5 ms·

I appreciate the comments from cheaters at the end. I run an online game, and the last one sounds like the majority of emails I get when I ban someone, although

I appreciate the comments from cheaters at the end. I run an online game, and the last one sounds like the majority of emails I get when I ban someone, although the people I ban are less articulate. Banning paying players is the worst. I wish there was a nice happy solution to the problem of cheaters, but I don't know of one.

5h 15y ago
ban them for an exponentially increasing time period? as long as they are clearly notified "you have been banned for 3 months, cheat again it will be 9" it'd do the same job surely?
- chrisacky 15y ago
  If only that were the case. [1] Judge says: "If you commit another crime or are found in violation of your parole you will go to prison for X months longer". It's a simple analogy that ignores a lot of extrinsic issues, but punishment isn't always a sufficient deterrent.
  - 5h 15y ago
    We're talking about being banned from connecting to servers to play a modification for a computer game here, it's a situation that just is simpler than "real life", it is nothing to do with providing a deterrent, if they are banned from connecting they cant cheat in a way that matters.
robert00700 15y ago
>I wish there was a nice happy solution to the problem of cheaters, but I don't know of one. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/The_Corn_Field http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/The_Corn_Field I recall bad avatars back in Second Life were once sent to a virtual corn field for a few weeks to reflect on their actions!
bonyt 15y ago
I've always wondered what would happen if you just let them cheat, but in a designated area - In effect, regulating it instead of banning it.
- icebraining 15y ago
  That already happens in games like CoD4, where you have plenty of servers with Punkbuster turned off, but they still cheat on the other servers. The problem is that cheating is more fun when you're the only in the server, since (from my experience) cheaters are looking for attention - either by annoying others or by getting top score. So a "cheating allowed zone" is by definition a boring place for cheaters.
simonsarris 15y ago
> I wish there was a nice happy solution to the problem of cheaters, but I don't know of one. In DOTA2 and Starcraft 2 cheaters (and in DOTA, griefers/feeders[1]) are put into their own secret matchmaking queue to be matched up only with other cheaters. I thought that was a rather clever solution. [1] someone who, possibly out of frustration, intentionally dies to the enemy team, giving them gold
- viraptor 15y ago
  That would work well... if you can guarantee no misclassification at all. Once it starts to rely on opinions, it's completely flawed. How do you judge if someone dies intentionally or not? There's always going to be a grey area. Now imagine you have a false positive and start matching someone who paid for their online gaming with cheaters all the time.
  - pavel_lishin 15y ago
    Not sure about DOTA, but in League of Legends, players can be reported, and a team reviews the complaints for any given player, including watching the games. Sometimes it's hard to tell - I've had bad days where I'm just dying all the time because I just levelled up and am playing against harder people AND having a bad day, so I keep dying - but usually, it's really, really blatant.
- tudorw 15y ago
  It's come up on my most recent project, a 'bad kids' playground, don't even tell them they are being sent there, just silently transfer them, if they still misbehave, then into a world of AI players for them to abuse...
- endianswap 15y ago
  Sorry to be "that guy" but do you have a source for StarCraft II putting cheaters in a special queue? I was pretty sure they were just banned from the service...
mjn 15y ago
It's not a videogame, but SomethingAwful's solution to banning paying members is to let them re-register with a new-account fee, so they can in effect stay if they pay a $10 fine. Particularly egregious or persistent troublemakers can get "permabanned", though. I think I'm more sympathetic to people trying out hacks out of curiosity, especially if they're not trying to cheat their way to tournament money or something like that; but I can see that it causes an overall problem if it becomes widespread. One question that sometimes comes up is whether it makes sense for game companies to be zero-tolerance about cheating tools, analogously to how possessing burglary tools is illegal in some jurisdictions. What if you really do use them in a "legit" fashion, such as only on servers where the server admin allows them? If it's explicitly a have-fun-with-hacks-here-all-you-want playground, or a server set up to allow bots to play against each other as part of AI research, then it's not really "cheating", is it? Yet people have gotten centrally banned for that sort of thing due to cheat-detection code inserted into the server by the game's creator. I've been reading this book lately, so the idea of how cheating is defined, and who gets to define it (e.g. game creator vs. server owner vs. community norms) is on my mind a bit: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262513285/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=kmjn-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0262513285 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262513285/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
- skymt 15y ago
  In my experience, games with anti-cheating code allow the server admin to turn it on and off at will. Games using PunkBuster or VAC often have a column in the server browser showing whether cheat prevention is enabled. Of course that's not a solution for games that only support peer-to-peer matches.
- lobotryas 15y ago
  >What if you really do use them in a "legit" fashion, such as only on servers where the server admin allows them? That would depend on the type of game. The above would be OK in a game like CounterStrike where nothing persists between servers. The above should be bannable in games like TF2 where using cheats in an "all cheats" sever could allow a person to get items or achievements that could then be used in games eithout cheats. Context is key. My biggest surprise is why games have never tried an "official" cheat mode that could be used exactly like you describe.

