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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
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.
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...
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 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