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Game cheats and cheat prevention
Cheating is one of the most hotly debated issues in gaming today. What is cheating? Is a cheat ever not really a cheat? Does all cheating affect the game world in which you play, or are some cheats totally benign? Does everybody do it?
A cheat is defined as a process, a code tweak, an exploitation of a glitch, or a hack that allows the player to engage in behavior that isn't intended within the context of the game. Cheating is exploiting weaknesses in the game's architecture to, for example, allow a player to kill another player's character where or when he should not be vulnerable; to have items that the character isn't supposed to have, either through duplication of legitimate items or by means of taking items belonging to another player; or to know information that isn't intended to be known, which gives the person using the cheat an edge in competitive play.
In this article, we'll examine how players are able to cheat in online games, and how game technology has progressed over the years to address this problem. We'll explore in-depth how cheating affected some of the very games that we helped to develop. Naturally, our observations about cheats in these games would apply equally to other games that use the same network architectures.
An early game: Townkill in Diablo
How susceptible a game is to cheating is largely defined by its network architecture. The easiest type of multiplayer game to program, and also the easiest type to cheat in, is an asynchronous peer-to-peer game. In this network architecture, each player's computer is responsible for modeling his character and all of his character's interactions with the world, and notifying other computers of the results.
One can compare playing an asynchronous peer-to-peer type of game to playing a game via the telephone. If a player says I hit you for 20 points of damage and there are no means by which that amount of damage can be verified as possible and reasonable for the attacker to inflict, the other player has no choice but to register 20 points of damage. So if the would-be cheater finds a way to send a message claiming he has inflicted greater damage than is actually possible for his character to inflict, he can quickly gain experience points and reach godlike character levels.
A famous example of this was the Townkill cheat in Diablo. The starting town in Diablo was intended to be a safe zone where players couldn't attack each other. However, even though it wasn't possible to attack other players through the game's user interface, hackers were still able to force the game to send a message over the network saying essentially I hit you for 20 points of damage. With Diablo's network model, other computers in the game would simply accept the message and dutifully subtract 20 hit points from their character.
There were a few reasons why people used this cheat. One gamer we talked too explained, Pking was so easy in Diablo, and it got old. But when Townkill came out I loved killing them in town, it's just totally unexpected, and they're like 'WTF?' Another, referring to the fact that characters in Diablo drop their equipment when they die, stated it's a way for me to get good stuff without the hassle of finding it myself.
What is the solution to this sort of cheat, or how can it be prevented? This particular cheat was possible for Blizzard to address. Since players weren't supposed to be able to do damage to each other in any way in town, Blizzard made the receiving computer ignore any incoming damage messages while it was in town. However, the hackers quickly adapted and created other types of cheats that Blizzard couldn't address, such as the ability to walk into any dungeon level and kill everyone on that level. As the cheats became more sophisticated, the receiving computer couldn't know for sure whether the message it was receiving was generated by a cheat or by a legitimate action of another player, so it had no choice but to accept the result.
Eventually, as most gamers know, cheating destroyed Diablo's economy, and forced honest players to avoid playing with strangers. There were many games released around the time of Diablo that used the same networking model, and they were all susceptible to this type of cheating. Diablo merely had the distinction of being one of the most popular online games, which made it one of the most popular targets for cheaters.
Source: BonusGambler.com Editors' Choice
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