Cheating in online games

Cheating in online computer games is a broad category of activities, all of which are generally regarded as modifying the game experience in a way that gives a player an unfair advantage over the other players. Depending on the game, different activities constitute cheating, as it is often a matter of consensus opinion.

Cheating exists in all multiplayer, online computer games. While there have always been cheat codes and other ways to make single player games easier, most developers attempt to prevent it in multiplayer games. With the release of the first popular Internet multiplayer games cheating took on new dimensions. Previously it was rather easy to see if the other players cheated, as most games were played on local networks or consoles. The Internet changed that by increasing the popularity of multiplayer games, giving the players anonymity, and giving people an avenue to communicate cheats.

Types of Cheats

User Settings

Typically a player can change settings within a game to make it suit their play style and system. These alterations are generally not cheating, except in extreme circumstances. Changing the keyboard layout to make it easier to use is for example usually accepted. But issues such as changing in-game player models and textures, or modifying the brightness or gamma in order to make it easier to see in dark areas are sometimes borderline cheating.

Exploits

Usually included in this concept of cheating is the use of existing bugs or gameplay aspects unintended by the developers known as exploits. Gamers are divided as to whether all exploitation is cheating, though most consider exploits as cheats if they are particularly unfair. It is also difficult to classify some activities as exploits, because sometimes unintended features in games can make them much more fun to play, like bunny hopping in Quake. However, most exploits are unbalancing to a multiplayer game, and are called cheats because they are based on mistakes by the developers. For example, duping ruins a synthetic economy and is rarely intended, and therefore is usually called a cheat.

External Software

The most unbalancing cheats usually come from external software. Either the program that runs the game is modified to allow the player to cheat, or other software is run which produces the same results. Wallhacks, aimbots, and other cheats fall into this category.

Cheesing

Cheesing (occasionally referred to as "cheap") is not cheating per se; it refers to players in online multiplayer football games such as Madden and NCAA making playcalls that wouldn't be made in real life, such as going for it on 4th down on their own 20. While doing this is within the rules unless players have formed a league and made an agreement not to cheese, it is generally frowned upon.

Disconnecting

In games where wins and losses are recorded on a players account, a player may disconnect from a game they have lost in order to prevent the loss from being recorded. A similar phenomenon is when someone running a server boots players who are beating them. Disconnecting can be accepted when there are multiple players in a game but if it is a one-on-one match it is considered immoral, as the opponent of the cheater will not have their "win" recorded.

Ranking up

Some games involve a global leader board, where each player is ranked according to how they have done in a game. It is entirely possible to cheat your way up to a high place through fake accounting, which is when someone creates an alternative account to let a person planning on raising his rank win without trying to beat him. These free wins help them reach the top of the leader board without having to compete against other players.

Sharing

Sharing is when multiple people share an online game (mainly MMORPG games) character. Common reasons for doing a sort of this is to gain a very unfair advantage by having higher online times, and being capable of having more manpower (for activities such as leveling or gaining experience). A common side effect from such cheating results in massive levels and/or massive loot.

Implementation of Cheats

There are many facets of cheating in online games which make the creation of a system to stop cheating very difficult.

"Never trust the client" is a common maxim among multiplayer game developers that summarizes in their opinion the case of client-servers. It argues that programmers should assume that information sent to the client game will be known by that player, regardless of whether or not the player should know that information. For example, the server might tell a client in a First Person Shooter that a player is hiding behind a door and cannot be seen, but a wallhack cheat can reveal the player. Similarly, data from the client might indicate that the client teleported from one side of the map to another for some reason (possibly a change made to the game's data). The server is responsible for sending only the necessary information and for maintaining the game's continuity. (See "Efficiency versus absence of cheating" below for the drawbacks.)

The game software

Many cheats in today's games are changes to the game software, although many game companies have policies which forbid the modification of such code. While the software (for most games) is distributed in binary-only versions and encrypted to make it harder, reverse engineering is always possible. Also many of the data files for the games can be edited without editing the main program and thereby circumvent protections in the software.

Wallhacks and maphacks often function by modifying the software. Other cheats can analyze or change the game's state in RAM, such as some aimbots and programs that give infinite ammo or health (often called trainers).

The hardware

Turning up the brightness on the monitor or using specific graphic cards with drivers that allows you to look through walls ("wallhack") are examples of using hardware tricks to get an advantage. These are frequently impossible to track with software, but they also have limited effect.

Packet tampering

Some cheats completely circumvent the protection of the software by running in real-time and changing the game data while in transmission from the server to the client. Many aimbots, in first-person shooters use tricks like this. Some newer games encrypt the network data, but this uses up computer resources that could be used to make a faster-running or better game instead.

