OT: Blizzard Entertainment disabled around 20,000 accounts of cheaters

[Gryphin]

May be old news to some:
"Blizzard Cracks Down on Warcraft III Cheaters
09-SEP-02
Blizzard Entertainment announced on their Battle.net homepage over the weekend that they have disabled around 20,000 accounts used by gamers who cheated their way up the Warcraft III Online ladder"
Link to articale:
http://www.techinformer.com/go.cgi?id=740449

[geoschmo]

20,000!

So more people cheat at Online Warcraft than even play Online SEIV. Like 700 times more.

We really are a niche game.

Geoschmo

[Arkcon]

from the article
The Battle.net cheaters were using one of several "map hack" tools that removed the fog of war from Online matches, allowing wussy gamers to see what their opponent is doing at all times. This sort of hacking is apparently a lot easier to devise than more serious cheats, such as allowing for infinite mana Online. Nothing like that's appeared yet, fortunately—and, with luck, it'll stay that way.

Yeesh, just how important are bragging rights in Online games anyway. I can see someone posting it here --

"Bwa Ha Ha. My 50 Organic armor, phased shield XXII, Ultra Massive Mount Null Cannon (reload rate 1) Super Dreadnought took out your 4 Battleships. Ha. Ha. Loser. Loser."

I mean really, what's the point. Does anyone really care that much.

[sparhawk]

Yes, the reason to cheat is totally unclear for me.
What is the fun of playing a game and knowing that you win, because you cheat .
Why should you play: I play because I like the kick when I win, using all of my strategies etc.
and that I know that I'm "better" than my opponents. So cheating is totally fooling yourself with the idea that you are "better" than the rest. so why cheat??????

Like a game that I played via internet: Tribes2
It WAS a great game to play: different kinds of soldiers, can use vehicles etc.
But the game was killed after a couple of months due to cheating of players.

So this is my sollution: Game makers; don't put cheatcodes in games!!
(offcourse you still can HEX edit the game, but I think most of the cheating could be avoided if they won't include cheatcodes).

Just an opinion.

Sparhawk

[sachmo]

My theory is that it's not so much about the actual win as it is about the acceptance these people feel that they get. My question is...shouldn't they be getting that somewhere else?

[sp0rk]

It's not the cheaters that bug me so much as the guys that write the third party software in the first place. There may well have been 20,000 cheaters, but I'll bet they all used the same handfull of cheat programs.

They guys that make these programs are the ones really looking for the bragging rights amongst their own small group of peers, the programs get posted on cheat forum Boards and then your 20,000 idiots go out and give the creator some kind of ego trip.

You get the same situation in chat rooms with 'booters' and 'laggers'. When excite used the virtual places software there was a whole mini community of programmers devoted to finding and using any exploit in the servers they could find. They were organised and held classes in programming, pooling resources.

Of course, when an exploit was found a program was made, given a nice GUI with the creators name in full view and found it's way to the masses. Every time I got booted it wasn't the goon that pushed the button I got mad at, it was the goon that gave him the button to push in the first place.

[ September 13, 2002, 15:04: Message edited by: sp0rk ]