Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other | Hacker News Reader

Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other

arstechnica.com

227 pointsevo_9115 comments

> we're a bit intrigued by the potential for the "Cheaters Pool" to evolve into a new mode of play that some players might actually prefer.

Unregulated cheats and hacks led a friend and I to inadvertently invent a proto-minecraft over a decade ago.

Around 1998, I was playing Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight when I started to experience cheats and hacks. Someone taught me how to do it, which was incredibly easy (each weapon file was a text file with variables you could change: projectile=bullet, damage=5, speed=3). Simply replacing the file client side would change the behavior.

When playing around with the projectile=[id] with some ids I found while map making, a friend and I discovered we could modify all of our weapons to shoot out various world objects such as bridges, platforms, doors, etc. We started playing the game almost exclusively this way for quite awhile, going off to separate corners of a map, building things, then comparing our structures.

So, I have to say, great idea on the quarantine, Rockstar!

Hahaha...that's great, Jedi Knight was my first real exposure to programming. Great times trying to make more and more sophisticated modifications of the game files...either legitly (custom levels, mods) and to use in unsuspecting multiplayer games on MSN Gaming Zone. I remember some members of the modding community ending up becoming serious level designers or game developers.

You could actually make more complicated hacks by making deeper modifications to the weapon/force power scripts. The game had a simple checksum on the client-side script files where it did a rudimentary count on the number of statements (method argument: one statement, pair of parentheses: one statement), and if you had a count identical to the server file, the rest of the contents of your script didn't matter. So you could basically do a lot of stuff as long as you were careful to keep the script file statement count intact: Change the properties of the levels or surfaces, give yourself all sorts of superpowers, freeze or insta-kill opponents, teleport yourself or others, etc etc etc. The scripting language was somewhat C-like and carried over pretty easily to more traditional programming.

> I remember some members of the modding community ending up becoming serious level designers or game developers.

I was one of them. COG scripting was my intro to game modding. I'd been writing small games until that point, but COG made the game a platform to develop for and that was different to anything I'd seen before.

Did you ever hang out on Massassi? I still frequent it, it's always fun to hear people talking about JK and find out that you knew them 10 years ago...

I was hanging out at Massassi at one point, username Gandalf the Gray. Was a period of maybe 2 years around 2000 I was reasonably active. Was probably around 15 at the time.

Ahahahah... I totally remember you. Happydud here. :)

Haha, that's awesome :D

I lurked for a while but never posted there.

I know you now dud.

> Jedi Knight was my first real exposure to programming.

Yeah, I was in middle school at the time.

I think between hacking that game, HTML on angelfire, and the TI-83 calculator, my trajectory for life was set.

I was playing that game (Trandoshan FTW!) around the same time and was always playing clean. However I kept winning matches because I found a good tactic (stick two time-delayed rockets in their back, then send a third to detonate all three on impact -> kills anyone with full health and shields with "one" hit) and was repeatedly tossed from servers for "cheating." Eventually I quit playing because everyone was so paranoid about booting cheaters and I couldn't play two matches without an interruption.

I think the cheater's pool is a great idea though. It should be amusing at the least.

I made blaster rifles that shot destructions, but never realized you could shoot map features. That sounds like the potential for interesting fps: remake the map as you go.

The Cube 2 FPS is designed exactly for that: real-time in-game map editing. It's also FOSS and multi-platform.

http://sauerbraten.org/

There's a TF2 mod that is kinda like that.

You start the game, and have 2 minutes to create defenses. After that, it's a normal game of CTF.

I forget what it's called though.

The game mode is called Fort Wars.

Source: http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/FortWars

Someone should do a mod of that, based on characters from the old A-Team TV show, complete with the original theme music. The "build defenses" interval would be like the build weapons montage.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/TheATeam?from=M...

In 1999 the Wheel Of Time game with it's Citadel mode was an early example of this. The original design was much more open-ended -- production realities meant that the end result was CTF with a 2 minute period at the start to setup traps in your home base.

See: http://www.worch.com/portfolio/wot/ for a description of the planned vs implemented Citadel mode.

