Rockstar Creates 'Cheaters Pool' For Game Hackers

itwbennett writes "Rockstar Games announced yesterday in a newswire post that the company has created a 'cheater's pool' (sort of like the populating of Australia with criminals) where players who have hacked the game to give themselves advantages will only be able to play against other cheaters. Although, Ars Technica points out that players may actually prefer the 'special' world."

Comments

Interesting

[Lithdren]

I find this idea rather interesting, but I worry what might happen to someone who was placed in this pool by mistake?

I can imagine that the aim-bot writers would find this rather interesting, you'd have a natural-selection pressure going on where the best and fastest aim-bots would survive. I have to wonder what might come of something like that.

Wouldn't make the actual game very fun though.

Re:Interesting

[h4rr4r]

It seems like it would be a lot of fun if you enjoy trying to make the best aimbot.

Re:Interesting

[localman57]

I find this idea rather interesting, but I worry what might happen to someone who was placed in this pool by mistake?

It still seems better than an outright ban. The guys sent to Australia probably thought it better than the gallows.

Re:Interesting

[localman57]

You're gonna need a hell of a lot more than an aimbot in this pool, I think. We're talking about full blown A/I, I think, to be competitive.

Re:Interesting

[malakai]

The details of this system are scary.

First, this is designed for:

Anyone found to have used hacked saves, modded games, or other exploits to gain an unfair advantage in Max Payne 3 Multiplayer, or to circumvent the leaderboards will be quarantined from all other players into a "Cheaters Pool", where they'll only be able to compete in multiplayer matches with other confirmed miscreants

Which smells to me like they had poorly implemented server side checks, and people who modified their save games or other client in memory vars, were able to rocket to the top or run around invincible. That's just plain bad server-side programming on their end. I don't doubt with the right queries into their server storage they could identify accounts that bypassed something they were supposed to spend time on or accrue. If they had the right amount of auditing sprinkled in.

If you see anyone in Max Payne 3 multiplayer using invincibility hacks, infinite adrenaline, score cheating or doing anything else suspicious, just send us an email at maxpayne3.banhammer@rockstargames.com and include the following:
-Platform (PC, PS3 or Xbox 360)
-Cheater’s Gamertag / ID
-Description of the violation
-If possible, please include concrete evidence, such as a video or a screenshot

Wow, again, very scary. So the server trust the client for things like invincibility, adrenaline, _actual score_..etc. Is this a FPS from 1993?

Will this find aimbots, wallhacks or radar? No. It never will and never can. If you have to trust the client to run your 'aimbot detection code' then you already lost that battle. ( sure, statistically you can find weak cheats, or push down new detection code to try and catch them off guard, but the good ones have checks in place for that ).

All and all, this is part PR ( "Hey we're really mad at those darn cheaters and we'll try and make a difference!" ) and part cover up ( "Oh, we fucked up and let you do crappy memory hacks to rule our leader boards, we were in a rush and couldn't get all the server state checks done in time, plus it was so laggy, so we just decided to trust the client. Now we know better, have more time on our heads, so we'll retroactively try and determine people that cheated and remove them from the leader board")

Re:Interesting

[Hentes]

The big advantage of doing this instead of banning them is that if there's a problem with the detection algorithm then the players placed there by mistake will play against other players placed there by mistake, no damage done.

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[cpu6502]

What's an aimbot? It that anything like the Grandia(?) RPGs that have self-plaiyng characters? I have to say that saved me a LOT of time wasted leveling-up. I could read a book instead.

Re:Interesting

[Anubis IV]

I remember back in the early 2000s when I was playing Medal of Honor: Allied Assault that I was using various exploits to wall hack and have no recoil. I also found a server that was permissive of cheating. Some of the most fun I had was on that server, since the best players there figured out how to exploit the cheats against the cheaters.

For instance, one person could draw attention through a wall while someone else came up from behind, effectively allowing you to use bait without ever endangering yourself. Or you could leverage the fact that everyone with wall hacks "pre-fires" at corners when they see enemies about to round them. Just run headlong at all corners and suddenly stop before turning them. The enemy will generally waste some ammo or will even need to reload, giving you a chance to engage them on your terms. You might even exploit the fact that the other player doesn't know how many walls are between the two of you to get them to leave themselves vulnerable. For instance, if you know they're aiming a rocket in your direction, put a wall between yourself and a window that they can see, pretend that you're crouched under the window, then stand up suddenly. As often as not, they'll launch the rocket prematurely, leaving you safe and them open for easy retaliation.

There's still a lot of room for fun, experimentation, and even skill when you have everyone on a level playing field, even if that field is different than the one most people are playing on.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

non-secured hacking servers were popular back when i used to play counterstrike. i created a hack for my own personal use and it was fun to go into hacking servers and pit my hack against other peoples work. i usually got dominated though, because tweaking a hack to beat other hackers is something different than creating one to gain an advantage over legit players.

Wouldn't make the actual game very fun though.

playing the game itself is still quite fun, but there the additional meta game of improving your hack. and for me personally, i was at the point where playing the game legit wasn't fun anymore (i had competed at the top levels of online league and LAN tournament play and grown bored)

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[SuricouRaven]

Aimbots are actually FPS cheats, not RPG. They intercept data from the game in order to track the position of all players and obsticles, and the very instant that a valid shot can be made by the user's character they will supply the appropriate movement data to turn and fire with perfect mathematical precision. They were for a time the bane of Counterstrike - an aimbot-using player with was effectively invincible, as anyone who had a potential shot at him would be instantly killed by the aimbot. Many different anti-cheating measures were incorporated into CS in order to defeat the use of these aimbots.

Other helpful cheater programs included modifying the client to make all walls translucent, thus allowing the cheater to see enemies lurking in wait behind cover, and changing the field of view and control response so that any weapon could be used for sniping, even a pistol.

Re:Interesting

[ottothecow]

Well the way these things usually work are that they don't have to be perfect at catching you cheat, but they only have to catch you once.

Its not even that novel of a concept...look at Valve and VAC, if you get caught cheating on a VAC secured server, your entire account gets blacklisted and can't play on other anti cheat servers (and this applies to every game linked to your steam account which is actually kind of scary). There are still other servers that don't enforce anti-cheat but my guess is they are filled mostly with hackers and pirates (so basically...a cheaters pool).

What happens is someone comes up with a nice hack, people start using it, Valve figures it out and bans everyone it can catch, and then the hack author notices it has been found and they modify it in such a way that it avoids detection again. Every time Valve does this, they ban a bunch of accounts who are gone forever unless they come in and buy a new game. It doesn't stop cheating or make it impossible...but it puts a financial burden on the cheater.

Re:Interesting

[Applekid]

And those mistakenly flagged will be forced to endure cheaters blatantly cheating, ruining the experience for them when they've done nothing wrong. If there's no way to get back to the general population, they might as well ban themselves by not playing anymore. Either way, they find themselves unable to fully play the game for which they paid.

It's like enjoying Tetris for the multiplayer aspects until the server decides I'm doing too well so it's going to send me a non stop flow of S shapes.

I guess it can be argued that once you embrace server-based multiplayer, you defer the ability to deny you enjoyment from your game to someone else, but it's pretty scummy anyway.

Re:Interesting

[girlintraining]

I find this idea rather interesting, but I worry what might happen to someone who was placed in this pool by mistake?

If you read the terms of the EULA, you'll find out: You can beg for mercy, and perhaps Caesar will grant you a reprieve. Maybe. If he doesn't have gas that day from eating at Taco Bell. You have no rights to the aforementioned virtual world... you can be removed for any reason or no reason, and if you paid money, well tough nuts. You were informed by psychic eminations of the terms when you handed them your credit card, which was a binding and unappealable legal arrangement, and you can't return the product for a refund once you've opened it, you know, in order to read the terms. -_-

This is why I don't pay for software for personal use anymore; If a company can take away what's mine on a whim, then it wasn't really mine to begin with, and I don't spend money on things I don't get to keep.

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[Anonymous Coward]

I'm hoping this "pool" becomes the bread and butter for known hacker data. If they cheat, know they are cheating, don't care - actually gives them a place to hone their skills. Hell yeah, - I'd buy all their gathered client data for a $1. Especially if they continue to play for months and months, that generates some habit data they might not get otherwise.

So sure, I agree with you about their design but I also hope they make a lot of money selling off this data to someone.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to Counter Strike of 10 years ago.

Re:Interesting

[h4rr4r]

In CS they really sucked since all weapons could shoot through some amount of walls and the AWP could shoot through the whole level. So you would spawn and suddenly get sniped all the way from the enemy spawn, even though there were many walls in between.

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[Andy Dodd]

This is why I never purchased Crysis 2 and likely won't purchase Crysis 3.

The single player game was gorgeous, and the graphics were stunning.

The game had enormous multiplayer potential, but - For all their expertise in making a graphics engine, they didn't know jack shit about networked multiplayer.

If a player shot a pistol at another player, take a guess where the decision on amount of damage done was made? You'd think that after years of online gaming, it would be the correct answer: The server.

You'd be wrong - The damage calculations were done BY THE CLIENT. Both offensive (weapon damage) and defensive (armor effectiveness) calculations were done on the client. Weapon damage calculations were done by the client of the player firing the weapon, armor calcs (esp. for vehicles) were done by the client of the player being shot at.

The XML files in which weapon and armor attributes were stored weren't integrity checked at all.

