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The Million-Dollar Business of Video Game Cheating
An anonymous reader writes "If you play games online against other people, chances are you've come up against somebody who's obviously cheating. Wall hacks, aimbots, map hacks, item dupes — you name it, and there will always be a small (but annoying) segment of the gaming population who does it. Many of these cheating methods are bought and sold online, and PCGamer has done some investigative reporting to show us rule-abiding types how it all works. A single cheat-selling website manages to pull in $300,000 a year, and it's one of many. The people running the site aren't worried about their business drying up, either — game developers quickly catch 'rage cheaters,' and players cheating to be seen, but they have a much harder time detecting the 'closet cheaters' who hide it well. Countermeasures like PunkBuster and VAC are sidestepped quickly and easily."
$300,000/yr posting game hacks?
Damn, I'm in the wrong business.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
It was the players who nicknamed it that, not the provider. Whoever it was sold an entire external server with a packet router on it that gave an entire linkshell (guild) of people the extra millisecond advantage needed to claim monsters first. The company sold the system for $3000 a pop, and only sold one per game server to ensure that the group using it would have no competition.
The reign of terror lasted about six months before SE finally figured out who was selling the NASA bot system and sent a pointed cease and desist letter. The programmer and designer of the system complied and all the servers were taken offline. Many of the users were ultimately banned.
To this day I cannot believe people would pool together three grand just to get more monsters in a video game.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
I run a 16 player (coop) L4D1 server, a 32 player TF2 server, and a 32 player Insurgency server.
I *really* wished Valve would provide better out-of-the-box tools to admins. Plugins like "TooLateTooBan" to ban disconnected players shouldn't even be needed in the first place -- they should be built into all Source games.
For example, why doesn't the server automatically log Steam Id, IP, and Handle? Why the hell do I have to write a SourceMod plugin to do this? And then I can't even use this on newer Source games like Insurgency because SourceMod doesn't work (yet).
When a community on a server has more then a few admins we can self-police. But we can't do this if the admin tools are lacking, broken, or "unsupported" !
As people can easy bypass it by doing something as easy as rebooting the modem.
Also it can flag the wrong person and it can get tripped by user behind NAT / proxies
Criminal justice systems, perhaps understandably, aren't preoccupied with people cheating in online games. “Especially when it’s international,” Gibson said. “Then you’re talking about the FBI and Interpol. If someone stole $10 million in diamonds, call them. If someone is hacking your game, they don’t care.”
Really? Isn't FBI bound to pursue possible CFAA violations? I mean, cops already used it for a number of other idiotic things already, haven't they?
Ezekiel 23:20
It's effective when playing the long-game.
It's mostly pointless to try to keep up with 0-day hacks as some kind of system-wide approach that covers any number of games.
Really VAC is there to pick up the idiots too dumb to even be allowed to get away with hacking.
Wait... people still run Insurgency servers?
Well, guess I know what I'm reinstalling tonight!
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
at $3 per ID when they're having a sale, (which is quite surprising, I wasn't aware it could be so cheap!) the cheapers are quite profitable. If they were quick to ban, say within a few hours reliably, it wouldn't be worth it for most of the cheaters, and they'd quit doing it.
As it is now, you load up your hacks, buy a few accounts, and "rent" some haxor time on the servers for a few weeks, and then they go ahead and ban you, more-or-less right on schedule. That's all it is, they're just working a different business model.
As a game dev, you have your bean counters run the numbers. The number of cheaters "C" subtracts from your legit sales, but adds to your cheat-burn-account sales. There's a point where C maximizes your profit. And I'd be quite amazed if they were off from their proper C by any amount. There's someone in the building who has the job of keeping an eye on non-cheat and cheat sales, making sure that the VAC ban rate is keeping their C at the most profitable point.