It's a shame the Wheel of Time game didn't become more popular. Even with the limited implementation of the Citadel mode, I still haven't seen anything like the combination of strategy and FPS action that you get when duelling. Tremulous comes pretty close when it comes to strategy when building stuff in team matches, though.

Shooting + digging = World War One

I remember the old days of Counterstrike and the infamous "myg0t" clan who would enter CS servers and use things like wallhacks and aimbots as well as excessive deliberate teamkilling.

After they had got themselves banned from just about every server out there they launched their own "anything goes" server which could be actually be a fun experience to play on.

Another interesting thing I remember from the CS days was that me and my friends used to play the game a lot which meant that we were much more skilled than the average player. The result of this was that admins would often accuse us of cheating (we weren't) simply because our kill/death ratio was so much better than anybody elses (I used to have screenshots of myself with 40/2 kill/death ratio on public servers using pistols only).

Of course this made us pissed at the time since we kept getting banned from servers, but now I think about it where they so unjustified in doing this? Having a massive advantage over the average player whether it comes from skills or cheats still has the same affect of reducing the enjoyment of the game for average players & newbies. It's almost like having an olympic athletic squad turn up to the local school sports day and dominate every trophy.

Since I don't have as much time or interest in games as I used to when I was a teenager I tend to avoid online play in many games because the experience is generally just getting curb stomped over and over again by more experienced/obsessive players and sometimes in team based RTS games I get kicked from a team because "I don't team with noobs".

Another thing I don't understand about this is how invincibility cheats would work, I can understand things like aimbots / wallhacks because they are using information that has been pushed to the client but surely the game server should never allow something like the number of health points to be authoritative on the client end?

At some point you have to trust the client. Invincibility cheats can be as simple as the client updating its position the moment it knows there is a projectile traveling towards it, or the moment another player is turned to face them they duck.

For Counter Strike: Source for example the server sends the location, and way that a user is pointing to the client. With some calculations you can then draw a line from the other players to where their bullets would go if they fired. Using that knowledge you can find where your hitboxes are and simply make sure that you are never in the path of their line of sight!

That is how wallhacks work as well, the client knows where the other players are so that sound can be properly calculated (so if they are further away and they fire their gun you hear less of a shooting sound and you hear a louder sound when they are closer).

Healthpoints are generally stored server side (at least for the games I've been RE'ing for fun lately), but even then you can cheat, if you have portable med kits you can take at any time, as soon as you drop below a certain percentage you take one, now hack the client to have unlimited health kits and you are set. Keeping everything and all variables on the server is impossible, mainly due to lag the game would become unplayable, and due to having so many variables to calculate there is always something you have to trust the client with (position being the biggest one, you can't take all user input, send it to the server, and then send back where the character should now be).

The faster internet connections become the more feasible it is to have a client that just renders the result and have all of the computations done on a remote server somewhere. Kinda like RDP for games. But until the game companies then also put the servers close enough by the user and build the game experience to equalise between different ping times (something CS:S attempts to do but fails at quite well, thus allowing people with AWP's to kill people that are not even near where they were scoping due to timing delays) it is going to be a huge mess and gamers will hate it.

>Keeping everything and all variables on the server is impossible, mainly due to lag the game would become unplayable, and due to having so many variables to calculate there is always something you have to trust the client with (position being the biggest one, you can't take all user input, send it to the server, and then send back where the character should now be).

Why not just take the user input from the client, and send it both to the model of the world on the server, and also to a non-authoritative model of the world on the client? The client is then immediately responsive, as the client model of the world is what is rendered, but if the model of the world on the client diverges from the model of the world on the server, the server overrules it.

This would ensure the client did not violate position rules, while still keeping it responsive, at the cost of an occasional noticable update when models get too far out of synch.

As far as I know many games have done this, since Quakeworld. I might be wrong, my knowledge is a little rusty?

Other issues remain that this doesn't solve (e.g. aimbot).

EDIT - Here's a wiki article this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-side_prediction which links to this article describing client side prediction in Half Life (so you can presume there is something at least as sophisticated in Source): http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/courses/4513-B03/papers/game...

