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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.
It's a 50/50 shot my kill cam footage is some dude killing me from 1000 meters away shooting at the side of a mountain.
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'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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Seriously? On what grounds should a game cheater get thrown into jail... are they stealing your money or something?
I can understand why it would be irritating - but let's have some perspective here.
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Thank God Americans don't hack :v
They probably don't - they're not good enough, being too busy with their Ethnicity and Race Studies classes
Hey, they do have to learn how to say, "Do you want fries with that?"
Bought it on release, got killed 3 times in 6 games by obvious cheaters (one suicide by clumsiness), asked for a steam refund, got it and that is it.
If they ever get the cheater problem under control, I may have a look again, but as it is this is just sadists against masochists. (No idea what else a cheater would get out of a game like this. It must become exceptionally boring to play as a cheater...). As I am neither, I am just not interested.
On a related note, how incompetent must the developers be to make it this easy for the cheaters? None of the cheats used is in any way innovative or new. Well, it seem the supply of sadists and masochists (and plain idiots) is large enough to make them a lot of money despite that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
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.
That's not based on research, that's based on actually implementing it for real games.
This is so not even close to reality. See this Stack Exchange comment for an explanation https://gamedev.stackexchange....
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
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'
Can't pay-to-win if there are cheaters.
Or gamble on matches.
Let's face it, that's the main reason for the police getting involved.
The problem in reality is much simpler than that. PvP (what I like to call purse vs purse, think two people battering each other with their handbags who can spend the most), attracts arse holes. People who like to make other people miserable and for whom cheating is winning. Lets be real, most PvP gaming is about cheating, specifically selling cheats for real world dollars build in developer cheats, compete equally no, but this cheats, you know 20% at a time, 20% stronger, 20% tougher, 20% more powerful and 20% faster, hey it's only 20%, nope it's 80% plus compounding affect. The sell the opportunity to be an arseholes to wipe out the people who do not pay.
They are not opposed to cheating, they are just opposed to unlicensed cheating where they are not the one making money. Stat boosts, zero cost to them, total profit from your dollars and other players misery until they wake up and give up and the game dies, all psychopaths and no norms left to kill.
My solution, too easy, PvE only, the arseholes tend to stay away, you just work you way through at your own pace. Generally selling account improvements seems the way to go, new areas, new stories, better account features, storage, crafting (forget grindy stuff, if any part of you game is grindy than that part is just shite and should not be there at all, think you are making you game unappealing on purpose making it more difficult for you to sell).
PvP as a gaming style will always be problematic, from approved pay to win cheating, to hostile game play to illegal cheats and hacks, they draw that toxic player base (get you knickers out of a knot, in part, not in total but that part can be a large and dominating percentage and when norms give up the game dies not victims for the cheats to victimise and paid buffs are cheats make no mistake).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen