Cheating in online games

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Cheating in online computer games is a broad category of activities, all of which are generally regarded as modifying the game experience in a way that gives a player an unfair advantage over the other players. Depending on the game, different activities constitute cheating, as it is often a matter of consensus opinion.

Cheating exists in all multiplayer online computer games. While there have always been cheat codes and other ways to make single player games easier, most developers attempt to prevent it in multiplayer games. With the release of the first popular Internet multiplayer games cheating took on new dimensions. Previously it was rather easy to see if the other players cheated, as most games were played on local networks or consoles. The Internet changed that by increasing the popularity of multiplayer games, giving the players anonymity, and giving people an avenue to communicate cheats.

Contents

[edit] Types of cheats

[edit] User settings

Typically, a player can change settings within a game to make it suit their play style and system. These alterations are generally not cheating, except in extreme circumstances. Changing the keyboard layout to make it easier to use is for example usually accepted. But issues such as changing in-game player models and textures, or modifying the brightness or gamma in order to make it easier to see in dark areas are sometimes borderline cheating.

[edit] Exploits

Usually included in this concept of cheating is the use of existing bugs or gameplay aspects unintended by the developers known as exploits. Gamers are divided as to whether all exploitation is cheating, though most consider exploits as cheats if they are particularly unfair. It is also difficult to classify some activities as exploits, because sometimes unintended features in games can make them much more fun to play, like bunny hopping in Quake, or even map an official part of the series such as "skiing" in Tribes. However, most exploits are unbalancing to a multiplayer game, and are called cheats because they are based on mistakes by the developers. For example, duping ruins a synthetic economy in online role-playing games and is rarely intended, and therefore is usually called a cheat.

[edit] External software

The most unbalancing cheats usually come from external software. Either the program that runs the game is modified to allow the player to cheat, or other software is run which produces the same results. Wallhacks, aimbots, and other cheats fall into this category.


[edit] Divulging

Most games allow other players to observe the game as it is played. Sometimes, these observers get the chance to see things in the map that other players don't see (ex. shrouds). And so they can cheat by telling their friend (who is playing) all the tricks or traps. Although it is legal, it is often frowned upon because it may make huge differences in some games where players must avoid dangerous objects.

[edit] Disconnecting

In games where wins and losses are recorded on a players account, a player may disconnect from a game they have lost in order to prevent the loss from being recorded. A similar phenomenon is when someone running a server boots players who are beating them. Disconnecting can be accepted when there are multiple players in a game but if it is a one-on-one match it is considered immoral, as the opponent of the cheater will not have their "win" recorded.

[edit] Rigging

This kind of cheating often involves altering game settings or team lineups in order to give one team an unfair advantage over the other. One example includes filling a team with only skilled or known players and pitting them against another team of lesser skill. Though this tactic is not illegal, it often upsets lesser-skilled players who feel that they aren't being given a fair chance. Less ethical rigging involves giving one team more advantages such as better weapons or equipment. Riggers can also abuse games with map editors by creating maps that give the advantage to a certain team in the game.

[edit] Ranking up

Some games involve a global leader board, where each player is ranked according to how they have done in a game. It is entirely possible to cheat your way up to a high place through fake accounting, which is when someone creates an alternative account to let a person planning on raising his rank win without trying to beat him. These free wins help them reach the top of the leader board without having to compete against other players.

[edit] Sharing

The results of account sharing on the MMORPG Tibia (computer game).
Enlarge
The results of account sharing on the MMORPG Tibia (computer game).

Sharing is when multiple people share an online game (mainly MMORPG games) character. Common reasons for doing a sort of this is to gain a very unfair advantage by having higher online times, and being capable of having more manpower (for activities such as leveling or gaining experience). A common side effect from such cheating results in massive levels and/or massive loot.

[edit] Implementation of cheats

There are many facets of cheating in online games which make the creation of a system to stop cheating very difficult.

"Never trust the client" is a common maxim among multiplayer game developers that summarizes in their opinion the case of client-servers. It argues that programmers should assume that information sent to the client game will be known by that player, regardless of whether or not the player should know that information. For example, the server might tell a client in a First Person Shooter that a player is hiding behind a door and cannot be seen, but a wallhack cheat can reveal the player. Similarly, data from the client might indicate that the client teleported from one side of the map to another for some reason (possibly a change made to the game's data). The server is responsible for sending only the necessary information and for maintaining the game's continuity. (See "Efficiency versus security" below for the drawbacks.)

[edit] The game software

Many cheats in today's games are changes to the game software, although many game companies have policies which forbid the modification of such code. While the software (for most games) is distributed in binary-only versions and encrypted to make it harder, reverse engineering is always possible. Also many of the data files for the games can be edited without editing the main program and thereby circumvent protections in the software.

Wallhacks and maphacks often function by modifying the software. Other cheats can analyze or change the game's state in RAM, such as some aimbots and programs that give infinite ammo or health (often called trainers).

[edit] The hardware

Turning up the brightness on the monitor or using specific graphic cards with drivers that allows you to look through walls ("wallhack") are examples of using hardware tricks to get an advantage. These are frequently impossible to track with software, but they also have limited effect.

[edit] Packet tampering

Some cheats completely circumvent the protection of the software by running in real-time and changing the game data while in transmission from the server to the client. Many aimbots in first-person shooters use tricks like this. Some newer games encrypt the network data, but this uses up computer resources that could be used to make a faster-running or better game instead.

[edit] Preventing cheats

Game developers and third party software developers have created technologies that attempt to prevent players from cheating. Anti-cheating software is most commonly used in popular first person shooters such as Half-Life and its various mods or Quake. A few examples of anti-cheat software are GameGuard, PunkBuster, Cheating-Death, Valve Software's VAC ("Valve Anti-Cheat"), Argus Anti-Cheat, and RSVP First.