The approach you have suggested is actually very similar to what is used in the THQ game "Supreme Commander". In this case they use a fairly P2P architecture and have clients exchange hashes of the game graph every so often and check that they match.

The problem with this is that the game needs to be fully deterministic and you'd be surprised how many games use random numbers to help determine outcomes like damage etc.

This can also cause problems when you have complex physics models, many physics engines are not deterministic and small changes between the ways that different CPUs deal with floating point numbers can cause the game to generate a completely different hash.

As gms7777 points out, for the RNG, surely you can just share seeds?

Your comment about the differences in how CPUs deal with floats is very interesting.

I found the following interesting comment, from a GPG employee, talking about how they take care to ensure their float math is deterministic:

"I work at Gas Powered Games and i can tell you first hand that floating point math is deterministic. You just need the same instruction set and compiler and of course the user's processor adhears to the IEEE754 standard, which includes all of our PC and 360 customers. The engine that runs DemiGod, Supreme Commander 1 and 2 rely upon the IEEE754 standard. Not to mention probably all other RTS peer to peer games in the market. As soon as you have a peer to peer network game where each client broadcasts what command they are doing on what 'tick' number and rely on the client computer to figure out the simulation/physical details your going to rely on the determinism of the floating point processor."

http://www.box2d.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1800#p164...

Interesting link, feral.

For anyone else reading, I'd also suggest reading some of the followup posts such as this one: http://www.box2d.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1800&...

> floating point math is deterministic.

This is news? Isn't this the entire point of the IEEE754 standard, to save us from the days when programs that were well-conditioned on a VAX would become numerically unstable on a Cray?

'Cray instability' sounds like a Star Trek episode but it is apparently something that could happen.

http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/c/crayinstability.html

Depends on compiler options. x86 floating point is 80-bit internally, but 64-bit in memory. Compile the same function with different optimization, for a different CPU, or whatever and get different answers. For gcc, the answer is to use -ffloat-store. But you have to remember to use it.

It seems as though the problem with determinism could be solved with random number seeding. If the server generates seeds, the two could stay synced even with random numbers.

The physics engine is a bit more difficult hurdle I suppose.

> At some point you have to trust the client.

I'm not convinced of this, and the general trend of every online game that cares about cheating since at least QuakeWorld (1996) is moving in the direction of not trusting the client for important things.

> Keeping everything and all variables on the server is impossible

True, but you can get quite far by only giving the client the information they're supposed to have. Wallhacks were originally possible in Quake because pre-QW, the client received the position of every player on the map.

The strongest way to prevent wallhacks is to only tell the client about other players they should be able to see. The id and valve engines do this, for the most part. Again, quakeworld in 1996 severely curtailed wallhacking by only showing the users players that were visible, or "almost visible", i.e. near corners.

Your example of infinite health packs is something that could be trivially tracked on the server side and is, even for games as big as WoW. WoW tracks the current inventory of every single player in game. You can tell because sometimes when there are server glitches, you're unable to pick up loot from dead monsters.

The reason that the client may need to know about other players locations when they are not visible is sound.

You can hear somebody moving on the other side of the wall to you and for the sound to be realistic it needs to be played at the correct volume level determined by distance etc.

This isn't a big issue in some games , because you can just make peoples movements silent (of course there is still weapon sounds). However other games (like CS) have a stealth element where you need to make a tradeoff between moving quickly and noisily or slowly and silently so the sound is a big part of that.

Sound sources can be anonymized, though. If the source of a given sound is on the other side of a wall, the player can't see who it is, and the client doesn't need to know.

I'd go so far as to not even notify the client about sounds that are too quiet and far away for the player to be able to hear in the first place. Calculating echoes on the server and having the client treat them as separate "original" sound sources should also help somewhat.

Even if you don't know who it is, knowing that someone is around the other side of the wall is a huge advantage in an FPS game. Also players tend to have their teammates displayed on a map, so the cheat program could take this into account and mark as friend or foe.

Pushing this info to the client early also allows the program to make sure all the required assets are loaded into memory before it has to be rendered.

