involved in this article, however, is it not a possibility that his autism led to a style of play that was a) successful and b) appeared to be a cheat?
The gist of the answer of several people who spoke about how cheating is detected in such games was, "No."
Now, several people replied to those answers by pointing out that Microsoft does not say how they determined he was cheating, so it is possible that they did not use any of the types of methods that the first group described and indeed the answer is, "Yes." However, I think that as things stand we should accept Microsoft's position that he did indeed cheat, while insisting that Microsoft give a least a little more detail on how they determined that.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
That's ok, you aren't achieving anything by playing videogames unless you are selling gold.
The best cheaters use wall hacks only and never get caught. Using a wall hack well is all about acting. Actors know what comes next in the script, but they have to pretend that they never read it. Wall hackers know there is some one around the corner, but they act like they are playing normally to avoid detection.
Six years for me running the same wall hack and I was never caught. Not by VAC or by an admin on a server/in a league. I gave that up to play TF2 with no hacks since that is much more enjoyable.
I can.
So while I'll admit I know very little about Autism and the proper manner of raising a autistic child, am I the only one that found the mother's defense somehow wrong? When we notice a shortcoming in our kids, we attempt to find a solution for them to overcome it. As I understand, the most difficult action for most autistic children is interacting with the real world...so how is accepting "xbox is his only real friend" and "the only thing he ever does" helping him to overcome the issues he'll have to face in later years? It would seem to me allowing him to immerse himself in a virtual world, where no communication is required, would only exasperate the problem. That video did not make me feel sorry for the kid because the mom claimed he was being unfairly treated by Microsoft...it made me feel sorry for him because he might be treated unfairly by his mother. What really is the lesson here...fight the evil corporation who took away achievements or that achievements have no real value in the real world?
That could raise flags in an online match, but it says he lost all his trophies, which isn't always effected by online actions. One of the ways to tell when someone is cheating is to look at their trophies and when did they get them.Here's a YouTube video on how to unlock achievements though cheating/altering a Gamertag. If the kid logged online with such a gamertag then he'd be noted as cheating. The video doesn't mention how he was detected and he might have just done something as stupid as this, got caught and is either hiding behind his mother, his Autism or both. Don't know for sure since there isn't enough information.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
Microsoft should disable his account completely for violating their terms of use:
> By selecting "ACCEPT" below, you are representing that you are 18 years old
source: http://www.xbox.com/en-US/legal/livetou
I'm sick of all the children running around Xbox Live. Would be nice if MS actually enforced their own policy.
One good point in here that nobody else seems to have talked about is the possibility that the kid himself is not intentionally cheating (the like actual cases of "OMG my brother installed cheats"). From my [limited] experience with autistics, if he's so focused at earning achievements, it's hard to believe that he would cheat to get them (though it's definitely a possibility still). However, if the cheats were already there, I doubt he would notice if the achievements were "too easy" to get (and would be honestly angry when they're taken away).
I'm not saying this is likely to be the case, I'm just surprised nobody else as mentioned it.
None of those 'solutions' does anything to prevent e.g. an aimbot from working - because it is impossible.
Lets get theoretical: Lets assume a typical client/server architecture for a FPS.
Given a server S and clients A, R, whereas R is a rogue client.
There is a few things, that we can (more or less) prevent R from doing.
1) Disclosing state information that shouldn't be known by the player:
By minimizing the amount of information that R has we can drastically reduce the amount of state R can disclose.
But even here there are no perfect solutions. Consider A walking behind a wall. S will need to disclose to R enough information to
positionally place the audio generated by movement of A. Thus R now does posses positional information about A and thus is
able to give visual clues.
2) Assisting the player in performing tasks, eg aiming.
As there is no way to reliably verify the integrity of code running on an untrusted system (the system of R), there is no way for S
to make sure, that actions are performed by the player on client R, and not the client itself. You can't verify the integrity of code
running outside a chain of trust.
I'm willing to bet that they log everything that happens to everyone in every game played, and BING this kid popped up Immediately upon trying his first cheat, and they watched him cheat more and more, and then have a hacker buy him armor and then cheat a little more. It must be so obvious when you show up with something you didn't earn on their server!
What if I show up at your work tomorrow with admin rights on half of your machines? My Mom swearing that I must have earned the right to be root on your box would do little to convince you I'm sure!
Cheers!
Microsoft involved, so they must be wrong, because they are evil - check.
The whole story's basically a sort of negative troll.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Will that be good enough for you? Follow the original link. The story has been updated. Microsoft has provided info to the mother and because of the publicity has also seen it necessary to go public with the info.
Basically the kid got help (or so they claim) from somebody else who offered to outfit his character with a special armor. This helpful guy modified the profile. MS anti-cheat scanning tripped on this. Apparently the profile was updated with several achievements while offline. That is impossible, not because of lack of skills, but because those achievements are earned while *online*.
What the mother says now is that, "yes he cheated but he didn't mean no harm". MS says "he cheated; we have an obligation to other players to prevent cheating and that's what we did. We stand by that". MS will not remove the "cheater" tag, but has given the kid one month free XBox Live to play up another character.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
The rumour is that John Carmack even tried to remove strafe jumping from quake, because players looked stupid, jumping around like rabbits.
If your player characters are jumping around like rabbits, then perhaps it's time to give them long ears and fluffy tails.
not just 1: there are many parallel universes...we call them "other people";-)
Wait a minute... Microsoft says the boy cheated, mother objects, everyone is outraged, Microsoft sends a Twitter message "he did cheat, we checked", and everyone says "O, that's OK then, carry on". I must be in a parallel universe.
Microsoft did check and this was not a case about a gamer being "too good" as initially claimed by mum. The kid had someone else help him edit a saved game to obtain a number of achievements. Microsoft correctly states that gaining achievements while offline is impossible and conclusive evidence of tampering.
Mother has admitted that the kid wanted that armor so bad that she actually paid someone to help them get it (by cheating). She assures us that she and her kid meant no harm. Microsoft stands firm and says they have to protect everybody else against cheaters (even if they are autistic cheaters). MS have given the kid one month XBox Live free-of-charge to play up another character, though.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
The cheat he was caught using was getting all of the achievements for his games, even the online ones, offline and out of order (for example getting the 1000 kills achievement before the 500 one) and then activating them. This is a clear indication of cheating and there is no chance of false positives here. All he did is pay someone online to do it for him, and his mom has said she knew about this and didn't consider it cheating.
So an 11-year-old with a malfunctioning sense of empathy would never lie. OK.
"A ban for just "being too good" is highly improbable"
For a normal person, yes. Being autistic is also "highly improbable". Having the uncanny ability to play a game perfectly is "highly improbable". Your entire argument is based on probabilities, averages, and what "usually" happens, but we're clearly dealing with an outlier here.
Having aspbergers myself I can state two things with assurance.
One on the hallmarks of people with Autism is a distinct difficulty in comprehending another persons state of mind. Evidenced by frequent inability to distinguish and use words like "You" and "I". The inability to comprehend "you" have a different state of mind than "I" renders these people very ineffective at understanding both Humour and deceit. If he cheated, he probably had no comprehension of it, and may have simply discovered a new technique or was told to do it by someone else.
I should know.
I was the only kid in my high school that ever scored 100% on 7 out of eight final exams and failed every single course upon being convicted of "Nobody scores that high, he must've cheated".