The devs and the hack-writers are doing it for the money, the cheaters have various reasons. A few can't shoot straight and legitimately need the help, most just want to pwn the noobs, and a few are just plain dicks.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
MSN Rated Backgammon doesn't even charge extra for cheats. Anyone who can figure out the bugs in their poorly written and administered code can employ the well know "Stalled Time Out Exploit". In this case, a "staller" who refuses to complete their turn can make the game "time out" on their legitimate opponent. This awards them the rating points and takes them away from the victim. I have been documenting and reporting every instance of this cheat every time it occurs to me for two years. But its been happening since 2003. At this point, I have a folder full of screen captures and one hundred unanswered letters to the "Zone Master" and it is all I'll show for this effort. I feel like I'm in jail with Tim Robbins in 'Shawshank Redemption' writing to the department of corrections for a library fund.... Its always AMAZING to me when an institution remains totally, willfully IGNORANT of a widespread problem. What is even MORE egregious is MSN's complete DENIAL that the problem even exists - so that when you pursue answers to why you keep experiencing this, there is NO MENTION in any of there FAQ or help forums. At one point I was so pissed off I took the issue up in a Microsoft Dev Forum (which pissed them off) and finally an admin admitted to be that Microsoft had in all likelihood purchased the application from a third party vendor and that they did not have the ability to repair the code. These bugs were not a problem at first, until they were discovered and exploited, and as Microsoft has proven to the world, a defect exists only after it does damage to the customer, and only then if it becomes widely recognized. Screw you MSN. I gonna play opera in the jail yard and expose the warden as a crook. Now if I could just get a pile of cash burieded by an oak tree...
Then that's a flaw in the game rather than a problem of the players. Personally, if this was in some way required to continue playing, I'd simply stop playing and continue when the chance to get it becomes more sensible or the problem has been remedied.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's rather hard to implement such a "need to know" strategy in games, as odd as it may sound. It's simply easier to dump all the information on your computer and have it, instead of the server, decide what you should and what you should not see.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The HL2 mod is now a stand alone 2014 game.
* http://store.steampowered.com/...
How many "hacks" are created by the devs of the game and sold out the back door?
Well, the problem is the same as in securing your hardware: Physical access = Game Over.
You've got folks running software on their hardware, they're going to be able to do whatever they want with that. I can see the ethics behind punishing people who cheat against other non consenting folk, but this statement bugs me:
If it wasn't for hacking and cheating in games I wouldn't have taught myself how to program as a child. In fact, the first thing I did when I got any new game was save the game, do some action, save it again and do a hex-diff to scan for the change, and edit the byte values to give myself more ammo or items or money, etc. I'd still take pride in beating the games without cheats, and in competitive servers I wouldn't cheat, but amongst other hacker friends, or on my own servers I see nothing wrong with cracking games. I've added new game modes, weapons, and levels to games via patching the EXE and data files.
Lots of folks bought Doom when they already had Duke3D and Quake just to play with new weapons I added to the game: Flame Thrower: Replace rocket launcher projectile with imp fire ball frames, limit its range by making it disappear after a duration [use the frame tables], increase ammo counts, reduce the damage and reload for VERY rapid fire, replace the projectile's death frame with Archvile flame attack, FIX the damn Archvile flame animation sequence so it animates smoothly. The sound effects preempted itself, so rapid fire would make a great whooshing sound as big beautiful gouts of fire shot out and went crackling up the walls. It was beautiful and all done with just a hex editor using in-game graphics, and I couldn't for the life of me imagine why the game makers didn't have it in the game already... High Explosive Ammo: Set the bullet puff / bleed frame to be the rocket launcher explosion, great fun in co-op w/ specially designed insane difficulty levels. Then there was the Tactical Force Gun: Plasma rifle bolts w/ no damage, high HP, partial invisibility, and high mass, but slow speed. You could make a time-limited wall of force by strafing. You could maintain a barricade, trap folks against walls or via encircle them, great for escape. BFG mines: Zero speed BGF blasts, without the bright bit set - they look small but have a big radius for hit-detection, and just twinkle as a little dot until someone walks into the detection range and they explode -- When these mines go off, invisible kill rays shoot from the "owning" player's current location even elsewhere in the map, but aimed in the original direction the blast was fired at (because that's how the BFG code worked, yep, the biggest and "best" weapon is/was fucking buggy as all hell, ruined would be a better word for it, come the fuck on Carmack, do you even algebra?). So, I'd do a binary diff and produce a binary patch that worked against a certain executable version to avoid distributing modded EXEs themselves so as not to break copyright. Soon DEHACKED came out, and even more folks were able to mod the EXEs. Thus when Doom2 just gave us one more shotgun barrel, everyone was fucking pissed! The hackers had shown off what the engine was capable of, so the game felt like a half-assed attempt to monetize the same game twice.
