|  |
|
Sam Parker
Hardware Editor
Wherever there's competition, you'll find people looking to get an edge. In online action gaming, there are a number of ways for players to customize their gaming rigs and settings to push the envelope without turning to questionable means. For example, Quake III Arena is host to a couple of common tricks, including setting gamma levels and uniform player models to ensure that all opponents are readily visible and without pretty-but-distracting customizations. There's also a somewhat significant exploitation of the engine that id Software has practically legitimized. The physics model does some rounding on jump distances that varies with the frame rate. At some frame rates, players get just enough extra distance while strafe jumping to cross otherwise impossible distances, so savvy players lock their frame rates at levels determined to get the best jumps. Is this cheating? It might be exploiting the physics engine, but when id fixed the rounding bug in a patch at the end of last year, player outcry led the developer to put it back in. It's almost the nature of the game to allow expert gamers a bit of room to tweak things out.
The majority of cheats and exploits aren't in anything like a gray area, providing an advantage that's much more extreme and runs counter to the spirit of the game. There have been cheats in single-player games since well before online gaming became popular, but it's not the same because there, only the player feels the effect of the cheating. Online gaming is fundamentally tied to social interaction, so it mirrors the best and worst in the way people act.
 | 
See through walls to get the drop on the terrorists. |
Some of the most dramatic and abusive cheats directly modify games like Unreal Tournament or Counter-Strike. Various hacks enable perfect automatic aim, dramatically boost a player's speed, or make walls nearly invisible for easy stalking. If you've played on a server where a cheater has jumped on and started dominating, you know just how frustrating the experience is. While multiplayer shooters can be one of the best tests of an individual's competitive skills, cheats like this require no skill--just knowledge of the cheat and the will to ruin the game for other players. It's amused me to hear the justifications some people have for cheating. The most common reason is "I cheat because I can." It's the game designer's fault if you can find a weakness in the game and exploit it. But with cheating as rampant as it is in Counter-Strike, cheaters say they need to cheat just to enjoy the game. For instance, for those who use the wall hack, there's something of a game within a game, with competition forming between the few people on the server that are all using the same cheats.
What's worse is that some don't cheat for advantage, but just to harass other players. In his last Question of the Week entry, Amer admitted to his guilty pleasure of exploiting a design flaw in Phantasy Star Online's trading system to effectively steal money from players, and said that "the feeling of breaking someone's heart is worth more than all the [money] in the world." More than just the admission of cheating, I think it's the irreverent attitude that upset many readers about Amer's story. Many players exploit design flaws in online RPGs for self-gratification, but the ways in which some players abused early Ultima Online bugs in order to score underhanded player vs. player kills is a clear example that some players will go as far as the game will let them. The more games encourage us to invest in building online personas, the more we should expect the system to prevent rampant unfairness. A cheater might say that this behavior just mimics the brutish world outside, but games are entertainment and there's no justification for ruining someone else's party.
| 
Adding spikes to player models also shows enemies before they get in your line of sight. |
But it's not enough for those who don't cheat to be righteous and call the cheaters out. It's natural to be upset about someone consciously spoiling the fun, but what can be done about it? In some cases, it's just not practical to leave all the responsibility to a game's developers. Some gaming communities have banded together to create anti-cheating programs like Punkbuster for Counter-Strike, which can detect hacks to the client or even non-standard drivers like those for Asus graphics cards, which intentionally enable transparent walls. Many have taken an activist stance in denouncing Asus for its cheat-enabling drivers, which were seemingly developed to provide a distinguishing feature to boost graphics card sales. Player activism is a good way to cut down on cheating, but it can take many forms. Even Counter-Strike can still be fun to play on public servers that are well administered, where known cheaters are banned. But I must admit I mostly stopped playing the game because being constantly vigilant of saboteurs made things less fun overall. There are enough other games to play that cheaters haven't yet taken over, and we can hope that more future games will be cheat-resistant.
|
|