As a result, it was dead easy to change an XML file, eliminate all bullet spread/variation from a pistol, and declare each bullet as doing 99999 damage. The client would say to the server, "I hit player Y for 99999 damage" and the server would believe it, no questions asked!

Similarly, the server would notify the client of a player operating a vehicle, "You were hit by this weapon class for X damage. How much of that was actually absorbed" - For example, most armored vehicles had 80-90% damage reduction from small arms fire. Well, just like the 99999 damage pistol hack, it was easy to declare a 99% (or even 100% I think) damage reduction to any weapons type. So you could easily create an attack helicopter that was immune to everything but controlled flight into terrain... In nearly every game I ever played, a cheater would eventually get access to an attack helicopter, and even if you decided "fuck it, if you can't beat em', join em'" and gave yourself super-rockets - they could fly around the map with impunity.

I actually eventually decided that the most interesting challenge for the game would be to see how far I could modify things without anyone calling me out - and thanks to the blatant cheaters, it was amazing what you could get away with (think 600 horsepower pickup truck, mobile antiaircraft cannon that could depress its turret by 10 degrees below horizontal, etc...) without anyone accusing you at all.

I think I played legitimately for a week, experimented with cheating for a week as an experiment, then deleted the game. It was so insecure as to be utterly pointless - blatant cheaters in every match, and my own experiments showed that there had to be a whole pile of more subtle cheaters lurking.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe hacks and cheats evolved a little bit. I am pretty sure most people don't actually have to press the fire button themselves when they cheat.

Re:Interesting

[toastar]

Well Most cheat packages in CS also let you see through walls, which when combined with aimbot made for some real... well....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZmuUGY-sZ0

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

While the underlying architecture to overly trust clients is totally crap, I think in and of itself, bunching cheaters together rather than just banning them is a brilliant idea, especially as opposed to simply banning people. I really hope this catches on.

Re:Interesting

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

I don't spend money on things I don't get to keep.

What about food, or beer?

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

That makes me want a competition to see who can build the best AI - the contest could be kind of like the pwn 2 own contest. Lessons learned could go into making better AI for future games, and the winners could get some prize money.

Re:Interesting

[AmiMoJo]

I wonder how well it will cope with non-software cheating. You can get autofire mods for XBOX and PS3 pads, for example. In fact you used to be able to buy programmable pads for older consoles where a single button could execute a complex combo in a fighting game, for example.

I remember back in the 90s there was software you could run on a PC used as a network bridge between the game machine and the router. A simple interface allowed you to adjust lag, drop packets or just stop forwarding packets for a few moments. Aside from being an alternative to rage-quitting it allowed you to take advantage of poor lag handling in some games, or if your PC was hosting the game make everyone else lag at strategic moments.

I suppose they could throw everyone with persistent network problems into this pool, but that would hardly be fair on people unable to get quality broadband.

Re:Interesting

[X0563511]

Who played Crysis for multiplayer? Cheaters apparently. I never even tried, I just enjoyed the single-player game.

Re:Interesting

[Anubis IV]

Yeah, aimbots and the like change things a bit, but there's still room for turning things around. In fact, of the things I described, the first two still have the potential to offer some help. You can still bait people and get them from behind, and you could expose less valuable parts around a corner in order to waste their shots, then pop out and get a headshot once they go to reload.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Long before CS it was already a plague on Quake 2.

Re:Interesting

[nschubach]

I've also heard of "aimbots" that only fire when you have a perfect headshot... so all you have to do is just point and wiggle around a player and it will auto-fire when you have the shot. You could even fire off a few rounds to make it look like you are actually playing.

Re:Interesting

[AngryDeuce]

I agree, if only because you simply cannot play a multiplayer game on the internet these days without someone accusing someone else of cheating, hacking, 'glitching', whatever you want to call it. Very few people lose because they're just not as good as the other people in that particular match, no, it's because everyone else is cheating. I mean, people bitch and complain about campers for Christ's sake, and they're not even cheating, they're just not running around like the rest of the retards and are actually employing some strategy beyond "Mash all the buttons!! Fire all the weapons! Jump jump jump jumpity jump jump!!!!!"

If some chickenshit 12 year old accused me of cheating because I had the audacity to kill him more than he killed me, and I ended up lumped in with a bunch of fucking wall-hackers and aim-botters for all eternity because of his butthurt, I would be furious and demand my money back. If they refused, I would never purchase another game from them ever again. There'd better be some sort of concrete proof required other than community feedback, even if they're depending on repeated infractions, because obviously people that are very good play a lot and hence will probably have a lot of bullshit reports of hacking/cheating just by virtue of that fact alone.

Ask Microsoft how many bogus "system tampering" reports they get from butthurt players. I bet less than 5% of those reported are actually guilty of anything other than being better than the person that reported them.

Outside of all that, though, I like the idea of a dedicated place to hack and such. I just disagree with the whole "email suspicious behavior" thing because I feel that is just going to be totally abused.

Re:Interesting

[Hatta]

Aimbots are actually FPS cheats, not RPG.

Yeah, but who can tell the difference anymore?

Re:Interesting

[AngryDeuce]

Wouldn't make the actual game very fun though.

I disagree...hacking is tons of fun when everyone is involved in hacking and it's not being used to beat people unfairly. Hell, even going back to the Game Genie/Gameshark days on the consoles, there was tons of fun to be had just playing with the codes and seeing what you could do and what kind of bizarre behavior you could coax out of the game...

Re:Interesting

[Jeng]

Modifying behavior may be cheaper than trying to remove that behavior via programing.

I do agree though that they should be able to code correctly at this point, it is not like this is their first online multiplayer game.

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[Seizurebleak]

Gotta love getting insta-railed in DM1 from the top where the 'nade launcher is and from the ledge where the hyperblaster spawns.

The cheaters were few and far between from my experience - although it only takes 1 to ruin a game. Once knowledge of botting got out, however, lots of really good players would get accused of cheating and sometimes booted from public servers. Sore losers and poor sportsmanship ruined online gaming for me, even more so than flagrant cheating.

Re:Interesting

[Johann Lau]

Who includes a multiplayer mode that is so useless it is actually *worse* than not having one? That's the real question.

Re:Interesting

[rk]

Well, you *can* certainly keep it when you're done with it if you really want to... but why would you?

Re:Interesting

[Lehk228]

that actually sounds like a fun way to mod the game, roll out a mod that forces server side distribution of those variables, with points earned while playing that allow you to modify your gear weapons and vehicles. UT2004 has a server mod that builds in an RPG like element, it works great with progressive invasion mod, all players are allied anyways so having some players able to shoot for 5x the damage of others isn't a big deal, and it lets more and more insane waves of monsters be beaten by the players, especially with good teamwork

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, lucky security only matters for real applications, it's better that game programmers stick to entertainment.

Re:Interesting

[Lehk228]

technically those are clickers, but yea they are harder to detect just looking at data going to the server, except if you probe for them. send a very brief incorrect set of data indicating a head in the crosshairs, like one or two frames, if bullets come out instantly, drop the banhammer.

Re:Interesting

[strikethree]

They are missing the whole point of cheating: To gain an advantage over others.

If there is no advantage, where they have to compete "fairly", then the cheaters will not play there. The only people who will play there are ... I am unsure but someone will play there, possibly the cheat writers.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

How can a multiplayer mode be worse than not having one? They don't make you use it...

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

until they met the wildlife that is.

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[X0563511]

But they do have to code it in, which influences the other code and saps hours from all parts of development.

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[FauxReal]

I have never been very good at FPS but one day I was just on fire on CS server and got accused of cheating. I was kind of proud... until I got banned.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

So like every single Tetris game I play.

Re:Interesting

[_Shad0w_]

And yet quite a few would make their way back to the UK, despite the penalty for returning being the gallows...

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

most of the pistols couldn't shoot through walls, the deagle being the exception. same for the shotguns/submachine guns. most of the rifles could shoot through one entity (wall/person) and the awp could only shoot through two.

Re:Interesting

[icebraining]

How does that work nowadays when they can shoot you through the wall where you're baiting them?

Re:Interesting

[Adriax]

Not from my experience. I used to play the teamfortress knockoff weapons factory, and I remember half the games I played I watched people shooting rockets out of their arses and impossible shots at my turrets through tiny holes in the map geometry while running.
Also, people turning off the screen flash render option that flashbang grenades used to blind people. It's really sad what lengths people will go to justify their actions when confronted on it.

Re:Interesting

[citizenr]

This is why I never purchased Crysis 2 and likely won't purchase Crysis 3.

The single player game was gorgeous, and the graphics were stunning.

The game had enormous multiplayer potential, but - For all their expertise in making a graphics engine, they didn't know jack shit about networked multiplayer.

If a player shot a pistol at another player, take a guess where the decision on amount of damage done was made? You'd think that after years of online gaming, it would be the correct answer: The server.

You'd be wrong - The damage calculations were done BY THE CLIENT

Sounds like ARMA / ARMA 2.
There is a very popular mod called DayZ ( http://dayzmod.com/ ) for ARMA2. It features persistent character and permanent death. Popular cheats involve :
-calling thermonuclear strike on a whole 250km2 island killing up to 50 players instantly
-throwing whole server population into the air, they all die when they fall down
-uploading your own mission file to the server spawning AI, This one is quite clever :) Ranging from spawning 3 women in Burqas following each player :DDD through small military convoy shooting all players on sight, ending with full blown carpet bombing done by AI.
-spawning items out of thin air. Somehow Arma lets ordinary players spawn a BATTLESHIP on top of a building :) not to mention all the guns, equipment and vehicles your heart desires.
-speed hacks / invisibility / aimbots / invincibility / flying (yes, player can tell server his position and server will just place him there without asking).

