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

arstechnica.com

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

#51

Post by icebraining »

bri3d wrote: post #43
X-Istence wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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…

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.

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

#52

Post by [deleted] »

arohner wrote: post #47
X-Istence wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> 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. Wa…

[deleted]

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

#53

Post by pyre »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #35
X-Istence wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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 significan…

  > 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.

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

#54

Post by 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.

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

#55

Post by 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!

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

#56

Post by JohannL »

neutronicus wrote: post #42
hef19898 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If only people would not downvote instead of voicing disagreement; just because someone is actually mistaken, or worse, simply not going along with whatever fad might be the issue, is hardly justification to waste their time like this. The rationale is that a non-troll/spammer can simply realize they have intruded on a circlejerk, instead of wasting their time making posts nobody even sees.

While I get that there may be actual good uses for this, it is super silly to assume "they must be trolls/spammers, or they wouldn't be hellbanned". That doesn't follow logically at all. What is common though, you might even say well-reasearched, is that when other people get treated unfairly by our own peers, we route around the damage with neat little stories about fairness. It's sociology 101, nobody wants to be a tyrant, or in bed with them. We want the power, just not the shame, and how mediocre and small it makes us seem in the right light. So we tell stories, and sometimes those stories happen to be true, but that's just because we got lucky, not because we actually inform ourselves. It's also very convenient that those affected can not give any feedback, they're banned after all.

Also: dunno about trolls (except that assholes or ignorant people are often called that, when in fact "trolling" implies deliberate deceit and trying to play mind games, instead of just being stupid or a jerk; but who needs to think when you can have labels), but why would a spammer not simply use a new account for each post? It seems like that would be actually less effort.

Now vote me down or whatever, I'd rather be banned than suck up :P I'm aware it's kinda off-topic, because none of this applies to gaming... but those are the posts I'm replying to, hah. I just think that modding people, not posts, is highly flawed; even ignoring the moral high horse for a second, it doesn't produce good results either.

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

#57

Post by jiggy2011 »

feral wrote: post #50
X-Istence wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

>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,…

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.

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

#58

Post by jiggy2011 »

arohner wrote: post #47
X-Istence wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> 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. Wa…

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.

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

#59

Post by StavrosK »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #23
jiggy2011 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 out…

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