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The World's Top-Selling Video Game Has a Cheating Problem (bloomberg.com)
China's Tencent Holdings is going after the cheaters and hackers that infest PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds as it prepares to bring the world's top-selling game to its home turf. From a report: Ahead of its official debut this year, the biggest gaming company on the planet has enlisted Chinese police to root out the underground rings that make and sell cheat software. It's helped law enforcement agents uncover at least 30 cases and arrest 120 people suspected of designing programs that confer unfair advantages from X-Ray vision (see-through walls) to auto-targeting (uncannily accurate snipers). Those convicted in the past have done jail time. Tencent and game developer Bluehole have a lot riding on cleaning things up for China, which accounted for more than half the game's 27 million users, according to online tracker Steam Spy. It's also the biggest source of cheat software, undermining a Battle Royale-style phenom that shattered gaming records in 2017 and surpassed best-sellers like Grand Theft Auto V. The proliferation of shenanigans threatens to drive away first-time users vital to its longer-term growth.
The problem with that is that then the server will need to have visibility testing on its side. Anyone who has done some amount of research in this area should be able to tell you that this kind of testing is impractical for a server that needs to provide information to multiple clients.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'm so sick of cheating assholes in my online games, about time some of these assholes get tossed in the pokey a while.
Visibilty testing server side is very straight forward it's not a hard problem. You just need basic representation of geometry via bounds and test for line intersection.
Well no, that's a naive oversimplification that won't actually work in the real game. You do have things like windows so you can't just do the bounds of geometry. You also have to consider environmental effects like reflections and fog/smoke. It also isn't just a simple test for line intersection, the player's positions are not just an infinitesimally small point in space, they have mass (and that varies significantly if they are in a vehicle or not). That's a significant load on the server to do this for all the players against all the other players.
Same story all over again. Those kiddos can't get enough of trolling and "cheap thrills" from no-effort gaming, while the rest of us who are actually honest player, rages to the brink of needing a psychologist over the fact that some trollers are gaming you (literally "gaming" you) till insanity. Too unhealthy, life is too short for that, there are so many other things to do. Cheating killed multiplayer.
However - when we feel like some multiplayer action - me and my friends run exclusively on private servers, because no one of us cheats, and we're not quick-fix instant-gratification teenagers anymore, so we like a good honest game and a lot of laughts. Playing on our private servers is a blast, because if someone actually makes it there, we know the history of the players, we know they're good, and everyone's struggle is real. Here you gotta work for your experience.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
By that logic, rearranging a couple of pieces on a chess board while your opponent steps away momentarily to grab a beer from the fridge shouldn't be considered cheating because you still had physical access to the board the whole time.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'