-and my fav, changing whole server population into goats! :o)

All that possible while being ordinary player joining MULTIPLAYER server, server that talks to a master server supposedly keeping track of all the players.
Did I mention their standard security practice was to ask server admins to mail RDP passwords for all the servers, in cleartext? and that the official mail account got hacked and most of the servers turned into malware zombies for almost a week? and the official website and forum deleted, including most recent backups :D Shit is hilarious.

Some of those companies just ignore past 10 years of experience and reinvent the wheel (or just cover their ears/eyes and pretend there is no problem) :(.

Re:Interesting

[Johann Lau]

There's making a bad multiplayer (not so shameful, making a good one isn't trivial), and there is trusting the client with data, much less data such as health points. That, just like what Rockstar seems to be doing, is just fan-fucking-tastically stupid... there's shareware games that wouldn't be caught doing that. Just lol.

Re:Interesting

[citizenr]

That makes me want a competition to see who can build the best AI - the contest could be kind of like the pwn 2 own contest. Lessons learned could go into making better AI for future games, and the winners could get some prize money.

Aimbots are not your old time BOTs.
I still remember my first BOT I downloaded for Quake 1, using a modem! It was the Reaper Bot. Another one that I forgot the name could even rocket jump. Those were true AIs that somewhat felt like humans. Best AI to this day has to be bots from both Quake 3 Arena and UT series.

I would also really like a competition for FPS AIs, but with heavy restriction. No hooks into client code. Just video stream and audio feed for input.

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[arose]

Nothing worse than would have happened if they were banned by mistake instead.

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[SimonInOz]

Hey - no talking about my family like that!

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[TapeCutter]

I don't spend money on things I don't get to keep

So you have never have, and never will, rent a house, hotel room, car, etc?

These days I play the freemium game 'world of tanks', there's no pressure to pay and they do a great job filtering out cheats. I do pay, but what I am getting (with or without paying) is a service, not a piece of personal property. Sure I put the free client on my machine to use that service but after that I just let it do it's stuff and enjoy the game. Now if you trash a physical piece of property you have rented the owner is likely to kick you out AND make you pay for the damage, (good) game service providers just kick you out. I for one fully support their right to run their service however the fuck they want to, if they can't keep cheats from destroying the game play then straight players like me will swap to a service that can.

Re:Interesting

[Anubis IV]

Yeah...if they can do that these days, then that kinda ruins things a bit. Or at least it makes it into a VERY different and very two-dimensional game. Even so, some people enjoy stuff like that, surprisingly.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I'm reminded of my days on PSO and the Dreamcast.

Granted, it was the birth of viable Internet-connected consoles, and Sonic Team to my knowledge never had to deal with multiplayer before, but my god.

They stored character data locally . With limited validation. To say nothing of trusting a number of calculations coming from the client, or the special craptastrophe that allowed players to corrupt at will the character data of other players, eliminating hundreds of hours of work.

The game, of course, got boring quick - it was a remedial Diablo. I quickly found the most fun I had was hex-editing in items and giving them as gifts to 'legitimate*' players - angry, butthurt souls who couldn't comprehend the workings of the Dark Lord, R'han D'hum Nuumbahr, and thus accused anyone who got lucky and had a rare drop of being an evil, evil h4xx0r.

I handed out tons of semi-rare crap 'h4xx3d' crap. They didn't know. But I knew. Oh, yes.

Now that I look back on it, damn, I'm pretty sure I was some kind of sociopath back in the day. :p

Re:Interesting

[petsounds]

And there's a reason the UT bots were good: the original UT bots were created by Steve Polge, the creator of the Reaper bot. You could always pick out a UT bot, they were in a kind of behavioral uncanny valley, but they made for a good challenge. Moreso from their accuracy than their tactics. As a map designer, it was very hard to get them to use advanced features of the engine like multi-stop platforms, but in generic DM and CTF maps they could easily hold their own. Sadly, shipping FPS games with bots seemed to fall out of favor with game developers.

I'm not sure I'd say they are the "best" bot made -- the UT bots were short on group tactics, by comparison with the AIs in the Half-Life series. They assumed roles in team gametypes, but I don't remember them ever using flanking tactics or helping each other out. But in terms of being a one-bot fireworks show, yes they were quite proficient.

Re:Interesting

[Scorpinox]

This happened in Counter-Strike 1.x back in the day. Some people may hate me for admitting this, but I used to cheat in Counter-Strike and started scripting my own aimbots using some of the cheating software packages that were available back then. The reason I got so into it and started getting into the scripting was because I found a server that specifically allowed and encouraged hackers to join.

It was like playing a completely different game. A lot of people were using the same packages of cheats that I was using, so it became a game of tweaking tiny variables here and there to make sure that your first shot always hit the head. Then once you set everything up, you had to learn the maps carefully, specifically knowing which walls were able to be shot through. While a lot of people just ran around and let the aimbots do all the work, the people who were winning were using wallhacks to see players through walls, and use a bound key to toggle the aimbot to shoot through walls (normally it'd only shoot players with direct line of sight).

Yeah, in the end there was little skill required to actually play the game, but the rewarding part came when you knew your aimbot was better than the other guy's because of the tweaks you made to it. I got out of it when Valve started implementing cross-server bans.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually eventually decided that the most interesting challenge for the game would be to see how far I could modify things without anyone calling me out - and thanks to the blatant cheaters, it was amazing what you could get away with (think 600 horsepower pickup truck, mobile antiaircraft cannon that could depress its turret by 10 degrees below horizontal, etc...) without anyone accusing you at all.

What's wrong with a 600 HP pick up truck?

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't just send convicts to Australia, they sent guards and whole administrative structure. Does this new lawless land have any of those?

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[eudas]

"There'd better be some sort of concrete proof"

Game companies don't provide ban evidence to end-users, because cheaters always request it so they can improve their cheat progs so that their next account can avoid the banhammer.

Re:Interesting

[Shadow of Eternity]

Modern DLL hooks certainly do that, the original primitive aimbots for CS simply used red and green color coded models and would fire at anything that appeared with the color you set it for. There were some funny moments when people realised just having a rainbow spray could instantly lock most aimbotters on the wall.

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[TheLink]

Play Crysis? Wait isn't it a GPU benchmark program? ;)

Re:Interesting

[TheLink]

I remember playing quakeworld teamfortress (customtf) when there were cheaters using aimbots.

How do I know they were using aimbots? I bound some commands so that when I scrolled my mousewheel I would jiggle/sidestep/strafe left and right very quickly (like alternately pressing A and D quickly, assuming a WASD setup).

When I jumped off a wall these bunch would be able to snipe me in the air nearly 100% of the time. But when I was standing right in front of them and "jiggling" they would miss me. Normal unassisted human players would not miss so many times - since I am not actually significantly moving anywhere. I can see the botters shoot to the left or to the right. In contrast the sort of human players who can consistently snipe you falling off the wall (it's not that difficult with low enough ping and high enough skill) would certainly not miss at all in that scenario!

Of course a more sophisticated aimbot will not be fooled by that, but that was years ago.

Re:Interesting

[AssholeMcGee]

I read the comments while everyone makes valid points, the fact of the matter is, legit players are getting tired of being destroyed by player with large gangs, due to the cheating/modding. RockStar does accept suggestions, one of the reasons there games are great they read forums and read emails over what they could do better, they even use modders hacks to add something they may or may not have thought of in there next release. As a user of there games I have created hacks/mods these are relatively easy to do, the reason I do this is because of the other cheaters out there who ticked me off, of course I then target them and leave the legit players alone, (like the idea of the underdog out for revenge). While there are 2 types of players straight players, and cheaters, no one should be afraid to try and mod there games. Just one cheater can dominate legit players, and they obviously target legit players to build up stats. As anything that starts off this will be a work in progress, it may be a success, but RockStar will try to fix whatever gamers do to get around this. But the hardcore guys/gals will always find a way around. The problem that I do see are those that decide to screen shot someone else cheating then using it against a legit player they dislike, or players getting tried of having to fill out a complaint form, or players that just do not understand how or what RockStar has underlined for actual cheating..

Re:Interesting

[JosKarith]

If you're building a game for multiplayer there are a whole load of things that have to change from single player. For example there can be no BFG9000's - every weapon has to be balanced so there's no "no brainer" weapon in the game.
Making a game multiplayer takes away from the single player - that's just simple supply and demand. If you're lucky you end up with a game that's 70% as good a single player game and 70% as good a multiplayer as a game that specialised in one or the other -which is great if you're wanting to use both modes but if you only ever intend to use it for one then you''ve lost that 30%.
The above, of course, is a massive oversimplification but you get the point.

Re:Interesting

[WrecklessSandwich]

The major downfall of the bots in UT was the pathing mechanics. The map editor icon for a path node for the bots being a piece of fruit was quite poetic -- it was very obvious watching your bot teammates that they were basically following a trail of cookie crumbs. While they could dance pretty damn well in combat if you cranked up the right settings in the bot config (yes, that was a thing in the UI!), but the way they navigated the map was incredibly predictable to the point of being a disadvantage against a real person.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but how do you clear yourself if you weren't cheating? Unless there's a massive number of people caught by the same glitch, you've no way of clearing yourself and can end up in a position where you've paid for a game and don't get full use of it.