You could stream sound from the server, but latency might be an issue.

It's an interesting point about updating movement automatically to avoid a bullet. I did consider this possibility before, however I assumed that this would not give you full invincibility because if you are standing in an area and bullets are being fired all around you it may not be possible to move to a position where there is not an incoming bullet in time. Although even with this you could still gain a significant advantage.

Also a lot of older games would mainly use a hitscan model for bullet collision detection. The projectile itself was not modelled, instead there was a ray intersection test done at the time the bullet was fired so there was no "movement" for the bullet so to speak. Do most modern games now use a physics engine to simulate every bullet instead?

  > Do most modern games now use a physics engine to
  > simulate every bullet instead?

It might depend on the game, but as the parent suggested, the cheat could just avoid 'line-of-sight' with the barrels of the opponents guns, though those movements might become more obviously mechanical to other players.

The only 'games' I'm aware of that do are the ArmA series (the first Operation Flashpoint included). As to whether or not they're strictly games (or a set of missions and set pieces set within a military simulator) is another question.

>if you are standing in an area and bullets are being fired all around you it may not be possible to move to a position where there is not an incoming bullet in time. A really good program would then be able to recreate Gun Fu from Equilibrium, or Neo and Agent Smith.

Keep in mind there's another balanced approach: trust the client instantaneously and back-check the game asynchronously. Record replays of every game and re-simulate them using trusted client and server, and note any discrepancies.

Then, one could even have a limited set of extremely beefy full-game simulation machines that run in lockstep against a certain sampling of active game sessions (like 10%), banning a large enough subset of cheaters in real-time to ensure player confidence in the game's anti-cheating system.

I think some recent AAA titles work this way, although I'm not 100% positive as I have no insight into the server end of their systems (and what I observe as automated asynchronous cheating detection could be a vast number of human observers as well).

That only prevents impossible actions, like teleporting or such, but that's already not feasible with most games, since the server double-checks those. The hard thing is knowing whether a certain sequence of actions was done by a player or by an All-Knowing cheat doing it for them.

Another option is to send false information to a client. So someone using a wall hack might see 7 people on the other side of the door and or players only get shown in their correct location when it's possible for someone to actually interact with them.

You can't really do that in many FPSs nowadays because you can interact with others even without seeing them; for example on Call of Duty 4 (2007), you can shoot and hit people through most opaque walls, and you get feedback from hits. So if the server were to put fake players behind walls or doors and a player just happened to shoot it, the game would provide false feedback.

  > Keeping everything and all variables on the server is impossible [...]
  > Kinda like RDP for games.

Are you familiar with OnLive?

http://www.onlive.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive

Yes, and I have used it, and the user experience for fast/twitchy games is absolutely shit.

I as a former not so good CS player can perfectly confirm that being at the recieving end of a i-shoot-better-with-pistols-than-anyone-else-with-sniper-rifles guy is frustrating. Back than i tried to avoid serers with to much of those guys.

A lot of it was not just shooting skill. Most new players tended to make a lot of the same predictable mistakes, for example standing close together in big groups at the same chokepoints in the map each time so that they could all be blinded by a flashbang. Also they didn't use walk effectively so would make a lot of noise.

CS was also one of the first popular games where weapon recoil was modelled and new players would tend to spray full auto at a target (because that's what you did in quake).

Though in CS recoil could be predicted and controlled. I had a friend who spent literally hundreds of hours spraying an AK at a wall on an empty server in order to practice incredibly fast and precise mouse corrections.

He was of course one of those often banned, since he was able to shoot at full auto without suffering recoil. I remember playing with him; his handle was kylyk, so I went with kylyks_meatshield.

Ah, that's what he did all the time while the rest of us was partying and drinking! :-)

Very true. But really knew one guy personally who really shot that good. But he usually scaled back a little bit in casual games. And that spraying part took me quite a while, old habbits die hard. :-)

me and my friends used to play the game a lot which meant that we were much more skilled than the average player. The result of this was that admins would often accuse us of cheating (we weren't) simply because our kill/death ratio was so much better than anybody elses

I have a few friends who were often accused of cheating in Counter Strike Source and Call of Duty even though they definitely weren't.

