Surprised At Cheaters

Wargfoot

In a game I was playing, one of the pillars of the community suddenly disappeared.
The "we cannot talk about it" song and dance from the GMs suggests the player was banned.

I ran around with maybe 4-5 people in this game and half of them have been banned for cheating.
They were really nice folks too.

I ran into that problem in other games - just a little taken back by how much cheating goes on.

Wargfoot

I think one thing that baffles me is why so many developers don't call out cheaters.
Why all the secrecy?

Angrakhan

Yeah I roll my eyes whenever someone says there's not much cheating going on in games and, of course, suggests the real issue is I need to "get gud" or whatever. Pretty sure we had an article a few days ago about 500,000 OW2 accounts banned for cheating. Does that sound like a few bad apples to you? That's enough people to populate 5 sizeable suburbs all cheating. It's a huge problem, and while I may need to "git gud" I can spot cheating behavior online. I'm not crazy or butt hurt someone beat me in a game.

Wargfoot

500,000 cheaters?

And people wonder why I'm not interested in the NFT/Blockchain/PlayToEarn/Whale nonsense.

Sovrath

Wargfoot said:

I think one thing that baffles me is why so many developers don't call out cheaters.
Why all the secrecy?

Maybe it can constitute harassment and they don’t want to be bothered with a lot of lawsuits.

As far as “how much “ cheating?

There are people who are very invested in looking like the best and cheating gives them that boost:

Elidien_ga

While I may "cheat" in single players (Contra for example), I have never done so in a multiplayer game. I game to have fun and not to be the best at it. This is one reason I do not play a lot of games where cheating greatly impacts game play like Overwatch or Fortnite. Its clearly evident and its just not worth my time. I know it happens in MMOS too especially and even had a friend banned from WOW due to using teleporting cheats. He said it was because the characters moved too slow - I told him welcome to MMOs.

Wargfoot

It was hard to hate the one cheater, she was using the cheats to beat up murder hobos.
Kind of the A-Team mindset - when the law just isn't cutting it.

She gave me probably close to a million gold pieces worth of stuff she'd looted off them.
I distributed most of it to others in need.

mikeb0817

I remember when I was a kid, and UO was just a year or two old. Loved that game. There were SO many game breaking exploits though. There were even websites (both free and paid) that focused on finding what broke with each new patch. Dr. Twister was one such site. They would post a small sample of bugs for free and then behind like a $10 paywall would be the juicy tips on how to Dupe items and gold, or steal something from inside someone's house through the walls... I'm searching my memory for the other website names and can't recall.. But there were quite a few. 

There was also the third party apps like UOExtreme that I used only as a defensive measure of protection against PKs. The early builds would allow you access to your bank box anywhere in the world, so when I was out killing Reapers with my heavy crossbow and saw the RED names and "Corp Por" pre-loading off screen - hit one button and frantically start emptying my loot and equipment into my bank box.. by the time they kill me easily over half my gear and loot was safe. God. What a rush .

I was a kid then, 13-14 I think. So much excitement back at the dawn of internet gaming. The possibilities seemed endless.

cameltosis

Cheating is an evolutionary successful behaviour - basically, if I can do something quicker or better than you by taking a shortcut, even if it's against some sort of rules, then I'll end up in a better place than you. It's ultimately a search for efficiency.

Now, that isn't me advocating for cheating, just an explanation as to why it is so widespread. Its kind of baked into our DNA to search for these shortcuts, and I think if we can then justify breaking the rules in our minds then we're more than willing to do it. sometimes the only justification needed is "i don't think i'll get caught".

For me in video games, I tend to justify cheating as being OK once I've already done something the "proper" way before, combined with not hurting anyone else. For example, playing survival games (single player), I'll play the game properly the first time through, grind everything out normally etc. But second time through, I'm more than happy using creative mode to build a base, rather than grind materials out again. Or using console commands to give myself specific mats, or spawn a specific enemy.

In multiplayer games, the only sorts of things I can think of that might constitute cheating are things like tanking a boss in a specific spot where he cant hit me properly, trivialising the fight. Again, I'll always make sure I've done the boss properly before, but if I have to grind the same boss out multiple times then I don't mind taking a shortcut on repeats.

Kyleran

Whoever said "winners never cheat and cheaters never win" was full of it.

I'll admit it, I've cheated in the past, buying gold from farmers to purchase a mount in WOW or some such convenience.

Never purchased power especially not to cheat in PVP where it directly impacted others game play.

I recall being sorely tempted to use radar hacks in early DAOC when it became obvious many others were using it, but fear of losing my accounts /characters kept me on the straight and narrow. 

