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Video Game Cheaters Outed By Logic Bombs
Lirodon writes: A Reddit user decided to tackle the issue of cheaters within Valve's multiplayer shooter Counter Strike: Global Offensive in their own unique way: by luring them towards fake "multihacks" that promised a motherlode of cheating tools, but in reality, were actually traps designed to cause the users who installed them to eventually receive bans. The first two were designed as time bombs, which activated functions designed to trigger bans after a specific time of day. The third, which was downloaded over 3,500 times, caused instantaneous bans.
So being a cheater yourself, tell us what the fuck inspires you. It's a game, what possible enjoyment is there in cheating to win? why play at all?
This is why I continue to prefer console games with no internet access ... I don't have to worry about the other guy cheating, but if the company made ways for me to "cheat" it doesn't hurt anybody.
If I want infinite ammo and can't die, who cares if I'm sitting in my basement and nobody else is affected?
Cheat codes used to be part of the fun of one-player games.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I used to make bots for my own use in Puzzle Pirates. Less directly competitive, but there were global ratings and you helped your crew by performing highly (without directly griefing other players). I found that writing them was a lot of fun--it was a challenge to see how optimized I could make them, and how realistically I could make them act as humans. Big 'oops' moment when my bot went to the top of the world rankings after it'd only been running for a couple days, and I think I got banned because my bot optimized for weird combos that humans are unable to predict very well; it would stand out blatantly if anyone ran those particular statistics, but at least it had delays and mistakes and weird mouse movements like a person. In any case I found the 'botting puzzle' to be much deeper than the 'bilging puzzle'. It would still be fun if it was single-player.
But, that's just me as a writer. I could see distributing it to friends as a kind of intellectual challenge in managing people, and getting ahead in the game to see more high-level content. In a one-shot game like CS:GI though, downloading someone else's bot is just pointless. There's no long term progression to gain from, and you don't get the challenge of writing the bot yourself. All you get is the meaningless short-lived internet points from seeing yourself on top of a scoreboard, and you won't even win fights in a way that earns respect from your enemies.
Now see, what I'd REALLY love is a game (fps, mmo, puzzle, mud, etc) that is populated by user-submitted bots only. Upload and then forbid human communication with bots while they're running. Your bot needs to adapt to the way other bots behave that season, maybe your bot even needs to be designed in a way that it can try to form alliances with other bots for common interest--I guess some kind of open spec for communication protocol within the game would be good there. Who's trustworthy, who's not, can you share information, can you trust information, and of course just basic ability at playing the game. THAT would be a serious intellectual challenge. Things like Corewars just aren't as in depth as I want.
This is the #1 reason I gave up on PC gaming and went Linux desktop and PS4 for gaming.
A friend of mine and I used to play a football video game back in the NES days. He would employ football strategy to plan his maneuvers, but i knew nothing of the game so I's just choose random plays and button mash. More often than not, I'd beat him because he couldn't figure out what my strategy was to make a counter to it. He'd plan a defense based on the most logical (to someone who knows football) offense, but I'd do something completely different and would win.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Valve should just quietly put the cheaters all by themselves, let them piss each other off whilst everyone else gets on with life.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Way back in the distant dawn of time (or at least, of competitive Counter-Strike play), I ran a major UK Counter-Strike league. Cheating was a pretty big issue back then (not least because software anit-cheat was much less developed) and we spent a lot of time on the watch for it. In the 18 months or so I was running the league, we had maybe 10 cheat detections during competitive play. The guys running the "open" public servers sponsored by the same company were getting a similar number of detections in the average week.
By and large, I think there were three reasons why people cheated. The first was simple curiosity; people who were bored of playing the game honestly and just wanted to see what the cheats were like. There probably weren't too many of these.
The largest group were the trolls; the people who cheated not because it was fun in itself, but because they got off on pissing off other people and screwing up their leisure time. Some of them would try to hide their cheating, but a lot of them were pretty damned open about it. After all, it's annoying to play a guy you think might be cheating. It's even worse to play a guy who is open and proud about the fact he's cheating, in a world where it can take time (up to an hour, on the public servers) to summon an admin.
The third kind were the properly competitive gamers who felt they were struggling to keep up with the pack and thought that by making subtle use of cheats, they could give themselves an edge. This was the only kind we tended to see in the competitive league. "Pro-gaming" was in its infancy back then, but was already becoming "a thing" and there was sponsorship and prize money floating around. There were lots of players who frankly weren't good enough who thought they could make a fist of pro-gaming. When it became clear that they weren't cut out for it (you need both a hell of a lot of practice time and god's own natural reflexes to cut it in that world), they'd often resort to cheats. They would always try to hide the fact they were cheating, so unless you got a rare software detection, discerning cheating from good or lucky play was hard (but not impossible) for an admin.