When I used to play Counter Strike (and more recently Halo), I would sometimes be the second-best player on my team - the best player being an order of magnitude better than me. In essence, I would get a low score until my team-mate left, due to him hogging all the kills.

As soon as that guy left, I would be able to play and would appear to get much better. This would lead to me being called a cheater, on the grounds of "you weren't that good just five minutes ago".

This sort of cheater purgatory existed even in the later days of CS 1.6 as well. Secure servers were only available from legitimate STEAM accounts but players could create 'insecure' (no VAC) servers that were still publicly listed.

These servers quickly became havens for players connecting using modified software (free clients and so on) and those who had steam accounts which had been "vac'd".

Ironically, included in this list were a lot of servers who hosted third-party anti-cheat software, as it conflicted with VAC - creating unjustified bans.

1.6 is still currently like this.

Another interesting thing I remember from the CS days was that me and my friends used to play the game a lot which meant that we were much more skilled than the average player.

That reminds me of how in Mass Effect 2, secret files on the character Legion (a sapient machine, for those who don't know) reveal that he has been banned from several online games for cheating; however in each case he appealed and successfully overturned the ban.

Jiggy I honestly think I remember you especially if you played under this exact name. Anyways I was on the other side as a core myg0t member for a while. It was fun, and why I started programming.

I take that back as my dyslexia kicked in. I knew. Jiggy2001

No, not me. I only used this handle on HN because the one I wanted was taken.

Basically, this is why automatic matchmaking such as what we find in CS:GO is better than a server browser.

I'm looking forward to testing this out. Currently there's not enough players in my country for it to be useful.

The reddit thread about this had some interesting discussion and excellent point:

This is about cheaters that cheat their saves by giving themselves items that they haven't yet unlocked (or bought). It's punishing those that don't care for earning items or buying them.

Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/uyk1v/rockstar_target...

I've always wondered if we had an Olympics type sporting event where 'anything goes' would be sport worth watching.

My experience has been in two online games, one an Aces game where you flew against WWII planes and cheaters would make their planes make impossible turns or suddenly have 3000' of altitude etc. Made it unplayable. And in World of Warcraft where a sort of soft-core cheating or 'twinking' was making player vs player for non-twinks seriously non-fun, they added a 'twinks' mode where twinks had to play only other twinks. (this was done with a combination of things but it worked.)

I enjoy playing games on 'god' mode some times, and its hilariously fun with friends, and have many fond memories of running a Unreal Tournament (UT) server with some really crazy environments. So I expect there is a market there. Very happy to see Rockstar being creative here.

I'd love to see sports leagues that allow not just performance-enhancing drugs, but also prosthetic enhancements of any kind. The athlete of tomorrow is a cyborg.

Such a league would appear unplayable or non-fun to those players who abide by the traditional rule-set. So it's important to segregate players by skill-range. I wouldn't have much fun trying to play football against cyborgs, but I'd love to watch them compete against each other.

Pro sports leagues are run by technophobes who don't even want to run lasers down the field to augment the referees' abilities, so we won't see cyborg sports any time soon. But online games are hardly run by technophobes, so we ought to see more and more of this insightful approach.

All games should accept that players choose their own level of rule conformance. Place players in competitions based on their skill level, and and the games will be playable and fun for everyone.

That was the direction the XFL went in, no? Turned out no-one wanted to play (entirely understandable really, most performance-enhancing drugs have negative effects on your overall health)

Not to mention the fact that professional athletes start their training very young, so this would essentially mean pushing drugs to kids for the entertainment of adults.

A lot of pro athletes use drugs anyway these days but making it legal would present some ethical issues.

The article just glosses over the fact that detecting cheaters is far from easy. It just makes it sound as if it's a done-deal, "if you cheat, you're isolated away".

Speaking with at least some amount of insight, I can say that cheat-detection in modern networked multiplayer action games is far from easy.

There's a fantastic intro to modern game cheating and cheat detection here, for anyone interested: http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/04/02/extravagant-cheatin...

