Cheaters

Prompted by this URL - he is pleading for data - I dunno what he intends to do with it.

A retrospective

I played Quake1. I now play TFC.

In quake the cheat favoured by everyone was the aimbot. 'zbot' and its relatives, ratbot and such, were in incredibly common use.

People almost always posted demos to 'prove' that they weren't cheating. On public servers, the cheaters were almost always obvious (perfect aim and no other skill?) but the potential for abuse by good players was incredible.

On the other paw, using such a cheat took almost all the fun out of the game - so the cheaters (except in match play) generally quickly left the game.

Move on to TFC.

I think, in hidsight, it is safe to say that almost all clans cheat. Certainly all clans that have topped a division.

Me? Provoke flames? Never ;)

Seriously. The number of cheats available (but not terribly common knowledge) back then was incredible. The asus drivers really broke the 'see through walls' cheats, but they had been around forever. Disguised skins, altered rates of fire, all these things were in.

An example. 'quickdet' was *so* common, that many people (myself included) simply considered it a thing the top demons could do (and the thing that made demo the best DM class) and played assuming their opponents could do it. This was well before the script that revelaed how it was done came out.

The speedhack fiasco - yes, it was terirble - yes, games became unplayable (and many MANY other online games are still dead because of it) but before TF1.5 ALL lpb's, in effect, had that advantage.

The current situation

If you play well - you are called a cheat. If you get lucky, you are called a cheat. If you know something an opponent doesn't, you cheated.

Strafejumping or bunnyhopping? Cheating. Using scripts binds and alias? Cheating.

Primed a grenade? Reloaded before running out of ammo? Guessed someone was coming? Worked out that someone heading towards your baase was a spy? Cheat cheat cheat cheat cheat.

And this lessens the accusation.

Because everything can be done without cheating, and you will be accused of cheating whether or not you do - how many players actually do cheat?

The asus drivers are still out there. Speedhack still works in a lessened form. You can change the graphics settings to almost remove explosion blinding, to make sniper dots 300 times more visible, to help an aimbot hit the head... You can see through the water (whch is MEANT to be foggy)

Cheating hasn't destroyed the game. The game got destroyed and the cheats came along hand in hand to help. Once it was no longer the expected thing to be civil, once you coldn't just come into a game and have fun - then the cheats spread quickly.

A couple of cheaters here and there aren't an issue. Frankly, so long as I don't notice them, I don't care. What is terrible is the nagging doubt 'might he be cheating?'

The solution

Developers can help make their game harder to crack. Cheats can be slowed down, and as a new one is developed, stopped.

Mass bannings and other such penalties (kudos to EA for mass bannings of people using warezed B+W) can help dissuade llamas.

But all of these measures can only slow things down. New hacks will be developed. And the countermeasures must be developed each time.

The punkbuster project (which, in short, acts like a virus scanner, then assures the server that your machine is clean) helps prevent this reinvention of the wheel. But still has to stay abreast. And you have to trust their software. And their software has to be unhacked (trust me, it has been cracked - attack the installer so that it lies that the newer version is in, then do anything you like to the old version)

There is a technical solution available. You give the player just a video stream and a controller - all the processing is done remotely, at the cable company.

But even that is vulnerable to aimbots.

So...

The community is the thing. Don't marginalise poor players, or llamas - keep them involved. Try to educate people to not invent, and more importantly, not USE such evil things.

Add a bit of fear by making sure that virused versions of the hacks are spread omore widley than the hacks themselves.

If people don't WANT to cheat, then there won't be many cheats.

One slight alternative. Make cheating utterly trivial. Put it within the game rules.

If someone wants to go faster, let them. Call it a handicap. Most would be cheaters will be happy with that - and will work to improve their handicap.

You're just left with the hardcore llamas at top level play - where ego and money are involved. Those people WILL cheat the system to display a lower handicap than they are actually using.

Frankly, let them. And be happy to not be involved in such a shady little world.

. . . and so I saw him run up the ramp, and I counted to fourteen, and I primed the grenade, and I counted to three, and I threw it, and I closed my eyes so that I wouldn't have to see his corpse yell "cheater! You saw me through the wall!" . . .