Cheating @ MSNBC

When someone displays extraordinary wit or skill, they have to be cheating, losers say. Ah, so it is my rapier wit getting me into trouble and not my skizzles. =)

I can see a day in the future where parents will need to have a total combined IQ to have a child cuz too many dummeezzzzzzzzzz iz cummin into thee werld.

The real problem here is fancy book learnin

Games that were poorly designed, can usually be easily hacked. Same goes for just about any program. Bad programmers generate easily hackable code.

Some cheating problems are not easy to solve, like the Aimbot one, because technically it isn't really a hack. You can make it difficult to write an aim or dodge type bot, but it is somewhat out of the hands of the programmers.

Any code that runs on the client side is vulnerable. Period. Any data that comes from the client is potentially bogus. Some things like aiming almost have to be client side, unless you have a crazy low ping to the server. Movement can get away with a higher ping, so you can offload that to the server, but then you get high ping vs. low ping arguments. Plus with movement, you can authenticate valid moves, things like he couldn't have gotten from there to there in a certain time.

You can do some things to authenticate aiming, at least at a primitive level, but it is an almost impossible problem. It really comes down to statistical validation. A human is much more random than a bot, so you can check for that. But then you could program the bot to be statistically random enough to pass the checks.

1) Anygame can be hacked!
2) Anyhack can be fixxed!
PROGRAMMERS GET TO WORK FOR FUCKSAKE!!!!

Enuff said!

Here's my favorite part of that article:

"
Whether itÂ’s aimbots for Unreal Tournament or techniques for improving response times over the Internet, the potpourri of cheats shows how pervasive online cheating has become.
"

Equating aimbots to improving your ping is just plain stupid (read it close, he isn't talking a bout a lag hack). Next thing you know, this guy's going to buy stock in 3Com then suggest we all go back to 56K like "the good old days". DSL IS CHEATING, DON'T USE IT. ;-)

Here's another gem:

"
SonyÂ’s PlayStation 2 is also expected to enable online games, but, like the Dreamcast, it lacks a hard disk drive. For such systems, fixing a bad cheating problem would likely mean distributing a new compact disk, a costly solution.
"

OK, the game code and everything to do with it is stored on the little disc. Unless somebody rips the game off the disc, hacks in the cheat, re-burns the game onto a PS2 disk (this is another problem in itself that I'm sure Sony has addressed from its PS1 days), THEN plays with the hacked disc, then how the FLIPPITY GOD DAMN HELL are they going to cheat in a multiplayer console game? If the figure out the cheat codes for single player Metal Gear Solid 2, who gives a shit?

This whole thing starts off wrong, he starts to complain about cheating in a game called "Delta Force Land Warrior", this guy has no idea what multiplayer cheating IS. He needs to hop on CS for a few minutes.

Just another mainstream media article that's all hype and little substance, glad I wasn't a journalism major because that class "Writing to sound like you're an expert" would have driven me nuts...

"Hi, Mr. Hollenshead? This is Joe Blow from Idaho, I work for MSNBC...YEAH that's us the guys on TV with all the stock reports...YEAH the MS stands for Microsoft, isn't Bill Gates a great guy? Do you have a few minutes?"

Perhaps one solution to cheating is temporary (or permanent?) banning from multiplayer systems (like WON) if cheating is detected?

If the server detects a person using a cheat, the server could invalidate their CD-Key for some period of time, ranging from a day, to a week, to forever so online play would be disabled for whichever length of time.

Just because someone has bought the game doesn't give them the right to ruin other people's multiplayer experiences. I'd like to see the terms of service in the game specify that by altering the software, or using 3rd party hacks in conjunction with the software, player access to online gaming networks may be suspended or revoked.

Do all the cs cheats work in software mode?

Ultimately, says Erik Johnson, a project leader at Valve Software in Kirkland, Wash., game companies have to rely on players to stop cheaters. “Our No. 1 weapon against the cheaters is the community itself,” he says.

“Our No. 1 weapon against the cheaters is the community itself,”

Wow, thats so sad.
Considering its the community thats developing the hacks...

PROGRAMMERS ARE AT FAULT FOR CHEATING! :)

"But game developers also have themselves to blame. For years, programmers put hidden codes into their single-player games so that they could take shortcuts as they tested them. Game magazines and Web sites began a lucrative side business telling players how to use these codes to cheat. InterAct Accessories, for instance, sells GameShark, a “video game enhancer” that has thousands of cheat codes for beating PlayStation video games.
“Some people grow up thinking that cheating is OK because the game publishers and the strategy guide publishers support it,” says Mythic’s Jacobs.

Developers can only do so much work, no matter how many fixes they make, hackers will find a different method and expose that. If you compare it to sports, leagues or sports events like the olympics only do ammount of prevenititive measures, i mean they could go about eradicating all the perforamincing enhancing drugs in the world but that wouldnt be worth there while, and its the same for developers of games.

(MSNBC is a Microsoft-NBC joint venture.)

* S M A R T T A G E D *

maybe first?