Cheaters in Garry's Mod
garry.tv
garry.tv
My perspective on why this is fantastic from being a game hosting company is that GMod servers were a bitch to maintain. They definitely took up 80% of my time in maintaince despite only being a small portion of all the games I hosted. The reason was to do with all of the cheaters who would nuke the server by spawning a ridiculous amount of resources and overwhelming the server with assets which the physics environment just could not handle.
The owners of the server would be angry at the cheaters and would also be angry at my company due to the quality of service. Often, these hackers would play on empty servers as well, which you might think is a victimless crime... but it could actually have a knock on effect to other servers on the same box.
Banning hackers in Gmod is a fantastic means to maintaining the quality and enjoyment of the game for other people. I would have loved to have seen this 3 years ago.
(Also if someone knows, how many active GMod servers are there currently running? Professional curiosity).
If I remember correctly, the error was "Unable to shade polygon normals".
EDIT: Corrected error message.
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.
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?...
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.
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
Now imagine you have a false positive and start matching someone who paid for their online gaming with cheaters all the time.
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.
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!
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?
[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.
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.
> “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
How dare you take away my ability to make everybody else's life miserable!
Policing online services is hard.
In three pages I only saw one reply which could be construed as "unprofessional", where the moderator said "this is my favourite..."
They all seem quite straight, to the point, and courteous. Well, as courteous as one can be when telling somebody they're not welcome in your community.
But I can't stop being bothered every time I see a ban for hacking the avatar to make it a weird color. Why is this so offensive to them?
I don't know why people change colors on their avatars, either. It seems such a pointless thing to risk an account ban for.
I can't speak for the arrogance. You can imagine dealing with customers who have, um, a flexible relationship with the concept of being honest.
Also, are these guys being banned from using GMod in any capacity, on creative servers, or on servers with specific game modes?
Once you’re detected and you’re on the list then you’re banned from all servers (unless they remove the cheaters.cfg - which is up to them).