
Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only against each other - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/06/rockstar-condemns-max-payne-3-cheaters-to-play-only-against-each-other/
======
walexander
> 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!

~~~
nohat
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.

~~~
younata
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.

~~~
visionpol
The game mode is called Fort Wars.

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

~~~
stcredzero
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...](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/TheATeam?from=Main.TheATeam)

------
jiggy2011
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?

~~~
X-Istence
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.

~~~
arohner
> 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.

~~~
jiggy2011
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.

~~~
Hemospectrum
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.

~~~
jiggy2011
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.

------
citricsquid
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...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/uyk1v/rockstar_targets_max_payne_3_multiplayer_cheaters/c4zpw2k)

------
ChuckMcM
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.

~~~
literalusername
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.

~~~
lmm
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)

~~~
pedrolll
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.

------
unwind
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.

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

~~~
Cushman
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.

~~~
jamesaguilar
> 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.

------
tseabrooks
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.

~~~
MartinCron
I read about this when I first heard of hellbanning:

[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-
or-h...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-
hellban.html)

 _(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.)_

~~~
jiggy2011
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.

~~~
disgruntledphd2
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.

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

~~~
hef19898
Hellbanned? what does that actually mean? Seems i missed a lot online since
around the early 2000s...

~~~
neutronicus
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.

~~~
hef19898
Ah! thanks for the quick answer!

------
libria
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.

------
jkeel
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.

------
i386
> 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.

~~~
angrytapir
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).

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

~~~
jiggy2011
Which side were you on?

~~~
txo
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

------
simba-hiiipower
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!

~~~
icebraining
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.

------
alextp
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.

------
CrazedGeek
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>)

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

------
hcurtiss
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."

~~~
alf
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 :)

~~~
hcurtiss
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.

------
fxm4139
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?

~~~
tlrobinson
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.

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

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

------
eupharis
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.

------
stcredzero
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.

------
barbs
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.

------
dimitar
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.

------
anonymousab
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.

~~~
landr0id
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.

------
andygcook
Kind of like the XFL for video games.

------
horsehead
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.