The first thing I remember from a multiplayer networking tutorial is that it is close to impossible to distinguish cheaters from really good players.

It's a bit more complex than that, I think. It's easy to distinguish careless cheaters from good players. It's hard to distinguish conservative cheaters from good players. It's also hard to distinguish good, nonconservative cheaters from really exceptional players.

But really, it doesn't matter. You can winnow out the obvious game-breaking things like wallhacking and instant-headshotting, but to the average player it doesn't make a difference whether the person who keeps killing them is a phenomenal player or just a skilled cheater; it's not fun either way.

A solution to one is a solution to both: Your game needs to be designed such that it maintains balance and remains fun when some players are performing much better than others, for whatever reason.

> It's hard to distinguish conservative cheaters from good players.

True, but getting the flagrant ones is usually enough so that in any given game the average player does not have to deal with cheating.

The biggest way that games attempt to catch players that are cheating is simply by scanning their memory space for changes that have been made, by seeing whether or not certain processes are running on the computer, whether extra DLL's have been imported into the application.

The thing is, that once code is running on my machine technically the game is over and it becomes a huge cat and mouse game. I can choose what to execute and how to execute it. Sure it takes time to figure out all of the different ways that you are trying to detect it, but I have control over my machine and thus can make it do what I want.

Yes, that is true. Additionally I don't necessarily want to run a program on my computer that has that level of access to my system (and submit it back to someone elses server) in order to run a game. This is firstly for privacy reasons but also because the program could possibly be exploited by malware people who could either inject code into the app or use it to gather information about my machine that could be used to exploit it via a different vector.

But sometimes it's really easy. See the YouTube channel of this Griefer who blatantly griefs and trolls teams on a variety of games on XBOX Live. Many people report him; he's still playing and griefing.

This is in a relatively walled garden - the client software and hardware is controlled; the servers are controlled.

NSFW (http://www.youtube.com/user/GeneralMinus?feature=watch)

Any anti-piracy or -cheating measure with a false positive rate over 0% is going to meet a shit storm not worth the effort. You have to really know what you're doing.

Maybe this could apply to people hell banned from communities. Instead of a regular hellban, have a hellban community... Let all of the rolls play together.

Back in the ARPANET days, the convention was that if you wanted to be removed from a mailing list info-foo@mit-mc, you sent email to info-foo-REQUEST@mit-mc to contact the maintainer of the mailing list, instead of broadcasting a "please remove me" message to the entire mailing list.

Of course there were people who didn't know the convention, and would violate this rule of netiquette. So a mischievous hacker who got sick of all the people asking "please remove me" set up a special mailing list called "please-remove-me@mit-mc" just for them, to which he subscribed people who didn't know the convention, so they could all talk to each other about how to remove themselves from mailing lists.

I read about this when I first heard of hellbanning:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h...

(There is one additional form of hellbanning that I feel compelled to mention because it is particularly cruel – when hellbanned users can see only themselves and other hellbanned users. Brrr. I'm pretty sure Dante wrote a chapter about that, somewhere.)

I have HN set to show me comments from hellbanned users.

A lot of them are just trolls/spammers , however there are a number that I feel sorry for because they post relevant and sometimes long comments on threads and I imagine that they wonder why they are not getting any votes or replies.

I think it's easy to get off to a bad start on an online community simply because you don't understand it's ethos rather than outright malice.

So do I. I tend to upvote the sensible (i.e. not crazy) ones, in the hopes that someday they'll make it back to positive karma.

I don't think the votes actually go through on hellbanned users unfortunately.

The public code in news.arc (which doesn't the anti-abuse code) suggests:

  * The test for a comment being auto-killed (marked [dead]) is "(or (ignored user) (< (karma user) comment-threshold*))"
  * comment-threshold* = -20
  * Karma is still updated on item authors if their post is dead - as long as the tests on the person doing the voting pass.
  * Once you have the ignore flag set, only administrators can remove it - it is independent of karma.
  * You get the ignore flag set for posting a link to a banned site, posting a comment containing banned text, or if one of your posts is blasted or nuked by an administrator.