What's worse is that sometimes conflicts between programs can cause issues.

If they don't want to provide the evidence, fine, but in that case they should be required to refund the purchase price. Seems fair considering they're preventing the accused from a proper defense and it's a lot cheaper than going to court.

Re:Interesting

[L4t3r4lu5]

So you have never have, and never will, rent a house, hotel room, car, etc?

Oh fuck off. If you rent a house, or hotel room, or car, the provider of such can't arbitrarily turf you out without warning or appeal, and keep all of the property you've left in the room / vehicle, or created while using it, for no other reason than it was there.

You want an analogy for this? Here's one: You head to a car dealership.

Salesman: "Obviously the sale is subject to terms and conditions."
You: "Yeah, that's pretty standard. Could I read them, though?"
Salesman: "No. You have to buy the car first."
You: "I really want this car. Ok, let's do it."
Salesman: "Ok, thanks for the payment. You don't own the car; You are licensed to use the car. We may take the car from you at any point, without notice, without any appeal process, and any contents within the car or work you have done involving the car is ours too. This is legally binding, and if you don't like it we have many more lawyers than you who we pay very well to bury discenters in debt for the rest of their lives."
You: "COULD I HAVE SOME MORE OF THAT SHIT SANDWICH, PLEASE? IT'S SO TASTY."

Re:Interesting

[jalopezp]

I remember reading somewhere (Niall Ferguson's Empire, I think) that the very poor in Northern England or Scotland would commit petty crimes and ask for to be sent to Botany Bay (a greater punishment). Australia being so large, it was quite common to get free land after having served your sentence, and the colonies' administrators would help out with capital, themselves having an incentive to develop beyond a penal colony. And that's how they got Sidney.

Re:Interesting

[queBurro]

returning to the scene of the crime, they can't help themselves?! mind you, bread for bar-work, it's instinct

Re:Interesting

[Andy Dodd]

Nothing, unless you're in a "race series" that only permits beat-up two decade old Toyota Hiluxes and various tanks and other armored vehicles.

I racked up a shit-ton of score in most games by capturing checkpoints in capture-and-hold games because I could accelerate 3-4 times as fast as any one else in a pickup truck, go twice as fast, and brake twice as effectively.

I never got the suspension tuned right though... it was REALLY easy to flip.

Not a single person ever noticed that my vehicle's AA cannon (when driving the mobile AA vehicle) could shoot downwards.

Re:Interesting

[Richy_T]

My Eng Lit teacher said Dickens made that up for effect. I never bothered to check though.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

The VAC ban is only for Valve games. It is true its connected to your account though. So if you would keep them on different accounts then your fine.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

hackers fffFFFFUUUUUUUU

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

come on now.....nosepak, ratbot, and zbot were pretty great. nothing like watching rails come out of the back of a model.....

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha, I remember all that Crysis 2 junk. Another game with shoddy MP design is Dead Space 2, where you can directly modify damage and health parameters for the humans (not sure if you could do the same for Necromorphs). Too bad that MP was too awful to be enjoyable even with hacks.

Re:Interesting

[NeoMorphy]

technically those are clickers, but yea they are harder to detect just looking at data going to the server, except if you probe for them. send a very brief incorrect set of data indicating a head in the crosshairs, like one or two frames, if bullets come out instantly, drop the banhammer.

Very nice!! I was thinking of something like that for drawing out the cheaters. Does anyone use this? If not, they should.

Re:Interesting

[Andy Dodd]

Oh, they didn't fix their shit for Crysis 2?

Re:Interesting

[Maritz]

And that's how they got Sidney.

I heard Sidney's mother and father had some kind of "special hug" but I haven't looked into it yet.

Re:Interesting

[rant64]

send a very brief incorrect set of data indicating a head in the crosshairs

But... That's cheating!

Re:Interesting

[RobertLTux]

The problem of having to open a product to read the EULA is why it should be Federal Law that the current EULA should be posted on the publishers website. In fact they should always have

1 any drivers for hardware bits
2 the software package(s)
3 the help file(s)
4 the EULA as currently ammended

in a page off the promotion page for the product

I like this approach

[Firehed]

Seems like a big improvement over the typical banhammer approach. Let cheaters play with other cheaters while legit players can continue to enjoy the game normally. Contrast this to Blizzard's apparent approach where everyone thought to cheat (even in single-player, apparently, since they've blurred the single vs multiplayer line on D3 with this always-on crap) suddenly have their $60 purchase made worthless.

Re:I like this approach

[alen]

Blizzard is on a money grab where they expect people to pay up for digital crap

its funny how slashdotters think that buying crap in farmville and similar games is a waste of money. but when blizzard does it people will spend ridiculous amounts of money for digital crap

Re:I like this approach

[imagined.by]

Not only do they make their $60 purchase worthless but lock down the complete battle.net account, offline games and all.

Re:I like this approach

[cpu6502]

If I was a Blizzard or Rockstar player, and they suddenly banned me because of "cheating", even though I never did cheat (or even know how to do it) I'd be pissed. I'd probably start stealing their games. (Since there is no legal recourse against corporations.)

Re:I like this approach

[Anonymous Coward]

Valve does this too. VAC bans (which are not reversible, and can be triggered by things totally irrelevant to cheating.) It is an easy way to force a gamer to re-buy their collection.

With Valve, it is worse -- you can lose access to thousands of dollars in games instead of hundreds.

Re:I like this approach

[Sir_Sri]

Except that in D3 you can't be purely single player. They overtly made the choice that the game is a multiplayer game. Any solo experience is really just not directly playing with other people, but you're still connected to the same economy. If you give yourself 100 million gold to buy stuff from vendors in your own space that's one thing. But when that 100 million gold goes out into the broader game economy where everyone is tied together you have a problem.

With max payne all you really get are achievements and that sort of thing. Pushing cheaters into their own space isn't really hurting anyone else, since there's no apparent economy.

Blizzard explicitly makes mention of how item dupes in D2 wrecked a lot of that game, as it trivialized content and so on. If you just hand everyone best in slot gear there's not really much to keep playing for. Which then hurts the community for everyone else. Even if you didn't dupe in D2 there was so much gold and so many super awesome items floating around that it affected you.

Re:I like this approach

[MORB]

Blizzard's approach is to make games that are single player or cooperative only and to make them so easy that there's no reason to cheat.

Re:I like this approach

[Sir_Sri]

Hard to steal a blizzard game that matters. WoW and Diablo 3 both have your data (character) on their servers, and SC still requires battle.net. No battle.net and you can't really play those games.

I only have the steam version of max payne 3 so I'm not sure if it uses steamworks out of the box or not, but you could get your whole steam account banned for pirating a steamworks game.

Re:I like this approach

[Endo13]

Exactly. I've already thought about this kind of possible solution before. I think I would much prefer it over current solutions. Being unfairly categorized is much less bad than being unfairly banned.

Re:I like this approach

[bky1701]

"I'd probably start stealing their games."

Why would you take out your anger on software stores by stealing the property they already paid the publisher for? It only means they have to buy another copy.

Unless you meant piracy, which is not stealing, and you should use proper, non-weasel-worded terminology to describe it.

Re:I like this approach

[Dahamma]

You are welcome to go "pirate" the Diablo 3 DVD as much as you want, since it's useless without a battle.net account and activation code.

So, really, the only way to play without paying *is* in fact to steal a legal copy of the game...

Re:I like this approach

[dlb]

It would be even better if they renamed all the banished to "Zod" "Nom" or "Ursa".

Re:I like this approach

[bky1701]

"You are welcome to go "pirate" the Diablo 3 DVD as much as you want, since it's useless without a battle.net account and activation code."

Yes, it is basically a MMO, not an actual standalone game. I wouldn't be too sure that it will never happen, though. Whole slews of MMOs have been reverse engineered. It never really caught on (except Ragnarok, which seemed more popular for knockoff servers than the actual game), but it happens.

Re:I like this approach

[fa2k]

Agreed. The only thing missing is the ability to voluntarily step into the cheater's pool, load up some hacks and let off some steam. Then return to the normal game

Re:I like this approach

[Whorhay]

The only version of Diablo 2 where item duping was a problem was the closed battlenet server games. And even there you didn't need duped items to trivialize the entire game. Some character builds certainly weren't very viable without specific super rare equipment, but that didn't invalidate everything else people were playing. And unless you were PvP'ing it didn't really matter at all what other people were doing. Again the only stuff that was being duped was a few very specific unique items, Stone of Jordan comes to mind, high demand items with perfect stat rolls, and highrunes. Everyone basically knew that if you were trading for a high rune there was a 95% or better chance it'd be a dupe.

If you wanted to build a character that could face roll the highest levels of the game you rolled a Sorc that you spec'd for either Blizard/Meteor or Frozen Orb/Meteor. A sorc in crap gear could quickly and easily farm the gear to make a Frenzy/Battle Orders/War Cry Barbarian that couldn't help but faceroll the game at all stages with relatively junk gear, no high runes or perfect roll items needed.

Diablo 3 seems to be heading much the same way, even without duping. Items are super cheap unless it has nearly perfect stats, in which case it'll cost hundreds of thousands if not millions. I've previously spent as much as 100K on single upgrades for my Barbarian. But when I hit Hell on him I was broke from finishing out my bank spaces. I spent just 42K on 5 different items and nearly doubled his damage, kicked HP up by 30% and damage mitigation by 4%.

