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PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Blocks 322,000 Cheaters (pcgamer.com)
The new anti-cheating system installed in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has been banning more than 6,000 suspected cheaters every day. An anonymous reader quotes PC Gamer:
That's according to BattlEye, which polices the game's servers. Its official account tweeted yesterday that between 6,000 and 13,000 players are getting their marching orders daily. On Saturday morning, it had cracked down on nearly 20,000 players within the previous 24-hour period... In total, the service has blocked 322,000 people, double the number that was reported by the game's creator Brendan Greene, aka PlayerUnknown, last month.
Yesterday the game had more than 2.2 million concurrent players.
Yesterday the game had more than 2.2 million concurrent players.
I'm sure that if you survey the people who've been banned, there is a near 100% false-positive rate.
I have it on good authority that nobody has ever been banned from any game for actually cheating; it's always a mod they forgot to uninstall (cosmetic only, of course!), or some innocuous program they have running in the background, or someone hacked their account...
=Smidge=
Indeed. Blocking is too nice. The better way is to detect cheaters and subtly modify their game so they go on a downhill course. Loss at every turn, and a hilarious sight for real players. After a while they notice, and consider the cheat sw 'broken'.
Doesn't sound like such a good idea anymore if it will bring cheating to the console experience...
Hopefully in cross-network games you can choose to play with console players only.
Twinstiq, game news
I remember once when someone was complaining on developer forums with much the same line of crap until one of the developers or community managers there posted and went into details about the programs the cheater was running and even pointed out another forum where the cheater (using the same username no less) had been posting asking after cheat programs.
I think companies do it this way because they know these little shits will just buy another copy of the game, so more money for them, but I think it would be better to just quarantine all of the cheaters together so they can only play with each other. The only way out of that is to play for as many hours as you were cheating without using any at all to learn why it isn't appropriate to cheat.
There are a few who are skilled enough to write their own code, but it's mostly just copy/paste from the plethora of online cheat sites.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Just put cheaters in a game with other cheaters. No banning necessary and everybody is happy.
Why bother cheating? It's a game. It's like saying, "Woohoo, I won the marathon!" while driving a hemi.
Seriously, if you have to cheat in a video game to make yourself feel 733t, you need to re-examine your priorities.
~X~
There are a few basic categories of cheating by modifying your client software. In order of simplest-to-most-complicated.
(1) Rendering. For obvious reasons rendering the 3D scene is done on the client side. A malicious client can replace opaque textures with transparent ones so as to see through walls. This is more advantageous in games where bullets go through walls.
More advanced rendering hacks involve replacing enemies/targets/powerups such that they appear in garish colors, emit light or even messing with their poly configuration so they appear huge.
(2) Data reveal. Since much of the data has to be transmitted from the server to local, much of it not "visible" to the player, another class of hacks intercepts this data (either in-memory from the victim process or from the network stack) and displays it out-of-band, e.g. on a minimap running on a second screen. I can imagine in a game like PUBG (or Starcraft) this would be a huge advantage.
(3) Input cheating. Most likely to get you banned -- this is basically an aim-bot that synthesizes the right input based on either reading the screen or, more likely, hovering data as in (2). Fairly easy to spot from looking at the server replay, as it will basically be a few milliseconds from when an enemy comes into view and when a perfectly-placed shot is fired. Also, in my experience looking at replays, humans almost always overshoot when aiming and then correct back. Aimbots somehow manage to decelerate right on target . . .
Why bother cheating? It's a game. It's like saying, "Woohoo, I won the marathon!" while driving a hemi.
Not that I condone cheating (I don't, there are better ways,) but you seem to misunderstand gaming culture. It's not about winning or losing, it's about making your opponent (and sometimes you teammates) rage and reevaluate their life choices/use of time.
If you can use nothing more than a glowing box with some hardened oil clicky things attached to it with metal and slightly less hardened oil strings and cause someone you've never met, who has no idea who you are, to smash their computer and develop an existential crisis - well that's just magickal - it's better than sex.