Besides, I seem to get caught eventually.  When first playing EVE I bought some 3rd party ISK because I didn't really understand the PLEX system at the time. 

Thought I got away clean however about two or three years later CCP deducted a billion ISK from one of my three accounts. 

I couldn't contact support to ask about it, especially since they seemed to have overlooked the 2nd billion ISK I had purchased a few months later for my other account. 

Learned my lesson though, was pretty much the end of my 3rd party gold purchasing days mostly because after that I rarely stuck with any MMORPG besides EVE for more than a month or three.

Flash forward to ESO 10+ years later where Zenimax was all too happy to sell me in game currency, cosmetics, skyshard / class unlocks and even full housing estates.  Probably spent at least $500 in the 9 months I played ....such a great convenience.  

Yeah, no more of that crap either, I'm really done this time around...no really...

Elidien_ga

You reminded me @Kyleran that I did buy gold in DAOC at launch or soon after. My very first MMO and first time playing. I am not even sure why I did or what my goal was. I got caught and felt really bad. I never used the radar though even though I know a lot of guildmates did.

Quizzical

One perennial question is, how were they cheating?  Sometimes there is no-doubt cheating behavior, such as having some cheat program that was designed to cheat at a particular game running on your computer while playing that game.

But sometimes, there are also gray areas.  Is some trick to fighting against a particular boss the intended way for that boss to be defeated, or is it exploiting a glitch?  Sometimes there are blatant bugs that an innocent player can accidentally trigger, in which case, you can't necessarily tell if someone who uses the bug occasionally intended to cheat.

Some games really hurt themselves by having too many gray areas of cheating, which leads to either banning a lot of innocent players, leaving an impression that the game is overrun by cheaters, or both.  Any of those options severely harm a game's reputation.

olepi

I have never knowingly cheated in any computer game. Never used any radar cheats, never bought gold, never hacked, never used cheat codes. In NMS, some stranger once gave me billions in goods at the Anomaly, and I threw them away.

Well, I did cheat once. In 1977 I was a UNIX ARPANET sysadmin and I got the source code for Adventure over the net. Adventure was the forerunner of Zork I think. I do remember looking at the Fortran source to get a couple of keywords. Remember xyzzy? and plugh?

Just found this tidbit on the wiki for xyzzy: "Gmail supports the command XYZZY when connected via IMAP before logging in. It takes no arguments, and responds with "OK Nothing happens.""

LOL

edit: found this about the game: Colossal Cave Adventure (also known as Adventure or ADVENT) is a text-based adventure game, released in 1976 by developer Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe computer.

Anyone here remember the PDP-10? or DEC-10? I do. Sigh.

Kyleran

olepi said:

I have never knowingly cheated in any computer game. Never used any radar cheats, never bought gold, never hacked, never used cheat codes. In NMS, some stranger once gave me billions in goods at the Anomaly, and I threw them away.

What is it like to walk on water? 

Scot

My first computer the BBC B had a version of Colossal Cave (called Classic Adventure) it was one of the first games on my own computer I ever played and my first text adventure.

olepi

Scot said:

My first computer the BBC B had a version of Colossal Cave (called Classic Adventure) it was one of the first games on my own computer I ever played and my first text adventure.

Yes, that's the one. I must have gotten an early version in 1977. I remember reading all the descriptions in the source code so I wouldn't have to play the entire game to see it all. So yes, I cheated

Wargfoot

I've not cheated, but I've knowingly used exploits (1):

1: I used an exploit in UO where a horse could be parked on one side of the wall, and all the creatures in the room would aggro to it, but couldn't get to it.  This kept all the mobs busy while I could cherry pick the one mob in the room I needed.

2: In FO there was a legendary spawn that wouldn't attack you, provided you played it right.  I farmed the hell out of that thing without being attacked.  I reported this bug, but made sure to get while the getting was good. 

3: In FO I found an absolutely devastating duplication bug and reported it.  I didn't abuse it though.m
















Notes:
1: pO-TAY-tO

Angrakhan

I'm pretty sure the 500k bans on OW2 were from aimbot/wallhack cheats. With competitive shooters it's always the same which is why I gave up on playing them. Honestly the wall hacks are the bigger concern. While an old fart like me would benefit from an aimbot because of reaction times I've watched my 15 year old son play shooters and I'm not sure an aimbot would help him much. He's pretty good without one. I've watched him drop 4-6 guys in a row like it's nothing just showing off some gun he unlocked to me.

