OT: Cheaters

[tesco samoa]

Tenryu

most people are just wrapped up in there own world and it seems that they are that way. Careless perhaps but on the whole do not wish for harm to occur to others.

[Trajan]

Gentlemen,

RANT ON
Having played games Online now for far too long (20 years? -- starting with compuserve on an apple) I have encountered cheating in every game. Whether it was a 1st person shooter like Tribes or Everquest (*Everquest is a HUGE discussion in and of itself), a strategy game like Mechcommander or StarCraft, or an edventure game like Diablo I have always found cheaters.

Some of those games had a fantastic and enthusiastic player community that stomped down hard on cheating. The best example of a player community IMHO was the StarLance Mechcommander league. There were instances of players and whole teams cheating, yet the retributive actions taken by the player-body and adminstration of the league cleaned up the problem player(s) quite nicely. (I miss Starlance - it was very good - in its time.)

Starcraft and Diablo were games that had rampant cheating and I soon left them in frustration and anger.

Some folks might make the general statement that all cheating is done by 13-16 year old puberty ridden boys. However, I have seen instances older (age 40+) established players, male and female, taking advantage of an exploit or hack in a game or league system.

Cheating is always sad, and I find that I have become fairly inured to it. If it ruins the gaming experience for me or my team, then I leave the game behind and find a new one.

RANT OFF

<~sigh~>

Cheers!
Trajan

[Ragnarok]

I just seriously don't understand how people can cheat not only once, but keep doing it. To me it's the most low thing they could possibly do. I mean that takes the challenge of the game away. When I get a game I'm looking for a challenge, not a blow away with cheats. That's why I've taken up PBW, to play against human intelligence(sp) and have a challenge, the AI got to be a little bit too easy. But it's no fun if you cheat, and when you cheat you take the fun out of the game for others, not just yourself.

[DirectorTsaarx]

Originally posted by Tenryu:
<snip>
Indeed, by now, I am convinced that honest, moral, upright behavior toward your fellow human being is the exception to the rule.

I have to agree, unfortunately. In a more real-world example, the company that one of my friends works for recently announced, in the spirit of open, honest communication, some changes they were making in preparation for acquiring another company. Instead of being praised for their VOLUNTARY disclosure, the market panicked, assuming that the company was using false honesty to cover fraud, and the stock value fell 50% in the span of a single day. I guess the moral here is to lie, cheat and steal because the general population assumes you will anyway, and will just punish you more for honesty than deceit.

[disabled]

The only reason, and this is the only reason, is that cheaters are losers that can't stand losing. The only way for them to win, however, is to stack the deck in thier favor mid-game.

In the past, I've seen players in SE leave because of cheating whether they did it or were a victim of it.

The tide of this war will have to start changing sooner or later. Sadly, we are going to have to drag our morals and ethics through the dirt before they can. What I'm taking about is that we need a group of people to find these hacks and cheats for MM and help him fix them. They will also have to investigate possible cheaters by simply playing them in games and cheating.

If a game is played between cheaters, one will cry 'he cheated!' and when we ask for proof, it'll expose them as cheaters one way or another.

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Hadrian Tyrael S. Aventine:
Sadly, we are going to have to drag our morals and ethics through the dirt before they can. What I'm taking about is that we need a group of people to find these hacks and cheats for MM and help him fix them.

Well, this is already being done. It's unfortunatly way too much of what I do at PBW. But it's worth the effort IMHO.

But it doesn't require any violation of ethics on our part. You can find cheats and hacks playing games on your own computer. You don't have to do it in an actual Online multiplayer game. All that does is call your motivation into question. So my suggestion to anyone out there that feels compelled to seek out these hacks and cheats, do it in test games on your own computer, and report your findings immediately to Malfador. Don't share this knowledge with anyone in a forum. And don't do it in PBW games, under ANY circumstances, even for "testing" purposes.

Geoschmo

[Baron Munchausen]

Actually, SE IV has an advantage over the other more 'interactive' games. When you are streaming packets of game information over TCP/IP it's quite easy to snoop the interaction between the game and the client and find ways to cheat. TCP/IP was not designed to be secure, it was designed to be 'survivable' in the event of major damage to the network. Exchanging entire game files, encrypted game files, and restricting the interaction to direct processing on the host machine makes it far harder to cheat. Combine that with the fact that the SE IV fan community is a bunch of geeks who do the math and check how the game is working all the time and it's pretty hard to get something by us for long...