5h 15y ago

ban them for an exponentially increasing time period? as long as they are clearly notified "you have been banned for 3 months, cheat again it will be 9" it'd do the same job surely?

chrisacky 15y ago
If only that were the case. [1] Judge says: "If you commit another crime or are found in violation of your parole you will go to prison for X months longer". It's a simple analogy that ignores a lot of extrinsic issues, but punishment isn't always a sufficient deterrent.
- 5h 15y ago
  We're talking about being banned from connecting to servers to play a modification for a computer game here, it's a situation that just is simpler than "real life", it is nothing to do with providing a deterrent, if they are banned from connecting they cant cheat in a way that matters.

robert00700 15y ago

>I wish there was a nice happy solution to the problem of cheaters, but I don't know of one. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/The_Corn_Field http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/The_Corn_Field I recall bad avatars back in Second Life were once sent to a virtual corn field for a few weeks to reflect on their actions!

bonyt 15y ago

I've always wondered what would happen if you just let them cheat, but in a designated area - In effect, regulating it instead of banning it.

icebraining 15y ago
That already happens in games like CoD4, where you have plenty of servers with Punkbuster turned off, but they still cheat on the other servers. The problem is that cheating is more fun when you're the only in the server, since (from my experience) cheaters are looking for attention - either by annoying others or by getting top score. So a "cheating allowed zone" is by definition a boring place for cheaters.

simonsarris 15y ago

> I wish there was a nice happy solution to the problem of cheaters, but I don't know of one. In DOTA2 and Starcraft 2 cheaters (and in DOTA, griefers/feeders[1]) are put into their own secret matchmaking queue to be matched up only with other cheaters. I thought that was a rather clever solution. [1] someone who, possibly out of frustration, intentionally dies to the enemy team, giving them gold

viraptor 15y ago
That would work well... if you can guarantee no misclassification at all. Once it starts to rely on opinions, it's completely flawed. How do you judge if someone dies intentionally or not? There's always going to be a grey area. Now imagine you have a false positive and start matching someone who paid for their online gaming with cheaters all the time.
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  Not sure about DOTA, but in League of Legends, players can be reported, and a team reviews the complaints for any given player, including watching the games. Sometimes it's hard to tell - I've had bad days where I'm just dying all the time because I just levelled up and am playing against harder people AND having a bad day, so I keep dying - but usually, it's really, really blatant.
tudorw 15y ago
It's come up on my most recent project, a 'bad kids' playground, don't even tell them they are being sent there, just silently transfer them, if they still misbehave, then into a world of AI players for them to abuse...
endianswap 15y ago
Sorry to be "that guy" but do you have a source for StarCraft II putting cheaters in a special queue? I was pretty sure they were just banned from the service...

mjn 15y ago

It's not a videogame, but SomethingAwful's solution to banning paying members is to let them re-register with a new-account fee, so they can in effect stay if they pay a $10 fine. Particularly egregious or persistent troublemakers can get "permabanned", though. I think I'm more sympathetic to people trying out hacks out of curiosity, especially if they're not trying to cheat their way to tournament money or something like that; but I can see that it causes an overall problem if it becomes widespread. One question that sometimes comes up is whether it makes sense for game companies to be zero-tolerance about cheating tools, analogously to how possessing burglary tools is illegal in some jurisdictions. What if you really do use them in a "legit" fashion, such as only on servers where the server admin allows them? If it's explicitly a have-fun-with-hacks-here-all-you-want playground, or a server set up to allow bots to play against each other as part of AI research, then it's not really "cheating", is it? Yet people have gotten centrally banned for that sort of thing due to cheat-detection code inserted into the server by the game's creator. I've been reading this book lately, so the idea of how cheating is defined, and who gets to define it (e.g. game creator vs. server owner vs. community norms) is on my mind a bit: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262513285/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=kmjn-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0262513285 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262513285/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

skymt 15y ago
In my experience, games with anti-cheating code allow the server admin to turn it on and off at will. Games using PunkBuster or VAC often have a column in the server browser showing whether cheat prevention is enabled. Of course that's not a solution for games that only support peer-to-peer matches.
lobotryas 15y ago
>What if you really do use them in a "legit" fashion, such as only on servers where the server admin allows them? That would depend on the type of game. The above would be OK in a game like CounterStrike where nothing persists between servers. The above should be bannable in games like TF2 where using cheats in an "all cheats" sever could allow a person to get items or achievements that could then be used in games eithout cheats. Context is key. My biggest surprise is why games have never tried an "official" cheat mode that could be used exactly like you describe.