Hellbanned? what does that actually mean? Seems i missed a lot online since around the early 2000s...

Your account appears, to you, to function normally, but your posts are not visible to any other users.

The rationale is that trolls and spammers will usually register new accounts upon being notified of a ban, but a hellbanned troll/spammer might continue to use the hellbanned account without realizing that their posts are ignored.

Ah! thanks for the quick answer!

I repost them with attribution and a message that the account is dead.

Will a positive karma score automatically un-hellban a user?

I think that exists and it's called 4chan.

Interestingly for certain topics there are banned users who join in by ghostposting in the archive (i.e. posting just to the archive, not to the actual thread - the archive is an independent site, so it doesn't matter if you're banned from 4chan proper) for those threads (the archive updates in realtime, so you can read threads there as they happen).

Facepunch, the forum mainly connected to the sandbox game Garry's mod, has had this for a long time. If you broke a rule you were banned to "Refugee Camp" for some amount of time. Only you, the moderators and gold users (paying or 5+ years and no permaban) can see your posts in the Refugee Camp. Mostly people complained and tried to reduce or revoke the ban, but occasionally it let to rather creative or crazy time-wasting.

I like it. There may even be practical ways for the antisocials to eventually meta-moderate each-other out from under the bridge. To be studied.

Another advantage of "keeping them alive" is watching what they exploit so they know where to harden, sort of like a free pwnium contest. And after the dust settles, they may have a few interview candidates.

I agree with the author that the cheater's pool would be cool to keep. I could imagine having two accounts - one account for regular play and one account for cheating to see who can do the best hacks. The author is probably right that it would just turn into a complete mess though.

> It's as if Major League Baseball suddenly opened up a second, parallel league that allows players to use performance-enhancing drugs and teams to use an ultra-precise pitching machine that throws nothing but 120mph fastballs to the corners of the plate. The games might end up as an unwatchable mess, but they'd likely attract plenty of fans and players who want to see just how far the "baseball" experience can go.

Sounds like a blurb to an awesome dystopian libertarian science fiction novel.

I'm pretty sure there's something similar mentioned in one of the Red Dwarf novels (with the experience ending in the use of genetically engineered players).

Sounds like CS 1.3 to me. Their so-called "hackers arms race" is what got me into coding in the first place.

Which side were you on?

Haha, I played with the cheaters.. But only with other cheaters. There was a small subset of cs1.3 cheaters who played competitively vs eachother. The original OGC hook was released as source and gave me my intro to compiling editing and debugging, along with some help from unknowncheats.com at the time

honestly don't have much value to add here (not really much of a gamer) and from reading other comments, clearly there are some points of contention around the issue, but my takeaway from the post.. that sounds awesome.

again, not a big gamer here, but i think that sounds like a totally reasonable way for the studio to minimize the negative impact of cheating on the majority of players who don’t, and while keeping those who do cheat (i’m assuming all of whom would have to be super-hardcore gamers/fans) engaged with the game and loyal to the brand (rather than being kicked-off outright).

also, and more importantly, i’m just imagining how cool it would be, and what a rush one would get, in having to compete with other like-minded hackers in a never-ending arms race to dominate in a (game) world of cheaters!

In my experience playing FPSs online (mostly Call of Duty 1/2/4), those assumptions are not quite true. For one, plenty of cheaters are not really very good players; they're not complete noobs, but they're often average players or below. Some are, but I don't think it's correlated with it.

And for many, having to compete with other cheaters would be boring and annoying, since for them the main satisfaction is 1) making ridiculously large scores compared to others and 2) watching others complain and leave.

An indication that this wouldn't be attractive to them is the fact that there are many Punkbuster¹-free servers out there, yet cheaters still spend time looking for cheats that can evade it.

¹ Anti-cheating system.

I wonder if cheating could be entirely solved with machine learning like TrueSkill that matches you with people with similar performance. Then matching cheaters with cheaters is almost guaranteed to happen, and a bad player cheating a little can still be a good adversary.

This is effectively what a VAC ban does, isn't it? I can't imagine why else you'd play on a non-VAC-secured server.