Just like Australia

[busyqth]

the company has created a 'cheater's pool' (sort of like the populating of Australia with criminals)

And just like Australia, the cheater's pool will become a lawless hellhole, where might makes right, as biker gangsters fight for supremacy in the irradiated wastelands.

Re:Just like Australia

[bickerdyke]

the company has created a 'cheater's pool' (sort of like the populating of Australia with criminals)

And just like Australia, the cheater's pool will become a lawless hellhole, where might makes right, as biker gangsters fight for supremacy in the irradiated wastelands.

" Although, Ars Technica points out that players may actually prefer the 'special' world.""

And why not... some people like Australia.

Re:Just like Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, that will describe both the cheaters' pool and the regular pool. The difference will be that the biker gangsters in the cheaters' pool have really good aim and can walk through walls.

Re:Just like Australia

[Oxdeadface]

Two bots enter! One bot leaves!

Re:Just like Australia

[skuzzlebutt]

Stay tuned for "Crocodile Leeeerooooooooooooy Jennnnkiiiins"

Re:Just like Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't need another aimbot!
We just need to know the cheat codes!
All we want is what's behind
  the cheater's code....

Sorry Tina....

Re:Just like Australia

[internerdj]

http://www.inquisitr.com/25753/seven-actresses-you-might-not-know-are-australian/

Re:Just like Australia

[Samantha Wright]

And now a Political Correctness moment, brought to you by your local public radio:

At no point in its history was the majority of Australia's population comprised of convicts.

I do believe we owe the editors some reheated "ignorant Americans!" comments.

Re:Just like Australia

[bickerdyke]

Sory but I don't even know these actresses, let alone where they're from.

Re:Just like Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn it. I was going to say "Two cheaters enter! One cheater leaves!" but it seems you basically beat me to it. Cheater.

Re:Just like Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

You have been missing out.

Re:Just like Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

I drive a Chevrolet movie theater.

Re:Just like Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

No one said there was a majority of criminals in Austrailila, just that a large number of them had been transported there. Which, as wikipedia states, is correct.

Re:Just like Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

...and you're citing "Wikipedia" as your source? Didn't they recently publish an article celebrating the 700th anniversary of America's founding?

Re:Just like Australia

[Samantha Wright]

No, it was the 800th.

Re:Just like Australia

[Samantha Wright]

Generalizations are verboten in the presence of the mighty commandments of PCdom.

Re:Just like Australia

[bky1701]

Or, they'll just get half American, half British accents and start selling jam and olive oil while living with an incompetent government. The horror!

Re:Just like Australia

[lennier]

And just like Australia, the cheater's pool will become a lawless hellhole, where might makes right, as biker gangsters fight for supremacy in the irradiated wastelands.

Australia does have *some* other places than Canberra's Parliament House, you know.

Re:Just like Australia

[strikethree]

Yes, Just as the US state of Georgia was not purely a penal colony... but being a penal colony was a part of its purpose, and well, it all rolls from there. It really is not a big deal as long as you understand what is really going on. Thank you for providing the link that demonstrates that understanding. :)

Re:Just like Australia

[busyqth]

With respect to the state of Georgia, I'm pretty sure you spelled penal incorrectly.

Re:Just like Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

Or not watching any popular tv/movies.

Re:Just like Australia

[networkBoy]

He used a /.post bot

Re:Just like Australia

[SimonInOz]

As I said before - stop talking about my family like that!

Re:Just like Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

Two bots...

One oil pan.

Re:Just like Australia

[jouassou]

I guess you could call it a... slashbot.

Re:Just like Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

From the Wikipedia article:

"On 18 August 1786 the decision was made to send a colonisation party of convicts, military, and civilian personnel to Botany Bay. There were 775 convicts on board six transport ships. They were accompanied by officials, members of the crew, marines, the families thereof and their own children who together totaled 645. "

...which would be a majority population of convicts.

Re:Just like Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

You have never heard of fringe, chuck, Dollhouse, or Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles? what kind of geek are you?

Re:Just like Australia

[Samantha Wright]

Incidentally, the article on the First Fleet gives totally different numbers and a much higher convict:free person ratio. I wonder how long it'll take for those mod points to reverse themselves.

Re:Just like Australia

[Cimexus]

The other thing is that a significant reason for the first convict settlements in Australia (circa 1788) was that they could no longer send them to the American colonies following the US War of Independence (1776).

In total, far more convicts were sent to the American colonies than were ever sent to the Australian colonies. Americans seem to forget that for some reason.

Re:Just like Australia

[WrecklessSandwich]

the company has created a 'cheater's pool' (sort of like the populating of Australia with criminals)

And just like Australia, the cheater's pool will become a lawless hellhole, where might makes right, as biker gangsters fight for supremacy in the irradiated wastelands.

" Although, Ars Technica points out that players may actually prefer the 'special' world.""

And why not... some people like Australia.

That entire theory is frankly idiotic on the part of Ars. Quite the contrary, being placed in the cheater pool is going to be like learning about the dangers of alcohol by someone forcing you to chug an entire handle of cheap tequila. It will be such an awful experience that you'll never want to do it again.

They mentioned invincibility cheats, but did not stop to consider the impact of an invincibility cheat on their theory. There can't be any sort of interesting "build a better aimbot" arms race metagame based on the ingame performance of your cheat if your cheat gives you perfect accuracy and 10,000% weapon damage against a target that can't ever die.

Ignoring that 300 pound gorilla, the whole idea only makes sense if you assume everyone is making their own hacks, and thus can be the one "winning" by beating the other hackers. To the average person that downloads a hack, being beaten by someone else that has a better hack would be even more frustrating/less fun than a normal player losing to a hacker. Instead of never being able to lose, they are now mathematically incapable of winning. It's the same sort of frustration, but colored by a sense of entitlement.

Re:Just like Australia

[Squidlips]

Ah but how many of those convicts lived? And how many of those convicts were really criminals? Many were just starving peasants who stole a loaf of bread to feed their family, hardly dangerous criminals....although I cannot say I like the look of their Rugby teams...(not that England's rugby teams are any more savory)

Re:Just like Australia

[Squidlips]

I know that convicts were sent to Georgia, but I gotta believe that a lot ended up in Rhode Island and New Jersey...

Re:Just like Australia

[NeoMorphy]

Cheaters just want an unfair advantage. When everyone else is cheating, you lost your advantage. To make it worse, if everyone is invincible, nobody wins. Eventually they'll get frustrated and know why non-cheaters hate their guts and lost interest in the online game because of cheaters. It's perfect, non-cheaters get to play with non-cheaters and cheaters get to play with cheaters. They should love it unless deep down inside they hate people like themselves.

That's fine

[rgmoore]

Although, Ars Technica points out that players may actually prefer the 'special' world."

Sounds like a win all around, then. The cheaters get their "special" world, and the non-cheaters don't have to deal with them. What's not to like?

Re:That's fine

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasted server and internet resources.

Re:That's fine

[mehrotra.akash]

Although, Ars Technica points out that players may actually prefer the 'special' world."

Sounds like a win all around, then. The cheaters get their "special" world, and the non-cheaters don't have to deal with them. What's not to like?

False positives

Re:That's fine

[Endo13]

No more so than any other server and internet resources used for games. Cheaters aren't any less likely to spend money on future content than other players.

Re:That's fine

[Endo13]

So if you got hit with a false positive, you would rather be banned than simply relegated to the cheater server? At least with this solution you still get to play.

Re:That's fine

[jmerlin]

What's not to like? How about the fact that the only way to get to the "special" world is to be caught cheating outside of the "special" world. Why can't I say "I want to play in the special world and use this cheat, then when I'm bored go back and play normally." You can do that with Punkbuster games (just search for punkbuster disabled servers, or put up your own). You can do that with VAC games (just search for insecure games). On and on and on. People who want to create cheats can with most games and cheat with other cheaters for fun (creating a cheat can be incredibly satisfying, you know, even more satisfying than actually playing the game legitimately). They don't have to have their account banned from all regular servers to do so.

So what's not to like? That this system is a step backwards. It offers no benefits, only drawbacks.

Re:That's fine

[jmerlin]

VAC and PB both already do this -- there are insecure servers in most games. If you get "banned," you can still play. But the flipside is also true, you can search for those insecure servers in the first place and cheat without risk of getting banned, then go back to normal games without cheats on. Not in this solution -- you can't join "cheater friendly" servers until you've already been banned. Terrible idea.

Re:That's fine

[kramulous]

Too right! For years I've been "campaigning" for a drug Olympics. Let's really see what human bodies are capable of.

Madness

[Sparticus789]

"My Aimbot totally pwned your Aimbot!"

Re:Madness

[Anonymous Coward]

lag

Re:Madness

[WrecklessSandwich]

"My Aimbot totally pwned your Aimbot!"

Well, I'm invincible,making me the grand champion of rock/paper/scissors/laser beam. What now?

Nice

[Anrego]

That actually sounds like a lot of fun.

The detailed article didn't specify.. but I hope they provide a way for regular players to visit. Maybe even allow regular players to cheat in the cheating environment without losing their right to play in the regular (assuming they don't cheat there).

I can however see that used as an excuse. "Oops, was playing in the cheater realm and forgot to disable cheat mode..".

Re:Nice

[gman003]

That's sort of how Valve games work. Their anti-cheat system is called VAC, pretty sure it stands for Valve Anti-Cheat or something dull like that, but I can't be assed to check.