My most successful hack was when I finally managed to fix the BFG in Doom2.exe by having the rays shoot out from the blast instead of the player and gave the ray direction the reflection vector of the surface it struck or reversed it if it was a player. This required reverse engineering the fixed point math format, and I had to find some unused area for my machine code to be inserted -- which was easy because Carmack
and it's very hard. We had good success not in stopping a commercial cheat system directly, but identifying the cheaters correctly. Our game was small enough that by making the cheat developer work too much they eventually decided it wasn't worth the money they spent on development. Most big online game companies don't care enough to even bother doing anything, other than maybe buying some commercial product that's easily bypassed. They make enough money up front that pissing off some customers isn't important. The funny thing is that people spent more on the cheat product than on the game.
What you describe is a nightmare. I sincerely hope that when my son gets older, he does not fall into some kind of trap like this where he poop-socks it for some stupid game just to get some pointless digital trinket.
I'd rather deal with just finding weed in his jacket pocket, like normal people.
Square-Enix had never done an MMORPG before, and worse, they're Japanese so they didn't really understand what people liked/didn't like about the early MMO's. All they knew is they wanted their own. Thusly they made a game only crazy Japanese conformist min-maxers who love grinding for grinding's sake would love.
In many ways the PS2's other MMORPG, EQOA, was a better and more enjoyable game.
Sounds like an incredibly shitty game. I'm glad I never wasted time playing it.
More seriously, what you just described is not a game. It sounds more like a psychological torture device.
I have a solution, at least in part. Have a circle of trust so that:
1. You can only play if you know people in the service (or at least have a few very notable seed individuals which dev's trust)
2. If an individual is reported (and verified) as cheating, have a non-trivial penalty on the individual(s) who are in said friend group
3. If the upstream peer continues to be penalized for their peer's cheating, they can choose to drop their association essentially stopping the other guy from playing (unless they have other upstream peers willing to support them)
The system relies on a person knowing others, which is a hassle in the video gam troll world, but it means there's truely a penalty for not just players, but their peers as well. As a cheat provider, you'd be less likely to target said system, because the cheaters will be soon weeded out of the 'good players' pool
Just a first swipe on the idea, enjoy.
Bye!
... online DRM'd games lead to this naturally. Game devs/pubs brought this on themselves by taking servers out of the control of players hands because of greed. Many people get hacks to get around paying for anything in online DRM'd games. Who'd of thought it, cheats being cheated by the original cheats (game pubs/devs).
ie: CoD MW2, It's not easy, then you toss in recoil of the weapon and it just becomes a war of words, very hard to prove. We had two people who's function was to judge weapon recoil and only they could ban or bless the player.
For me it was also important to recognize a good player, as my son was banned from just about every server he played on, he's just freaking good. This is an old clip I made proving an accused cheater was really just a good player. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
But just goes to show just how hard it is to nail a cheater. What one thinks is a cheat, is another being very good.
IDKFA was more than a phrase, it's how I started my games. http://www.gamefaqs.com/ is my source of faq's and other unknown tricks of a game.
My son brought me into CoD, he's good, and cheat free. I not only set an example by following his lead but I see no sense in cheating in these types of games and honestly I'm one that would benefit from doing so. I'm not a good shooter, if in an engagement I'll almost always lose be in on foot, armor, or aircraft. (were talking CoD or BF3).
I have a lot of BF3 friends and know a few cheat on the sly. Coming over a hill from an obscure direction (jet crashed) when one of my friends picked me off, it was slick and shouldn't of happened. They knew me after the kill and I figure they knew they had been caught, but I said nothing.
Even if I were to turn them in nothing shows they were cheating, they maintain an approvalable battle record.
I say this affirming the fact that some are cheating but not for progression, or any spectacular Rambo stuff. Just doing so in the back ground gaining very little from it.
A breakdown of the situation in a meta-view shows us that cheaters suffer from feelings of insignificance, they feel socially outcast due to some aspect of life they fall short of. This eventually leads to full blown erectile dysfunction. Symbolically, they cannot get it up for the game and participate as the skilled do, so cheats are substituted as a kind of VIAGRA in order to mimic virility. This is sad in the case of female cheats who could avoid the problem entirely by stopping their diet of cookies and chips, getting off their fat asses and doing some excercise instead of substituting video games for interaction with males.