Some companies select to ban suspected cheaters from their servers. When this is done by blacklisting the game's serial key, the player is often effectively prevented from playing online the game they purchased. Blizzard Entertainment and Valve Software are known to have banned players, though the actual number of players is unknown. These companies also chose not to restrict these players to "cheating allowed" servers, even though it would be just as easy to implement, mirroring the dislike some took to cheating.

Sometimes the anti-cheating fervor leads to embarrassment, such as when Phil DeLuca, America's Army executive producer, drew parallels between cheating and Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, and threatened FBI and Secret Service involvement. [1]

It might not be financially wise for a company to fight "cheaters" in its games. Alternate characters are frequently banned in free games but they bring in revenue just like normal players in games that require subscription fees. Gamers have speculated that this is the reason why "two boxing" is not a bannable offense in major MMORPGs. Players are often less concerned about these circumstances because it might be debatable if the actions in question are a form of cheat.

It could be argued, however, that when a company does not take cheating seriously, they could very well be shortening the lifespan of their games. Some gamers have noted that recent games that have no serious anticheat are not high on their list of "games to purchase", while other games that do have some sort of anticheat system seem much more attractive. On the other hand, those that do cheat at these games might look at the situation the other way, and prefer games that have little to no anticheat system. Regardless of one's perspective, the stance a company takes on cheating could have a significant impact on whether one will decide to purchase a game or not. For this reason, a game company is left to consider the cost of working towards stopping cheating vs the cost of ignoring cheats.

[edit] Efficiency versus security

The more of the game code that is run on the server, the fewer cheats are generally possible in the game, as the server's operator has control over what happens. However, a game server has limited bandwidth and limited resources, which makes it necessary to distribute code to the clients. It's a tradeoff between lack of cheats and usability.

For example, a player is not supposed to know who is hiding behind a closed door. The server has to make a trade-off between calculating what the player can and cannot see. It can do this by sending only a part of the entire world state, which can result in client lag but makes wallhacks unlikely, or sending the player the entire world state, which is faster for the player but makes wallhacks more likely.

In Unreal Tournament, maps are divided into various zones. Zones are distinguished by separate rooms, different areas of interaction, etc. When a player is in one of these zones, only that zone info is rendered on the client side and sent through packets only pertaining to the zone. This prevents wall hacks as well as optimizes the maps for enhanced online gameplay.

[edit] Cheating in MMORPGs

While persistent world online games, such as MUDs and MMORPGs, are often subject to the same sorts of mechanical weaknesses to cheating as other online games, as often as not cheating in such games are social cheats, in the form of confidence games. Many of these confidence tricks are based on old-fashioned real-life tricks, or take advantage of the greed or inexperience of new players.

These scams often take the form of uneven trades or outright bad-faith dealing in trades of in-game items. Players will misrepresent the value of their goods to new players, substitute lookalike worthless items for valuable ones, offer to improve items (by crafting raw materials or enhancing equipment) and then just walk away with the item to be improved, or use one of any other con games.

Social engineering is often used to steal players' login information. Scammers will pose as the staff of the game, either in e-mail or in the game itself, and ask for the players' login information under any number of pretexts. Alternately, the scammer will offer cheating or automation services, or require that the player give their information as part of initiation into a (nonexistent) clan.

Another controversial issue in MMORPGs is farming, which involves acquisition of in-game money or items in order to sell it to users in exchange for real money. Farming can be done either by manual effort, or with external programs that effectively turn the player-character into a bot. Farming often affects in-game economies negatively, and as a result, most MMORPGs prohibit farming in their user agreements under the threat of account closure. This effecively puts farming under the category of cheating, though it is difficult to enforce due to the number of players and time investments required for an investigation.

In some games that have a claim system where only one group of people can fight a monster at a time, many types of exploits exist. Most of the time, the first person to take action against a monster in such a game holds the claim and until the monster goes unclaimed again (usually when the group fighting it dies, but not always), only the group can touch it. Programs exist that can claim a monster the moment it spawns. Other programs might involve using exploits to make a monster go unclaimed in the middle of battle so a different group can attempt to claim it or to directly change the claim to a different group. Games that involve such systems tend to breed a lot of discontent amongst rival groups, with accusations of monopolization and cheating being prevalent.

[edit] Alt-F4

One particularly long-lived scam is the "Alt-F4 scam." In this scam, the scammer tricks the victim into pressing Alt and F4 (the command to exit a program in Windows; similar scams have used Ctrl-W, the command to close a window in Windows along with many other window manages for other platforms, Ctrl-C, the command to interrupt a Telnet session, or Command-Q, the command to close a program in Mac OS). Another version of this scam is the F10 in Counter Strike. The person is told that F10 gives out an AWP. Another popular trick in Counter Strike and other Half-Life mods is the unbind all trick. In this trick the victim is told to type unbind_all in the console of the game to be rewarded with something such as unlimited ammo or extra money. The unbind_all command actually results in all controls being unbinded from their keys or buttons making it impossible for the player to shoot, move or even bring up the menu forcing them to quit the game or bind all the commands back in the console. A particularly crafty variant in EverQuest involved inducing players to type the ambiguous "/ex" command, instructing them that it displayed statistics related to experience points, when in reality this command was interpreted as an abbreviation of "exit" and immediately quit the game. [1] Sometimes the scammer tells the victim that this will duplicate a dropped item (which the scammer then picks up and absconds with), and sometimes this trick is just used to win in certain games unfairly in a PVP battle.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ The EverQuest Purity Test (2006-01-15). Retrieved on 2006-08-23.

[edit] External links

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