(for reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Anti-Cheat)

Close. It's not clear if cheaters are actually informed they've been sent into no-man's-land.

CS servers running third party anti-cheat software are non-VAC-secured.

It's an elegant solution. In 1998, as a freshman in college, we kicked a lot of ass on Tribes. By my sophomore year, the hacks had completely ruined the game. Frankly, it inspired one of my teammates to go into CS so that he could "hack back."

Are you referring to skiing? Tribes is an interesting example of a "hack" that completely re-invents the game (in most people's opinions, for the better).

For those not familiar, a bit of gaming history: Tribes is a FPS where the players have jetpacks and can fly around in the air. The jetpacks have limited energy, so players ended up having to spend a lot of time on the ground too. One particularly innovative aspects of Tribes was it's expansive maps. It was like a Battlefield game, but 5 years earlier. By only running and jetting, it could take minutes to get across a map, which is important considering the primary objective of the game was to move the opposing team's flag from side of the map to your team's side.

The hack was: players discovered that jumping at the instant the player lands on downhill surface caused them to accelerate in the downhill direction. Mashing repeatedly on the jump key going down a large hill would cause the player to accelerate all the way down the hill, as if there was no friction with the ground (hence "skiing"). Someone wrote a script that automated this act so all a player had to do was hold down the jump button instead of pressing it repeatedly.

This bug completely re-invented the game into something no one imagined it would be. Many players embraced it, I am sure some did not. It added a layer of complexity and made the game addictively fast paced (with skill you could now get across a map in seconds). The competitive community embraced the new style of play and the developers had no choice but to not patch the bug. This bug arguably became the defining gameplay aspect of Tribes.

The lesson? As mentioned here many times, the users are what make your product special. Sometimes they will invent uses for it you never imagined :)

No, skiing was awesome, and we were, frankly, some of the pioneers (it only worked on some keyboards, I had to buy a new one). I'm talking about the aiming scripts and when guys started walking through walls. Most of the base servers were later patched, but for a while they were hard to find.

Wait, why do some of these "cheat" mode exist in production games? Isn't that the problem to begin with? Why does omething like "invincibility" exist in the game? Am I missing something here, or is this a noob question from a non-gamer?

They aren't deliberate "cheat modes", they're hacks. Certain types of hacks are extremely difficult to prevent or even detect.

There was an article on HN a few months ago (can't find it right now) that discussed hooking into the GPU to avoid detection.

Are the cheaters informed when they are sent to the "Cheaters Pool" penalty box?

Hopefully not, that would allow them to flag detectable hacks and buy new accounts to continue cheating with new tools.

An elegant solution.

Sorta like the idea that there should be two leagues for the Olympics, the Tour de France, et al.: one with steroids, one without.

It would be interesting to see which got more viewers.

If Rockstar is doing this right, then they will separate cheat detection from cheat consequence by 24 hours or more, and make this interval random. Why? Because to a cheat hacker, detection is a bug, and delaying the consequence of cheat detection by a random amount makes it a hard to recreate, latent bug. It inflates the difficulty of "debugging" from the cheater's POV.

Kind of reminds me of skiing in tribes. Although not necessarily a hack, it was a glitch that was heavily exploited, and now it's an integral part of the gameplay, and a large part of what made it great. Giving people the freedom to be creative with the gameplay mechanics can lead to great things. Other examples would be DotA and CS.

Its seems exactly like prison. You have jails to separate criminals from the general population.

However people who go to jail tend to come out more dangerous and knowledgeable than before.

As long as they don't have the false and shocking "we NEVER make mistakes!" attitude towards their ban software that companies like EA, Valve and Bungie had, then that's neat.

Bungie I don't think ever really did make mistakes though, mainly because their bans were based off of the number of times and frequency at which a player would betray teammates and get ejected from games/back out of games early to avoid a loss. I agree though, that mentality isn't really needed.

Kind of like the XFL for video games.

A Max Payne parallel universe!! I would make myself into a zombie character. With super fast running and the ability to bite people.

in any case, it sounds like this could actually be a little more fun. I give it a 50/50 chance of working how they anticipate.

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