Cheating, Gold famring and Punkbuster on CNN.com

[CharlieMopps]

They are about 10 years late but better late than never.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/10/01/videogame.cheating.ap/index.html

The Intel thing sounds like crap. It logs keystrokes and reports them to the game? pffft... If they can create a virtual USB dongle and send fake into to software, they can certainly create a virtual USB keyboard and send fake keystrokes. Unless games start requiring windows certified drivers... oh my 

[Trippy]

For the Intel thing you would need to crack/discover the private key(s) to be able to forge information reliably.

[JoeTF]

Hehe, bye bye online cheating. You know, if it was anyone else you could diss it as bullshit, but with Intel it's basically irrevocable death sentence to macroing.
They add few lines to their vPRO platform (which is already included in every CoreDuo, whethever you want it or not) and it's done. Give it few years and 90% of popolation will be using those chips - at worst it means GM will have ten times less subjects to watch, at best companies will eventually make it an requirement to have vPRO enabled.

[bhodi]

Hehe, bye bye online cheating. You know, if it was anyone else you could diss it as bullshit, but with Intel it's basically irrevocable death sentence to macroing.
They add few lines to their vPRO platform (which is already included in every CoreDuo, whethever you want it or not) and it's done. Give it few years and 90% of popolation will be using those chips - at worst it means GM will have ten times less subjects to watch, at best companies will eventually make it an requirement to have vPRO enabled.

Even the article admits that the idea is in the "research phase". It's all handwaving. You can safely ignore it. I'm going to "diss it" as vaporware bullshit right now, right here. Implementation is not as simple as "adding a few lines to the vPRO platform" and, as such, it will never happen. Furthermore, there are a lot more methods of cheating that this wouldn't even touch, even if it did what they hypothetically say it might.

[CharlieMopps]

How will they stop a macroing keyboard like my logitech? Or on top of that, 99% of the cheats aren't even keyboard or mouse hacks... they are Radar and whatnot. Most hacks are hacks of DirectX itself nowadays... thats why hacks for games come out sometimes before they are even outa beta.

[Salamok]

It's a question of priority and the gaming industry can't afford to make "no more cheating" their #1 goal.  After all you need to create a game that is attractive to a decent size playerbase before you have to worry about an economy at risk due to cheating.

If there is a solution to the problem i doubt it is going to evolve out of anything originating from the gaming community.  The Intel solution is more oriented at malware (stuff the user isn't aware of) but as has been pointed out Intel doesn't control what type of keyboard you plug in to that USB port.  I wouldn't doubt there are people out there using a full on desktop to emulate their bot keyboard via USB to USB connections.

[sam, an eggplant]

Stopping cheating is easy, but you need to have the ability to change and implement major low level systems for much of it.

1) Radar/showeq/packet inspection programs: don't trust the client. Don't transmit any information it's not supposed to have. Simple, right? Then why does nobody do it?

2) Transport stream manipulation/teleportation/packet injection: again, don't trust the client. Inspect every packet for validity. It's 2007, computational power is cheap now and getting cheaper every day.

3) Botting: Log all player activities and continuously mine that data, looking for atypical action. When it passes a certain generous threshold, send the player a "captcha".

4) Asian gold farming/leveling services/RMT: Nothing to be done at the technical level, this needs to be addressed through game design. Instead of designing achivement mechanics based upon time /played, base them upon some other metric. I've already gone into this in detail before, so I won't cover it again now.

[Salamok]

1) Radar/showeq/packet inspection programs: don't trust the client. Don't transmit any information it's not supposed to have. Simple, right? Then why does nobody do it?

this can make the effects of lag more noticeable and degrade the game experience.  Also this has been gotten around by planting tracking bots that sit in the relevent zones parsing for zonewide event spam.  I know you could remove some of the event spam but once again it makes for a less rich gaming experience.

2) Transport stream manipulation/teleportation/packet injection: again, don't trust the client. Inspect every packet for validity. It's 2007, computational power is cheap now and getting cheaper every day.

Yes this could be tightened up more but when dealing with that much code there are bound to be a few exploitable areas.  Also, teleport hacks and speed hacks don't really disrupt the world economy, they are more of a pvp nuisance and as such can be handled with a decent player reporting system.

3) Botting: Log all player activities and continuously mine that data, looking for atypical action. When it passes a certain generous threshold, send the player a "captcha".

 
Good luck defining that threshold, bots can be quite creative and I don't know about you but when I am grinding I try and do it as efficiently as possible, this tends to make me look like a bot even though I am not.  A game where i constantly have big brother GM bots on my ass and interrupting my motherfucking isn't ideal.

4) Asian gold farming/leveling services/RMT: Nothing to be done at the technical level, this needs to be addressed through game design. Instead of designing achievement mechanics based upon time /played, base them upon some other metric. I've already gone into this in detail before, so I won't cover it again now.

8 million wow players seem to like this mechanic.

There probably isn't a huge player base to justify creating a laggy game, in a less rich world with gm bot Nazis watching your every move that has some mysterious rewards system that isn't based on time.  Most such rewards systems are generally based on skill and unfortunately the majority of players are not skilled enough to inflate their epeens to a satisfactory level based on that metric alone.

[Stephen Zepp]

1) Radar/showeq/packet inspection programs: don't trust the client. Don't transmit any information it's not supposed to have. Simple, right? Then why does nobody do it?

this can make the effects of lag more noticeable and degrade the game experience.  Also this has been gotten around by planting tracking bots that sit in the relevent zones parsing for zonewide event spam.  I know you could remove some of the event spam but once again it makes for a less rich gaming experience.