If you are detected as a cheater and banned, you can no longer play on VAC-enabled servers. But, server admins are able to disable VAC. It's not common, probably because they get overrun with cheaters (wouldn't know myself - I've never played on one). And any cheating performed on a non-VAC server "doesn't count" - since the anti-cheat isn't running, you can't be banned.

Valve also has a no-excuse policy on ban appeals. The only times, to my knowledge, that they overturn a ban is when for false positives, which are generally pretty rare.

And yeah, now that I think about it, it could be fun for a bit. Some of the best fun I had in TF2 was when the players ignored the rules of the game. Doing something where, for instance, *everyone* has wallhacks, might be fun.

Re:Nice

[davydagger]

or even make an official API/ABI for mods, allowed on one server, disallowed on the other.

Re:Nice

[Lehk228]

UT2004 does per server mods quite well, the server will send out copies of mod files needed, and can be configured to redirect the client to a dedicated file server

Re:Nice

[networkBoy]

Back on Halo we mod'd a couple maps. We had shotguns that fired sniper rounds instead of pellets that had the impact of the rocket launcher. used in a fairly constrained level made for hilarity as people ganked themselves almost as often as they got a kill.
As long as everyone obeys the modified rule set then it still isn't cheating though, it is a modified ruleset. Cheating is when someone violates the social construct of the environment for their own gain.
-nB

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Those were the days eh?
I remember placing all the plasma pistols in the center of the map, and made them shoot rockets. Rapid fire rockets.
Once everyone realized it became a huge clusterf**k in the center of the map. Everyone had a blast.

Honeypot

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a honeypot to me.
Rockstar will be able to observe a plethora of hacks in action to better prevent them on normal servers.

Re:Honeypot

[GuldKalle]

Everybody wins

I played in cheat servers before

[Anonymous Coward]

Playing in cheat servers in CS: Source was fun but something interesting happened if you played in the server for a while.... most, if not all of the hackers ended up playing hte game properly.

Re:I played in cheat servers before

[Anonymous Coward]

This happens over the span someone plays a fps game. There is a skill-cap to players using cheats same as there is players that don't cheat. A bad player botting is still a bad player and good players don't need the help. So if someone actually gets pretty good at something like Counterstrike, a bot, wallhack, etc start to hinder rather then help, because you can do everything it does better by playing smart, practicing shots, and predicting where enemies are/what they are doing. With the one exception of maybe rambo mowing people down in public servers... but that won't get you anything but A) banned and B) killed by the good players.

Re:I played in cheat servers before

[jmerlin]

Top-end players used cheats while training. Being able to intimately learn sound->positioning and where you could shoot through walls with what weapons were made possible by sound-esp and wallhacks. Aimbots that aimed at actual hitboxes instead of models gave a better sense of where to shoot to score hits in various animation sequences. Looking at the actual recoil spreads and their trends for different guns (and using pitch/yaw compensation instead of nospread) showed you how to compensate for recoil extremely effectively. Armed with this knowledge, you're far better at the game than average people.

I developed cheats for a while and I was also a cal-i level player. I went 23-0 legit in one side before being banned in a cal-i scrim back in 1.5, and then barred from scrimming with that team again (and a friend was the manager, he swore up and down that I was cheating). This was before it became common to use cheats to study the game, so I had a huge advantage. You can even download modified maps that have transparent walls if you don't want to run some shady executable cheat (now, you couldn't then). People had made player model mods before that painted the head a bright blue/green that made it very obvious where you should aim (and this was accompanied by color-based aimbots which were pretty terrible).

When we're talking about competitive gaming, researching the game to this level with the assistance of cheats is clearly a benefit. If cheats are treated like some form of a plague where once a person is infected they should never be able to ever play again, you're really just dealing with a massive ignorance. You know, the ignorance of all these bad server admins than ban anyone who's better than them. "Once a cheater, always a cheater" level stupidity. Headshot 5 people in a row? BANNED, too many headshots, must be a cheater!

If we adopted this type of reasoning in science, cutting open a body to figure out how it works would be cheating and would be disallowed. Deconstructing atoms with supercolliders would be considered cheating and disallowed. The creation of vaccines and medicines that cure diseases unnaturally would be considered cheating and disallowed. And if you ever violated any of these rules, you'd be sentenced to death, because once a cheater, always a cheater, and cheaters should be permanently banned from the game (life, in this case). Sounds reasonable, doesn't it?

Re:I played in cheat servers before

[black3d]

No, they don't. They end up turning off their aimbots and wallhacks but still use ESP hacks to tell them where every other player is. Makes them seem more legit. Once a cheater, always a cheater.

Re:I played in cheat servers before

[black3d]

"If we adopted this type of reasoning in science, cutting open a body to figure out how it works would be cheating and would be disallowed. Deconstructing atoms with supercolliders would be considered cheating and disallowed. The creation of vaccines and medicines that cure diseases unnaturally would be considered cheating and disallowed. And if you ever violated any of these rules, you'd be sentenced to death, because once a cheater, always a cheater, and cheaters should be permanently banned from the game (life, in this case). Sounds reasonable, doesn't it?"

Except.. science isn't a video game, Learning more in science isn't considered an unfair advantage, thus, whatever means you adopt to learn more can't be comparably considered cheating. Learning more in science about how things work is the entire point of science.

I understand you've written a huge post trying to justify your cheating, but nonsense like this doesn't help your cause. When you were cheating, you weren't playing with other people aware you were cheating, so you could try and "learn". You were doing it on public servers against other players who were trying to have fun. You're scum. Once a cheater, always a cheat, is in fact very apt. Such individuals are generally scum at every level of interaction with the rest of humanity.

Re:I played in cheat servers before

[Anonymous Coward]

Good players learn how to play by playing and observing.

Cheaters cheat.

No matter which way you try to spin it, if you only got good at a game by cheating, your wins are undeserved. If it's proven a sportsman only gain muscle-mass they need by doping, irrespective of whether drugs are in their system at the time of testing, the world still recognizes them as the cheating pieces of shit they are. Just like you.

Re:I played in cheat servers before

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who's played fps's at the competitive level before and trained for lans with some of the top players of the day, nothing you describe is something anyone can't learn without cheats by using common sense and practice. But nice try at a rationalization on why it is okay and why admins and companies should just be nicer to cheaters.

Although "cheats" mean different things to different people. Coming from quake1 things like full-bright skins and bunny-hopping are fine IMO and should be in every game because shit like hiding in the shadows works against some video settings/cards and not others. However you can pretty well tell what the community finds acceptable and if you break those rules against people that fully aware you plan to use cheats against them and okay with it, you should be barred. I think everyone recognizes things like wall-hacks and bots as cheating, always, and yes you should lose you're rep and be removed from competition for using them as that's the only price they can really make you pay. Although lets be honest here, all it takes is a new account usually to get around that.

If you want to train for something like that and don't have a regular practice squad to play against or friends to lan with, don't cheat to train.

Re:I played in cheat servers before

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

His 'cheating' was a form of training. He didn't take steroids, he boxed against a robot.

Re:I played in cheat servers before

[Anonymous Coward]

Not at all.
When you cheat you're disrespecting the people engaged right there in that map that have come to play in "equal" terms with their peers, in fairness. Your glorification of CHEATING as "research" would be admissible if all those so called "research" games where played by you alone. When you connected to a public server and turned on your cheats, usually accompanied by bullying and trash talking, you're participating in Personal Corruption, and admitting through your actions (not thoughts or words) that you don't care about equal conditions and fairness, or skill (ironically, in your case).

Once a cheater always a cheater is pretty wise, when dealing with 13-21 yo demographic. Don't flatter yourself, corrupt player.

Re:I played in cheat servers before

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll cite cl0ck during his osp/cpm q3 days for this as well. caught red handed with OGC on dm6. claimed he was using it for practice. I tend to believe him since he preforms well on LAN.

At this point its commonly accepted that most top tier players have at least experimented with it at one point or another, if for nothing else than to learn.

Re:I played in cheat servers before

[jmerlin]

The japanese circa WW2 have a bone to pick with your theory that science doesn't give an "unfair advantage."

And thanks for this well structured, well thought out post. Clearly I said that I spent all my time cheating in public servers. The truth is that myself and others spent all of our time in our own servers with vac disabled with friends or others who were also using cheats to better understand the game or try to make their cheats better than other peoples'.

Re:I played in cheat servers before

[jmerlin]

Have you watched a professional CS match? It's completely littered with wall spam, grenade bounce glitches, and on and on. You can spend 5 hours trying to figure out what the bounds of penetrable wall are and where the sound of player footsteps or fire line up with them or you can load up a cheat designed to show you wall trace depths and penetration levels on weapons to render walls green and transparent if you can shoot through them + show on screen where a sound originated from so you can quickly match sound direction with whether or not it can be shot through a wall. Instant knowledge, no need to spend hours and hours wasting your time trying to figure it out. Using a tool to get better at a game is what professionals do. It's what professionals do in everything. If you can create something to increase your competency, you do it. For instance, quake 3 pros use custom maps designed for training -- whoops.

You seem to be confusing the concept of "cheating" and "training." Cheating is abusing something that other people DO NOT have access to in order to gain an unfair advantage. If you load up an aimbot in league play, you are cheating. If you learn exactly where to aim and how to wall shoot with a cheat before league play and dominate because you know better than others how to do it, you are not cheating. You're just better at the game. It's their fault for not taking advantage of what the available tools can teach them.