The problem of cheats is purely psychological.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Ehhh StillAnonymous, Eve Online is about as bad or worse but with PvP. Besides FF11 is an older MMO and it is enjoyable. Crono is just stating only 1 negative point of view the game but hey, if you want to have your kids smoke weed, go right ahead and let them know too.
... and a few are just plain dicks.
Err, no. Every last person who loads up a cheat then plays against other people on the net on non-cheat server is a complete dick. It is like entering a public chess tournament with a hidden computer. It utterly detracts from the fun for other legit players who just want to enjoy themselves in a competitive, but also fair environment. If you can not get you head round how to enjoy playing a game online and also doing ok at it, then fine just give up or whatever. Don't try and ruin for everyone else though because that to me is being about as petty as you can get.
I dont read
Definitely going to check that one out, I remember playing it when the crew first developed it, and I thought it was probably the best "war-sim" FPS out there at the time.
Side note regarding Steam - I'm really digging how they've embraced the modder community by folding them in as full (for lack of a better term) games - Just Cause 2 MP being another of my favorite examples.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
When the shell with a NASA bot (Toki) moved to Seraph, we simply pulled out of the Land Gods race and focused on {sea}, {sky}, Dynamis, ToAU, and Limbus instead. The NASA group didn't waste their time on the {sky} spawns and we always hit {sea} when they were doing Dynamis runs. They did gank our Xarcabard one go round.
The leaders got busted for gil-buying shortly before NASA went down, then the rest of the shell dissolved when it died. Most of them transferred servers since they were blacklisted from endgame on ours. Harmony restored.
I still play XI casually. I had led a Dynamis shell and finished Gjallarhorn then later on Dardaubla, so I still hop on a couple times a week to help the remnants of that old group out.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
ChronoCloud, that was a weird post. While Japanese gaming culture has some marked differences when compared to, say, N.A gaming culture, it is just plain racist (and factually incorrect) to say "they're Japanese so they didn't really understand what people liked/didn't like about the early MMO's". I'm guessing your frame of reference excludes the early Japanese MMOs, for example.
As for EQOA being "better and more enjoyable" than FFXI, I totally disagree, and I guess I'm not the only one; EQOA is long gone, but FFXI is still going strong.
Valve has always understood the long tail. Ubisoft/EA is the complete opposite of Valve -- smegging clueless about what customers want.
Ubisoft: We'll sell you same shit year after year. Map editor? Mods? 4+ coop support? Begone because "obviously" _everyone_ pirates our game; we have complete and utter contempt for our PC players even though they helped build our company before we could do shitty PC ports!
Valve: Here are yearly dirt-cheap sales so you can play with your friends. You can run your own server -- most of our games have an in-game server browser. Here is a map editor too so you can guys make your own maps! The team behind L4D's custom campaign "I hate Mountains" even had Valve record new voice lines! That custom campaign is extremely well-done!
Basically, Valve respects their customers; other large publishers treat them like a resource to be exploited.
I've spend hours on "old school" MMOs where group play was key and instances were rare, if they existed at all. Every single MMO that succeeded, without fail, ensured that there is no frustrating waiting spot in the game. Grinding, yes. I've ground away countless hours in DAoC, mowing down armies of enemies for that minimal, pixel-sized growth of the xp bar. But it was never a waiting game.
People can dig grinding. They can accept killing enemies over and over and over, hoping that at some moment in time they drop something with a chance to drop that borders on the nemesis asteroid hitting Earth, or just for XPs sake. What people don't readily accept is waiting in line or, worse, assembling at some point to kill a timed boss.
An example:
A decade ago, Westwood sunk themselves into making an MMO. Earth and Beyond, they called it. Soon they were gobbled up by EA (the place franchises go to die). The game lasted a whole of about 2 years and could today serve as the textbook example of what NOT to do if you want your MMO to last. It had a lot of things never seen before in MMOs that could've made it WoW before there was any WoW. A storyline that's been developed as you play (and at a rather fast pace with a new "chapter" being thrown at the players every other month rather than every other year with an expansion). Interesting and believable NPCs. Missions and quests (believe it or not, that was a novelty back then). FULL voice acting (ok, just at the beginning as they decided it's "too expensive" to keep up with it, thanks EA!). Story-wise it was awesome.