2) Transport stream manipulation/teleportation/packet injection: again, don't trust the client. Inspect every packet for validity. It's 2007, computational power is cheap now and getting cheaper every day.

Yes this could be tightened up more but when dealing with that much code there are bound to be a few exploitable areas.  Also, teleport hacks and speed hacks don't really disrupt the world economy, they are more of a pvp nuisance and as such can be handled with a decent player reporting system.

I don't want to get into a "my engine is better than your engine" fight, but I disagree completely--none of these things are rocket science, they just require a top down integrated network design and implementation. Something that has been around for years--just not used by most MMO's.

Torque, as well as OpenTNL (our open source networking library) has both of these systems built in to the design itself--and while they aren't aimed directly at MMO architectures or user loads, they are both certainly adaptable to same without extensive performance loss (if implemented properly) or breaking the design.

[Salamok]

Yes better code won't present as many weak points for hackers to take advantage but it won't eliminate the gold farmers or tracking bots which are the majority of this problem. 

Your number one goal as a developer is usually to develop a game that people want to play. 

IGN and co's number one goal is to make real money off of your in game economy.

Where there is a will there is a way, this is right up there with the malware and spam battles there is simply more money available to the other side.  Look at wow they probably have the single largest budget of any game ever made and yet all of these cheats described here exist in that game.  In addition to pure budget it is probably the most polished (least buggy) MMOG ever produced.  The hacks are able to exist because their goal for the product is to provide entertainment for the subscriber base.  Now with that budget if their mission statement was to provide security for the subscriber base there would be no hacks, on the flip side there would also be no subscriber base.

[sam, an eggplant]

i constantly have big brother GM bots on my ass and interrupting my motherfucking isn't ideal.

Pretty sure you forgot a word in there, unless your mom's not into three-ways.

We're talking about cheating as a whole, not just RMT, although I covered that too. These issues aren't endemic to the medium, they are fixable, but they require educated design and code decisions to be made and enforced early on in development.

[Salamok]

i constantly have big brother GM bots on my ass and interrupting my motherfucking isn't ideal.

Pretty sure you forgot a word in there, unless your mom's not into three-ways.

We're talking about cheating as a whole, not just RMT, although I covered that too. These issues aren't endemic to the medium, they are fixable, but they require educated design and code decisions to be made and enforced early on in development.

just borrowing schilds new phrase.  and I think we have already hashed out that the mother can be any random milf and doesn't technically need to be a blood relative.

[Hoax]

I've always read it as the person/thing that is a motherfucker has wronged you to the degree that said person/thing fucking you own mother would wrong you...

But don't let me get in the way of you making up new shit.

If you use it as a positive its totally refering to being so badass the subject could easily get away with fucking any hottie milf he/she/it came across.



my 2cents.


Its kind of obvious that they are using it in a third, new to me at least, way. I'm guessing related to the second (positive) side of things.

[sam, an eggplant]

Schild's trying to take back incest, make it a positive? OK, then.

THREAD DERAILED!

[tazelbain]

Schild only started fucking his mother for the jokes.

[CharlieMopps]

It comes down to money. Developers don't think they lose money from cheating unless it's extremely widespread, if fact, I bet they think they make a LOT of money off of it. They are basically milking the farmers of their money by slowing banning their accounts and forcing them to buy new.

As far as Gold farming goes... I personally could very easily catch gold farmers if I had access to their database. I could get it to send them an email every time a transaction took place. It would be cake. I bet I could write it in a couple of hours depending on what they used for a DB.

[Salamok]

Thats just it though I wouldn't consider the act of goldfarming cheating, it's the gold selling/buying that is the problem.  I am sure we have all farmed gold for our own personal use, I know I have.

Believing that you can prevent all cheating is sort of like believing world peace is actually attainable or you can put a stop to all crime.  There is always going to be someone out there that thinks the rewards outweigh the risks and they are going to cheat.  They may eventually get caught but it isn't likely to happen on their 1st offense.

[Samwise]

Your number one goal as a developer is usually to develop a game that people want to play. 

This has always been my take.  If someone is making a living playing a game that other people don't want to play, bully for them, and remind me not to play that game.

[Azazel]

A pearl of wisdom that was passed on to me somewhere around 10 years ago. Now I pass it on to you all:

There's nothing wrong with being a motherfucker. As long as she's good looking, and she's not your mother.

[CharlieMopps]

Thats just it though I wouldn't consider the act of goldfarming cheating, it's the gold selling/buying that is the problem.

If buying gold for real money is against the EULA then it is cheating. It just doesn't involve using a hack.

[schild]

Eh? No, it's just a violation of the EULA. It's not cheating.

[Xuri]

I've always thought of EULAs as game-rules you agree to play by before the game starts (think board-game rules). So violating the EULA is cheating in my book.

[schild]

Games rules are written by designers.

EULAs are written by lawyers.

[Salamok]

my point was the act of mindlessly grinding out gold isn't cheating or against the EULA so dedicating any efforts to tracking said activity is kind of pointless.  ya ya track the bots but if you are living in a country where you can live better than your neighbor on $5 a day then bots aren't really necessary.

[CharlieMopps]

Games rules are written by designers.

EULAs are written by lawyers.

Good point. It's still cheating though.
I'm fairly sure most game designers would agree with me and like to see an end to it... but the suits wont let them... or at least wont bother investing any money into prevention until the community screams. Simple things like not allowing trial accounts send tells should be obvious. But most companies don't do anything until their playerbase is getting spammed every 5 minutes.