 However being able to see your enemies through walls all the way across the map is a pretty huge tactical advantage. I've seen scores in Destiny 2 matches where the top scoring guy literally had to kill the entire other team numerous times over to achieve his score. It's so bad he's starving his own teammates of kills because they can barely hit double digits while he's got 52 kills in a single match. Even if you were a pro level gamer with precision aiming skills, how could you amount that many kills without having some way to also know at all times where the opponents are? There's just not enough time in a 10-minute game to find that many people much less kill them otherwise.  His kill per minute rate is greater than 10. Every 6 seconds he's getting a kill for the whole match on average. It boggles the mind.

It's pretty easy to search up aimbots in shooters on YouTube because people literally offer them for sale. Just better hope they aren't bundling a keylogger in there to scrape your account credentials while you're cheating. Nevermind getting banned that seems like a big concern. Not like aimbot vendors have ethics, you know?

I have no idea what people do in MMOs. Only story's I've heard is where someone gets a hold of the admin client and credentials and can insta-kill raid bosses and take the loot. Stuff like that but they always seem to get busted because they have to brag about their fancy gear and people ask questions.

Elidien_ga

Teleporters were common back in vanilla WOW as I mentioned earlier but there were a lot of hacks with bots and players somehow gathering resources from under the map.

Bots in ESO were fun as you could find them in certain zones and they would have paths where they would gather and move and gather and move. I loved watching them and I would get right in front of them and gather the resources instead. They would be forced to stand there and look stupid for 5-10 seconds since I beat them to it. I would report them too of course.

Sovrath

I remember being in a dungeon in Lord of the Rings online where there was an exploit where an encounter could be repeated so that the entire party could get a specific drop. 

The group leader gave us a choice with the disclaimer that they might not be able to run the encounter for everyone if we chose to repeat it. We chose the exploit.

Since then I have cemented my opinion that it was the right thing to do.

Otherwise the only cheating I’ve done are after I’ve played through an Elder Scrolls game I sometimes give myself a specific set of armor from the outset. Especially if it’s a player mod.

Quizzical

Angrakhan said:

I'm pretty sure the 500k bans on OW2 were from aimbot/wallhack cheats. With competitive shooters it's always the same which is why I gave up on playing them.

Wallhack is bad coding.  For it to be universal to the genre is disgusting.

There is an old saying about online games that you should never trust the client because the client is in the hands of the enemy.  It came from some developer at least 20 years ago, though I don't recall who.  In context, he was probably saying not to trust the client saying this is where I am, this is what my character has, and so forth.

But it applies just as well to not trusting the client to not display information to the player until it should.  If the client shouldn't be able to see another player on the screen because there is a wall in the way or the player is facing the wrong way or whatever, then the server shouldn't tell the client where the other player is.  Without that, there could be no wallhack.

Yes, yes, line of sight is hard, and telling what is visible is hard.  But computers are massively more powerful than they were 30 years ago, so today's servers should be able to handle it.  Have FPS games not updated their code at all in that time?  Even being slightly wrong so that a wallhack lets you see a player who should be barely around a corner wouldn't be nearly as bad as a wallhack that lets you see straight through the middle of a solid wall.

And yes, this would mean that you sometimes have a delay of 100 ms after a player should be visible before he appears.  But is that really worse than having a game completely ruined by cheaters?  If you know that you're creating a competitive, online FPS, you should anticipate that players will try to cheat and write your code to stop them from doing so.

Scot

Wargfoot said:

I've not cheated, but I've knowingly used exploits (1):

1: I used an exploit in UO where a horse could be parked on one side of the wall, and all the creatures in the room would aggro to it, but couldn't get to it.  This kept all the mobs busy while I could cherry pick the one mob in the room I needed.

2: In FO there was a legendary spawn that wouldn't attack you, provided you played it right.  I farmed the hell out of that thing without being attacked.  I reported this bug, but made sure to get while the getting was good. 

3: In FO I found an absolutely devastating duplication bug and reported it.  I didn't abuse it though.m


Notes:
1: pO-TAY-tO

Good to see you know how to pronounce potato.

tclupis

Wargfoot said:

In a game I was playing, one of the pillars of the community suddenly disappeared.
The "we cannot talk about it" song and dance from the GMs suggests the player was banned.

I ran around with maybe 4-5 people in this game and half of them have been banned for cheating.
They were really nice folks too.

I ran into that problem in other games - just a little taken back by how much cheating goes on.

Interesting, I remember reading several posts by you about how you weren't going to play FO anymore because the devs lied and made it P2W. I quit that game at the same time for the same reasons, and seriously those devs are nothing but a cash grab as you yourself argued a few months back. It's a shame and interesting you weren't able to stay away, I noticed you didn't say the same of the game in your original post as well. Were talking about fractured online. 