Preventing Cheats

Game developers and third party software developers have created technologies that attempt to prevent players from cheating. Anti-cheating software is most commonly used in popular first person shooters such as Half-Life and its various mods or Quake. A few examples of anti-cheat software are PunkBuster, Cheating-Death, Valve Software's VAC ("Valve Anti-Cheat") and Argus Anti-Cheat.

Some companies elect to ban suspected cheaters from their servers. When this is done by blacklisting the game's serial key, the player is often effectively prevented from playing online the game they purchased. Blizzard Entertainment and Valve Software are known to have banned players, though the actual number of players is unknown. These companies also chose not to restrict these players to "cheating allowed" servers, even though it would be just as easy to implement, mirroring the dislike some took to cheating.

Sometimes the anti-cheating fervor leads to embarrassment, such as when Phil DeLuca, America's Army executive producer, drew parallels between cheating and Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, and threatened FBI and Secret Service involvement. ^*

It might not be financially wise for a company to fight "cheaters" in its games. Alternate characters are frequently banned in free games but they bring in revenue just like normal players in games that require subscription fees. Gamers have speculated that this is the reason why "two boxing" is not a bannable offense in major MMORPGs. Players are often less concerned about these circumstances because it might be debatable if the actions in question are a form of cheat.

It could be argued, however, that when a company does not take cheating seriously, they could very well be shortening the lifespan of their games. Some gamers have noted that recent games that have no serious anticheat are not high on their list of "games to purchase", while other games that do have some sort of anticheat system seem much more attractive. On the other hand, those that do cheat at these games might look at the situation the other way, and prefer games that have little to no anticheat system. Regardless of one's perspective, the stance a company takes on cheating could have a significant impact on whether one will decide to purchase a game or not. For this reason, a game company is left to consider the cost of working towards stopping cheating vs the cost of ignoring cheats.

Efficiency versus security

The more of the game code that is run on the server, the fewer cheats are generally possible in the game, as the server's operator has control over what happens. However, a game server has limited bandwidth and limited resources, which makes it necessary to distribute code to the clients. It's a tradeoff between lack of cheats and usability.

For example, a player is not supposed to know who is hiding behind a closed door. The server has to make a trade-off between calculating what the player can and cannot see. It can do this by sending only a part of the entire world state, which can result in client lag but makes wallhacks unlikely, or sending the player the entire world state, which is faster for the player but makes wallhacks more likely.

In Unreal Tournament, maps are divided into various zones. Zones are distingished by seperate rooms, different areas of interaction, etc. When a player is in one of these zones, only that zone info is rendered on the client side and sent through packets only pertaining to the zone. This prevents wall hacks as well as optimizes the maps for enhanced online gameplay.

Cheating in MMORPGs

While persistent world online games, such as MUDs and MMORPGs, are often subject to the same sorts of mechanical weaknesses to cheating as other online games, as often as not cheating in such games are social cheats, in the form of confidence games. Many of these confidence tricks are based on old-fashioned real-life tricks, or take advantage of the greed or inexperience of new players.

These scams often take the form of uneven trades or outright bad-faith dealing in trades of in-game items. Players will misrepresent the value of their goods to new players, substitute lookalike worthless items for valuable ones, offer to improve items (by crafting raw materials or enhancing equipment) and then just walk away with the item to be improved, or use one of any other con games.

Social engineering is often used to steal players' login information. Scammers will pose as the staff of the game, either in e-mail or in the game itself, and ask for the players' login information under any number of pretexts. Alternately, the scammer will offer cheating or automation services, or require that the player give their information as part of initiation into a (nonexistent) clan.

Alt-F4

One particularly long-lived scam is the "Alt-F4 scam." In this scam, the scammer tricks the victim into pressing Alt and F4 (the command to exit a program in Windows; similar scams have used Ctrl-W, the command to close a window in Windows, Ctrl-C, the command to interrupt a Telnet connection, or Command-Q, the command to close a program in Mac OS). Sometimes the scammer tells the victim that this will duplicate a dropped item (which the scammer then picks up and absconds with), and sometimes this trick is just used to get rid of an annoying player.

External links

Tom's Hardware: "Cheating: Multiplayer Gaming's Achilles' heel?" (May 2003)
A Legal Perspective on Cheating in Online Multiplayer Games An academic paper that discusses the legal aspects of cheating and how to combat cheating with legal means.
Aspects of Networking in Multiplayer Computer Games by J.Smed et al., The Electronic Library, volume 20, number 2, pages 87-97, 2002.
TKC's Heckling FAQ covers the motivations and justifications seen from the cheaters' point of view. The Teamkill and Cheat Community (TKC), 2004.

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