It was the completely shot mechanics that sunk it. Not wanting to go into details like the shot balance, unnecessary classes and poor endgame content, what really ticked people off was simply that EVERYTHING was on a spawn timer. The worst atrocity was an NPC on a planet who was level 30 (of 150 max level). In other words, everyone and their dog could one shot that boy long before they maxed out. That NPC dropped something that EVERYONE wanted. I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was pretty much a necessity to have it. That NPC was on a spawn timer, once a week at $time, at $day that beast spawned. And as if that's not bad enough already, it was a key storyline quest NPC for a class.
One can probably guess what happened. At $time and $day, a billion people assembled in the location of the NPC, ensuring that the nanosecond he spawned an insane overkill set in and he was vaporized, leaving the players of aforementioned class out in the cold because they could neither progress in their story nor accumulate the skill points they needed to advance in their power levels.
It took seemingly forever for EA to finally admit that this might not be a good idea. But since that was only one of such problems and most of the other ones were not even addressed ever, the game (which even today has a very faithful following that even reverse engineered the whole shit and created fan-run EaB servers long after the game was canceled) barely survived into its second year.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I think he really meant "games that were popular with the mainstream Japanese [country] culture compared with the tastes of people that live in other countries" (and probably meant the USA specifically).. Rather than literally meaning the term Japanese to mean anybody of Japanese descent, regardless of where they live.
BTW, the wikipedia article talks about monthly story driven updates (you say a new chapter every other month). Not sure which is right.
While Japanese gaming culture has some marked differences when compared to, say, N.A gaming culture,
There are a LOT of differences gaming culture wise which affects the mindset of Japanese developers. While I'm not 100 percent agreement with Phil Fish's opinion, I think Japanese Development houses simply haven't adapted well now that they have to compete on a level playing field with top of the line formerly PC-only US/UK/CAN developers like Bioware, Blizzard or Bethesda.
it is just plain racist (and factually incorrect) to say "they're Japanese so they didn't really understand what people liked/didn't like about the early MMO's".
But they didn't understand, at least they didn't understand the tastes of us Gaijin. While there may have been Japanese MMO's those tended to stay in Japan, while FFXI was one designed for the world...and Square-Enix didn't do a good job of it or informing their player base. Let me give you an example.
I played WHM and as you know the WHM has some nice weaponskills, which means you need to be up front using your weapon battle-cleric style. The WHM can equip armor and weapons to play that style. But...the crazy conformist heavily Japanese player base think healers are dress wearing Aeris style staff-chicks cowering in back,
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...
not Western style battle-cleric.
http://dnd.jeffandeden.com/lin...
And Square-Enix never went out of their way to say to the Japanese players. "Hey quit being so god-damned conformist, there are MULTIPLE ways to play characters, the game is designed that way, so lighten up". So people who played WHM's in a way that the game actually supported were often "cursed out" by Japanese players for playing their own characters the way that worked best for them. Admittedly, battle-cleric was a better option for Hume WHM's than Taru-Taru ones.
As for EQOA being "better and more enjoyable" than FFXI, I totally disagree, and I guess I'm not the only one; EQOA is long gone, but FFXI is still going strong.
FFXI is much more annoying and grindy than EQOA was. The economy was also ruined for us Gaijin because we got thrown in there with the heavily Japanese player base instead of on our own servers with an economy that wasn't @#$@# up after NM campers, and obsessive grinders messed it up for the years they had it before we did. Sure it had some features EQOA lacked, but overall EQOA was a better "game". I mean after all you could actually de-level in FFXI and lose the ability to use the equipment you're wearing! And the way subclasses worked meant you had to fill up bank space with equipment you needed to level the sub-classes.
Sure FFXI is still running, but it's because Japanese players, more than most, are stuck in gaming's past. Playing 2D RPG's on their PSP's and FFXI on their PS2's. The vast majority of japanese FFXI players are playing it on the PS2.
Let's replace "Japanese" with "black" and see how that reads:
Alright, it was badly worded. But how else can I say:
Square-Enix and other japanese developers don't get/understand the gaijin market outside of Japan in ways they should if they're wanting to sell games to us gaijin.
It's not racial, it's cultural. Kind of like how us Yanks don't get "Branston Pickle"
They did monthly updates, but alternating they were content and story updates.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.