Cheating in online games: Encyclopedia II - Cheating in online games - Preventing Cheats

Cheating in online games - 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 PunkBuster, Cheating-Death, Valve Software's VAC ("Valve Anti-Cheat") and Argus Anti-Cheat.

Some companies elect 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. Multies 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.

Cheating in online games - 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, which is slow but wallhacks are unlikely, or sending the player the entire world state, which is fast but wallhacks are more likely.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Preventing Cheats", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki