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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

#61

Post by cpeterso »

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.

Will a positive karma score automatically un-hellban a user?

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

#62

Post by gms7777 »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #57
feral wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 et…

It seems as though the problem with determinism could be solved with random number seeding. If the server generates seeds, the two could stay synced even with random numbers.

The physics engine is a bit more difficult hurdle I suppose.

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

#63

Post by feral »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #57
feral wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 et…

As gms7777 points out, for the RNG, surely you can just share seeds?

Your comment about the differences in how CPUs deal with floats is very interesting.

I found the following interesting comment, from a GPG employee, talking about how they take care to ensure their float math is deterministic:

"I work at Gas Powered Games and i can tell you first hand that floating point math is deterministic. You just need the same instruction set and compiler and of course the user's processor adhears to the IEEE754 standard, which includes all of our PC and 360 customers. The engine that runs DemiGod, Supreme Commander 1 and 2 rely upon the IEEE754 standard. Not to mention probably all other RTS peer to peer games in the market. As soon as you have a peer to peer network game where each client broadcasts what command they are doing on what 'tick' number and rely on the client computer to figure out the simulation/physical details your going to rely on the determinism of the floating point processor."

http://www.box2d.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1800#p164...

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

#64

Post by Hemospectrum »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #58
arohner wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).…

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.

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

#65

Post by hef19898 »

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.

Ah! thanks for the quick answer!

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

#66

Post by SimHacker »

tseabrooks wrote: post #2

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.

Back in the ARPANET days, the convention was that if you wanted to be removed from a mailing list info-foo@mit-mc, you sent email to info-foo-REQUEST@mit-mc to contact the maintainer of the mailing list, instead of broadcasting a "please remove me" message to the entire mailing list.

Of course there were people who didn't know the convention, and would violate this rule of netiquette. So a mischievous hacker who got sick of all the people asking "please remove me" set up a special mailing list called "please-remove-me@mit-mc" just for them, to which he subscribed people who didn't know the convention, so they could all talk to each other about how to remove themselves from mailing lists.

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

#67

Post by dkersten »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #14

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 wa…

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 have a few friends who were often accused of cheating in Counter Strike Source and Call of Duty even though they definitely weren't.

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

#68

Post by jamesaguilar »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #14

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 wa…

Basically, this is why automatic matchmaking such as what we find in CS:GO is better than a server browser.

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

#69

Post by jamesaguilar »

Cushman wrote: post #33
pestaa wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

> 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.

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