Re:I played in cheat servers before

[jmerlin]

They were played in servers dedicated to such, with other players doing the same. The more you know.

Fastest aimbot wouldn't win

[Anonymous Coward]

The fastest aimbot wouldn't win.

The aimbot closest to the server would, however.

Re:Fastest aimbot wouldn't win

[History's Coming To]

It depends - some systems add artificial lag to all players to bring everyone down to the level of the laggiest player (within reason, I'd imagine).

Re:Fastest aimbot wouldn't win

[getSalled]

When can I co-lo at Blizzard?

stop and RTFA first

[Eponymous Hero]

there's no idyllic haven for cheaters like the headline and summary imply. they put all the cheaters together and then see if they cheat again, and when they do they get the ban hammer. the only way to stay in the cheaters pool, and the game itself, is to stop cheating. even ars technica missed this important bit of info.

Re:stop and RTFA first

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like you misread the article.
Cheaters can be forgiven and reenter normal play after the first offence. After the second offence, they're permanently 'banished' - to the cheaters pool, not banned from the game.

Re:stop and RTFA first

[Waldeinburg]

Okay, but at least the summary writer got a quite interesting idea then.

Re:stop and RTFA first

[Anonymous Coward]

It appears poorly phrased, and therefore open to (mis)interpretation, but I believe that the ban hammer comes out only if Rockstar permits them to jump back into the non-cheater pool, and are found cheating in the non-cheater pool a second time.

FTFA:

In the event we decide to absolve any of these cheaters for their past transgressions they may re-enter play with the general public, however a second offense will result in their indefinite banishment.

Re:stop and RTFA first

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah you got that straight, but the way it's written is really confusing, that's probably why you're not more upvoted than parent.

Re:stop and RTFA first

[Eponymous Hero]

looks like you misread my post. i didn't misread anything:

they put all the cheaters together and then see if they cheat again, and when they do they get the ban hammer. the only way to stay in the cheaters pool, and the game itself, is to stop cheating.

Re:stop and RTFA first

[GuldKalle]

Source?
The Rockstar link uses the wording "permanently banished", but doesn't specify "banished from game" or "banished from normal servers".
(I haven't read the comments on the rockstar link).

Re:stop and RTFA first

[jarkus4]

From the Rockstar announcement:
"In the event we decide to absolve any of these cheaters for their past transgressions they may re-enter play with the general public, however a second offense will result in their indefinite banishment."
So:
1. it only applies to those that get moved back to normal servers
2. word "banishment" may mean ban, but may also mean just being poot in cheaters pool without chance of returning to normal game (and I think second interpretation is the correct one)

WoW

[Triv]

Blizzard tried this in WoW, sort of, in a super-clever way.

Battlegrounds used to provide no XP when in them, so it was possible to hit the top level of a bracket through quests and such, outfit yourself with the best gear for that level you could find, and just sit at that level decimating all the normal players you'd end up fighting against. "Twinking."

But Blizzard turned on XP gains in battlegrounds, so if you did that, you would eventually level out of that bracket and into the next one. BUT. They also put in the ability to turn off your XP gain, effectively a "twinking switch." BUT, if you did that, you would only be matched up against other twinked out players in battlegrounds.

The result? Twinking pretty much died off. Why? Because it isn't as much fun when you can't just ROFLSTOMP the competition, and fighting fair isn't fun.

Working pretty much as intended, in my opinion.

--Triv

Re:WoW

[cfalcon]

Twinking was never cheating, is the difference. The correct comparisons would be teleport hacks, which normally result in perma-bans.

Throwing all the twinks in the same BGs hasn't stopped it- it just forced them to organize so they can have their twink time. A twinked character is far more powerful than a regular one, but it is all within the confines of game stats- a cheating FPS player has any number of bizarre advantages that create essentially an entirely different game.

That being said, you still can't cheat in the cheater pool, or you get kicked out, so it is nothing like twinking in the twink pool (which was the whole point of the twink pool).

Re:WoW

[Triv]

Twinking wasn't against the rules, no, but it wasn't especially fair, either. Zoom out a bit and it applies here, too.

Re:WoW

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

Now only if WOW would open a bot's are allowed server. Some of my favorite times on Asheron's Call was watching AI that I wrote going around the map exploring and PKing anything it ran across.

Re:WoW

[SuricouRaven]

I like the EVE solution: If it's within the in-universe rules and doesn't involve hacking, it's actively encouraged. Stab those backs! Never fight fair! Bastardly tactics are not only encouraged, it's the only way to win.

Re:WoW

[Anonymous Coward]

The result? Twinking pretty much died off. Why? Because it isn't as much fun when you can't just ROFLSTOMP the competition, and fighting fair isn't fun.

Working pretty much as intended, in my opinion.

--Triv

This may be true for some players but certainly not all. They implemented that change before they merged the PvP brackets. The result was if you turned off your XP you would *never* get to play a match since there wasn't enough "twinks" to start the match. Even if there was, they had been AFK'ing in the queue for possibly several hours waiting for enough players to join and missed the popup prompt to join.

I had a "twink" to play WoW PVP without having to invest the time to constantly regear my character (I only had an hour every other night for WoW, and wanted to spend it PVPing). Then this patch came in, after a week without a single match even starting I cancelled my account.

If I could reactivate my account and play battlegrounds (even excursively against other twinks) whenever I signed in like before, I'd reactivate today.

- 12 year /. accountless lurker

Re:WoW

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the EVE solution: If it's within the in-universe rules and doesn't involve hacking, it's actively encouraged. Stab those backs! Never fight fair! Bastardly tactics are not only encouraged, it's the only way to win.

And then there's people who like playing video games as an escape from real life.

Re:WoW

[History's Coming To]

Agreed. I play Battlefield with a mate who's actually very good, but will rage quit out of a game if we're losing because "the other players are cheating". His definition of cheating so far includes:

Using shotguns
Sniping
Being good with helicopters
Pinning us down and mortaring us
Being better than us (probably)

It's a war simulator, there's only one thing I can think of in the game that breaks the Geneva convention, and that's shooting people on parachutes before they hit the ground.

Re:WoW

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who leveled through all the twink brackets and had a level 49 hit rank 10 or whenever the 60 level blues were all purchasable twinking was fine and a fun way to level and it was a good change to kill off the people that just hovered at the top of the bracket cap, although I think cross server bgs did as much to kill it off as the experience change, because at that point who cares who you are killing, you never see them.

However twinking wasn't cheating, all that gear was available to characters of whatever level. Hell it wasn't even like Everquest where you could stick a couple velious or whatever expansion raid weapons and a fungi tunic on a level 1 and mow things down until about 10 or levels from the old 60 level cap.

Wow cheating was basically botting leveling or other grinds, item duping, pathing exploitation, teleportation, attacking invulnerable mobs that don't fight back for skill raises etc. Most people doing that tried fairly hard to stay out of the public eye while doing it, to keep their accounts. Most MMO cheating isn't of the player vs player variety, it's trying to exploit the game world to cut down on the time-sink aspect or gain virtual items/money.

Re:WoW

[Anonymous Coward]

No it doesn't. Those items were all available to players around those levels if they did the groups/quests for them. There was nothing any more unfair about being decked out in dungeon gear then there was letting someone 9 levels lower into the same battleground with someone at the top level of a bracket.

Re:WoW

[networkBoy]

I don't play WoW, so I may be wrong (or outdated). But as I understood it bots are "allowed" but you have to be at the keyboard at all times. Kinda Like Google's self driving car in NV and soon CA.
-nB

Re:WoW

[scot4875]

Sure, it wasn't against the rules -- but it definitely ruined the fun of anyone who just wanted to take a break fora bit of PvP when leveling up a new character. I had a few characters that would have been entertaining to play in the battlegrounds between level 10 and 49, but the prevalence of twinks meant that half the time you'd be fighting characters with 3x your health that did twice your damage. Completely pointless and boring.

What's sad is that there are so many people who get off on winning such one-sided contests.

--Jeremy

Re:WoW

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Heh. I'm starting to wonder if I played Quake against him a long time ago. One of my favorite CTF maps had a perch with a rail gun. People who were really good at sniping could really turn the tide of the game if the other team didn't defend properly Of course, this was considered 'camping'. Their way of dealing with it was to call you a bunch of names and shout at you in all caps to move off the platform. Whenever anybody pulled that shit with me, I'd say no and focus my energy on taking them out. (I mean from anywhere on the map, not from the 'campsite'.) Most of the time they'd rage quit, though some where smart enough to just stay quiet for a while and I'd get bored with picking on them.

Once in a great while, though, somebody would say "Hey man, couldja give us a break?" And I'd jump down and sharpen my skills with another tactic. Why? Because I'm there to have fun and if somebody's being nice, sure, why not rise up to a new challenge?

I won't have hurt feelings if this story makes you think I'm an asshole. I suppose I could have been nicer in the face of having several words starting with the letter F flung at me, but that map was designed intentionally with that perch in mind.

So, yeah, 'cheating' has a broad definition when playing FPS's.

Re:WoW

[WrecklessSandwich]

I ran into a guy like this in UT one time. Each time he called me a noob, no-skill faggot, etc. for using a weapon, I switched weapons. I eventually got him to complain about every weapon in the game except maybe the Enforcer (the starting pistol you spawn with). Dude even raged about the pulse gun, which is what prompted me to start this experiment. I even got him to bitch about the Piston and telefragging him with the Translocator.