Good luck with no fractured base to look up you Imbues.

Well on the positive side of things every single day the player count drops!

300 daily players 2 weeks ago. 110 now during free playtime.

Still no endgame content. Still dishonest devs. Still crap. It's a shame and sham.

tclupis

tclupis said:

Wargfoot said:

In a game I was playing, one of the pillars of the community suddenly disappeared.
The "we cannot talk about it" song and dance from the GMs suggests the player was banned.

I ran around with maybe 4-5 people in this game and half of them have been banned for cheating.
They were really nice folks too.

I ran into that problem in other games - just a little taken back by how much cheating goes on.

Interesting, I remember reading several posts by you about how you weren't going to play FO anymore because the devs lied and made it P2W. I quit that game at the same time for the same reasons, and seriously those devs are nothing but a cash grab as you yourself argued a few months back. It's a shame and interesting you weren't able to stay away, I noticed you didn't say the same of the game in your original post as well. Were talking about fractured online. 

Good luck with no fractured base to look up you Imbues.

Well on the positive side of things every single day the player count drops!

300 daily players 2 weeks ago. 110 now during free playtime.

Still no endgame content. Still dishonest devs. Still crap. It's a shame and sham.

Quick note. Are you supprised that a player "cheated" after the amount of time that individual put into the game for free?

 He might as well been a paid employee. When they stabbed them in the back. 

They're not buying in game gold with real money (P2W sanctioned cheating), might as well still try and keep up with the Wales cheating for free. Don't blame the player one bit

Wargfoot

tclupis said:

Wargfoot said:

In a game I was playing, one of the pillars of the community suddenly disappeared.
The "we cannot talk about it" song and dance from the GMs suggests the player was banned.

I ran around with maybe 4-5 people in this game and half of them have been banned for cheating.
They were really nice folks too.

I ran into that problem in other games - just a little taken back by how much cheating goes on.

Interesting, I remember reading several posts by you about how you weren't going to play FO anymore because the devs lied and made it P2W. I quit that game at the same time for the same reasons, and seriously those devs are nothing but a cash grab as you yourself argued a few months back. It's a shame and interesting you weren't able to stay away, I noticed you didn't say the same of the game in your original post as well. Were talking about fractured online. 

Good luck with no fractured base to look up you Imbues.

Well on the positive side of things every single day the player count drops!

300 daily players 2 weeks ago. 110 now during free playtime.

Still no endgame content. Still dishonest devs. Still crap. It's a shame and sham.

I feel like you're kind of gunning for me here a little bit.
I've been pretty up front and consistent, I feel, but maybe I didn't come across that way.

I've not played FO since the release - and I intentionally put off trying it again until at least Oct 1st - in large part because I don't think it will last until then.  The player numbers are dropping off as everyone on the sidelines predicted.  The developers continue to focus on elements of the game for which I've no interest.

I'm looking at maybe testing Star Reach, but really have my eye on Light No Fire.
I think Fractured Online is toast - I hate saying that, but I see nothing there that inspires confidence.

Wargfoot

tclupis said:

tclupis said:

Wargfoot said:

In a game I was playing, one of the pillars of the community suddenly disappeared.
The "we cannot talk about it" song and dance from the GMs suggests the player was banned.

I ran around with maybe 4-5 people in this game and half of them have been banned for cheating.
They were really nice folks too.

I ran into that problem in other games - just a little taken back by how much cheating goes on.

Interesting, I remember reading several posts by you about how you weren't going to play FO anymore because the devs lied and made it P2W. I quit that game at the same time for the same reasons, and seriously those devs are nothing but a cash grab as you yourself argued a few months back. It's a shame and interesting you weren't able to stay away, I noticed you didn't say the same of the game in your original post as well. Were talking about fractured online. 

Good luck with no fractured base to look up you Imbues.

Well on the positive side of things every single day the player count drops!

300 daily players 2 weeks ago. 110 now during free playtime.

Still no endgame content. Still dishonest devs. Still crap. It's a shame and sham.

Quick note. Are you supprised that a player "cheated" after the amount of time that individual put into the game for free?

 He might as well been a paid employee. When they stabbed them in the back. 

They're not buying in game gold with real money (P2W sanctioned cheating), might as well still try and keep up with the Wales cheating for free. Don't blame the player one bit

I don't if the player cheated, but the way developers are acting, I'd put money on it.
I happened to like that player a great deal - but da rules are da rules.

I hope he finds a game he loves and has tons of fun.

No worries.