I couldn't agree more. But I don't think it's about feeling errrrr 733t?... it's about being an little punk asshole. Like in the MMOs where they grief players for fun. Like completely taking over a town in WoW killing everyone over & over, including the NPCs, so no quests can be ran. Some people really seem to enjoy it.
I shouldn't be surprised how many people cheat. Back in Quake 2 my friends & I ran a server. At one point we finally had to add anti-cheat & dang we caught a lot. Many people I knew for a long time & thought they were damn good. ICQ was burning up that night. These guys got shamed bad, how embarrassing.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
It's the same reason bullies bully. They only feel good when on top, and they lack the empathy that makes you feel on top when helping others. So the only way to feel on top is to dominate others, and the surest way to dominate others is in an unfair fight.
If you're interested in the science behind this, find the lecture "What makes a bully" on youtube.
Stream Sniping is where players watch the Twitch stream of another player that they're in the game with to get a fix on the location of the Streamer and using it to get an advantage on the Streamer. It's similar to the old days where you could do 4 player Deathmatch in Goldeneye on a shared screen, and get accused of screen sniping each other in a similar way.
I think DotA 2 cages cheater and bot accounts into their own world. So it turns into cheaters vs. cheaters and bots vs. bots. There is no way to find out that you are locked out of the normal game until you notice a complete lack of collectible items and those don't drop very often.
"What's that? Did we read you say you wanted to buy more loot chests??"
(3) Input cheating. Most likely to get you banned -- this is basically an aim-bot that synthesizes the right input based on either reading the screen or, more likely, hovering data as in (2). Fairly easy to spot from looking at the server replay, as it will basically be a few milliseconds from when an enemy comes into view and when a perfectly-placed shot is fired. Also, in my experience looking at replays, humans almost always overshoot when aiming and then correct back. Aimbots somehow manage to decelerate right on target...
I remember aimbots that worked like that in Unreal Tournament last century. They were quickly banned, they were quickly modified to "merely" be superhuman-ish. I have a friend who could get himself banned on any public server with the sniper rifle, he wasn't cheating as I saw him play in real life just very quick, very skilled. Hit a few too many headshots and he'd be banned as a cheater. I'm sure the anti-hack system was also pretty crude just like the aimbots themselves, but it's not trivial to accurately recognize what's human and not. Like whether you're playing a chess computer or if it's Magnus Carlsen pranking you, it's probably the former but unless they 100% match the best line and just pick a "humanly" good move it's hard to tell.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That only covers the killer-type cheaters (which, granted, is most of them). Explorer and achiever types cheat to gain undeserved praise from other players for their discoveries or gear they've amassed. There's not much cheating among socializers, though they have a disproportionate share of drama and backstabbing. Basically cheating in the social realm, rather than in the game realm.
Why not just cohort all the cheaters together, and let them play by their rules?
... but I think it would be better to just quarantine all of the cheaters together so they can only play with each other.
This.
The negative stigma against cheating at video games really didn't start until most games went in the direction of online PvP. Pepperidge Farm remembers official strategy guides (printed on actual dead trees), Game Genie, and when developers actually included cheat codes in their games. Video games are just supposed to be entertainment - not a personal quest towards enlightenment. IMHO, all this taking games too seriously has sucked the fun out of gaming.
Being banned for cheating is like Hasbro confiscating your game of Monopoly because you didn't want to follow the official rules. Rather than ban 300k players, simply separate them from the non-cheaters, and let them have their free-for-all with each other. Problem solved, everybody is happy.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
While i understand and to a point agree, there is a big difference between cheating in single player to bow off steam, and then cheating in PvP.
Cheat all you want single player, but if you come to an online platform where it is PvP or any way multi player leave the cheats at the door..
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
well that's just magickal - it's better than sex.
If it is better than sex, you are doing sex wrong.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Draconian penalties are not particularly effective in preventing bad behavior, whether it's crime or cheating. What works is increasing the likelihood of getting caught.