What lawless world?

[Alchist]

Where in the release does it explicitly state cheaters will be able to continue to cheat in this secondary pool? It only states that the pool of available players would be confirmed cheaters.

makes perfect sense

[surd1618]

Different rules, different game.

Sort of like dealing with telemarketers

[Anonymous Coward]

Sort of like the approach of sending telemarketers to a ten minute recording rather than blocking their number outright.

Nobody has to be offended by being labeled a cheater, just use some heuristics to detect cheaters and silently queue them in the cheaters server pool.

They could do other things, like send duplicate player location data, not send any data at all, update every other player, reduce frequency of update frames, etc.

Really?

[Yosho-sama]

There's a desire to play in a game where nobody is actually playing but letting their cheats win for them? Some people have too much time.

Re:Really?

[networkBoy]

Makes for some good AI dev skills. And really a good testing ground.

hrumph, what what?

[Thud457]

I'll have you know I look quite dashing wearing my monocle while giving some dirty privateer a through spreadsheet-lashing.

Re:hrumph, what what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Quite. 1.4 billion ISK well spent, really. Personally, I can't find enough time to walk through my 10 m quarters to admire it. Now, if only that damn door could open...

flying to Australia soon?

[at10u8]

Knowing of previous incidents, I suspect that itwbennett may have an interesting time when next dealing with Australian customs.

Not a bad start.

[Millennium]

Do you suppose they might be able to quarantine the 12-year-old rednecks in the same way? Not to dismiss the extent to which cheaters ruin gaming, but the fratcore are way worse.

Has anyone else noticed?

[erroneus]

Has anyone else noticed that the water in the cheater's pool is always a bit warmer and greener?

thanks for the easy set-up Sam!

[Thud457]

I told you a dingo did eat my baby!

Needs Just One More Feature...

[jonadab]

Players who are not cheating should be allowed to voluntarily play in the pool where cheating is allowed, for the extra challenge. Of course, if you're not cheating it would be voluntary, and you could go back out into the regular game world any time. But for really advanced players, the extra challenge of playing against stacked odds and unconstrained opponents could be compelling.

cheaters pool

[Cyko_01]

watch out for the first graders. They always pee in the water

People who cheat need people who don't

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheaters only cheat because they feel like the have an advantage over the group. Whether it makes the feel better as a player or they just enjoy enraging others, they will get none of that isolated in "cheater paradise".

I guess my point is, cheaters will not play together so making a cheater pool is effectively the same as banning the player.

Good day.

Re:People who cheat need people who don't

[CanHasDIY]

Cheaters only cheat because they lack skill and talent, and would fail miserably if they didn't (FYI, this goes for life as well as video games).

I guess my point is, fuck 'em.

Re:People who cheat need people who don't

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually cheaters cheat for a variety of reasons.
Making people rage is a lot of fun, their tears taste so very good.

In related news,

[idontgno]

The International Olympic Committee has announced its definitive response to doping, 'roiding, and other "unsportsing" performance enhancements: The All-Drug Olympics.

I've seen another game do something similar.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if it was on purpose or not, but if you pirated "Phantasy Star 0" for the NDS, you could only play with other people who had done the same. A patch was released to get around this though, and I imagine the same thing will happen here.

Blizzard should do this for D3...

[kommakazi]

...instead of the banhammer....and enable offline play for this "pool"

Let's try this for /.

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll pool for troll!

"cheating" is back!

[fox1324]

I used to play a PC game online called "Interstate 76". It was a game where you would drive cars around a virtual desert, and shoot at each other with turrets mounted on the cars. Shortly after the game was released, people started to figure out how to "hack" their cars by manipulating the game's files locally. With a bit of knowledge and a hex editor, you could customize the art on your car (although it would only be visible locally), and you could also override the number/type of turrets you were allowed to mount on a particular class of vehicle. There was no server-side check on the number/type, so if you went into an online game like this you could have a significant advantage over any players using "stock" vehicles.

This sort of "hacking" was a lot of fun, and I believe that it extended the gameplay experience for myself as well as many others. It was terribly unfair to everyone else, so people began hosting games which would specify "NO HAX" in the name. Of course this was unenforceable at the time, but it would be nice to have a walled-garden-type area to mess around in.

PS. great funk soundtrack on I'76, find it if you can.

Re:"cheating" is back!

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

Haven't tried I-76, but I-82 also have excellent sound track.

Can you request to be put in the cheaters' world?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints, the sinners are much more fun.
- Dr. William Martin "Billy" Joel

Like Australia?

[handy_vandal]

It's not like sending convicts to Australia.

It's like setting up a brothel full of hot Sheilas in Australia, and inviting every bloke in the world to jet in for a beer and a bang.

Diablo 2 had this

[netsavior]

It was called "open battle.net" Then later it was just called Diablo 2, since after a while there wasn't a legit player in the whole game.

Typical Darktide Logic

[Anonymous Coward]

Playing is a spectator sport.

This is happening in other games to

[Anonymous Coward]

This is used by some competitive free to play games as well. The idea is that if you just ban the cheaters or abusive players they will make another account and continue to poison the game, but if you lump them all together on their own server/games and don't inform them of it they will continue their behavior but only other people who have committed similar infractions have to deal with them.

diablo 3

[ganjadude]

multiplayer becomes worse, when it removes single player (without the need of a server somewhere) from the game...

but who says what is hacking and where d game bugs

[Joe_Dragon]

but who says what is hacking and where do game bugs fall??

Let's say you cheat by useing a game bug with no EXE or RAM hacking who's to say you will not get flagged as a hacker.

Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

This has always been an obvious solution, and we don't know how many games have already been doing it. If people are doing things which make the game worse, grouping them together until they can't stand it any longer is a natural way of removing them from real game play. If people are doing things which can be dealt with by the normal environment, dilute the bad guys by spreading them out and let the environment (ie, reporting of violations) will take care of them.

It's been done before.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only we called them "Australian" servers.

If you wanted to see cheat bots in action on a grand scale, you just logged into any Australian FPS game server.

Many or even most of the non-Australian game servers I used to visit actually blocked Australian IP ranges, because it seemed as if the vast majority of Aussie players were cheat bot users.

Why this should be I couldn't say, but it's honestly how it was.

goobers

[Askmum]

Once I discovered goobers, Wolf3D just wasn't interesting anymore...

Cheap R&D

[Coward Anonymous]

A lot of interesting things can come up when people are allowed to experiment freely. Better AI is a distinct possibility. Rockstar can just sit back and watch evolution take its course until something useful pops up - it can then learn something new or hire the developer. Win for everyone.

Australia already had people there

[fantomas]

Bad analogy with Australia - Australia already had a population for many thousands of years when the British came along on and used a small corner of the place as a penal colony. Probably will probably upset a few Aussies who can trace their ancestors back more than a few hundred years on the continent.

Perhaps itwbennett either has a 1970s history book on Australia or is one of those crazy ultra-right wing white Australians who really still believe nobody was on that continent before the British turned up with a flag?

Ragequit Hell

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not really new. Capcom has been doing something similar to ragequitters (people who leave a game in anger before it's over, which is considered bad sportsmanship in many games) in some of their fighting games (Tatsunoko vs Capcom and Marvel vs Capcom 3).

They called it Ragequit Hell - leave games prematurely a few times and you get placed in Ragequit Hell with other known ragequitters. If you stop ragequitting you will eventually get placed back in the regular player pool.

It seems to work quite well, I almost never ran into ragequitters in MvC3.

Re:but who says what is hacking and where d game b

[WrecklessSandwich]

If the developers don't fix it or explicitly call it "working as intended" in a timely fashion, you probably have bigger problems.

Dizzying Intellect

[Ukab the Great]

Because invisible cyanide molotov cocktails come from the Cheaters Pool, as everyone knows, and the Cheaters Pool is entirely peopled with cheaters, and cheaters are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me, so I can clearly not choose the molotov cocktail in front of you.

AI Challenge

[nneonneo]

They've (either purposefully or inadvertently) created for themselves a bit of an AI challenge. If the hackers take this seriously enough, we could see the development of some pretty advanced game-specific AIs.

And, just like Australia, they might all eventually come to be accepted as mostly-normal members of society.

My experience with this system on GTA4 on PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Rockstar has been using this sorta idea on Grand Theft Auto 4 multiplayer on PC for a while now. A patch or so ago, because of rampant cheaters in multi (not just god mode players, but some just crashed every server to the ground that they could get into) Rockstar made is so cheaters could only join their own little cheater servers. Non-cheating players could be safe on normal non-cheating servers and join friends on the cheating servers. That was the idea that worked nicely for a few days.

The system only decided if a player was a cheater if a certain version of a cheat trainer and other certain mods were installed at the time of launching the game. So it wasn't permanent, but it also didn't work 100%. As soon as a new version of the trainer got out, people could bypass being distinguished a cheater and got back in crashing normal servers. On PC, GTA4 uses Windows Live. Not sure if Windows Live is to blame but reporting cheaters through it would result in no administrative actions to cheaters (I've seen the same accounts, reported by many players, reappearing week after week).

Personally, I'm in love with Rockstars single player games, but things like their "once in a blue moon" crack downs on cheaters leave me incredibly sad that the multiplayer part of the games like GTA4, for which most people buy just to jump strait into (less than 30% of gamers ever finished GTA4), is actually cheater imposed hell. When you actually can get a server with friends and no cheaters, it's heaven.