Dealing with Hackers ?

[Broken Drum]

I never understood the mentality myself. Getting your name in the bright lights I suppose.

If a game has a lengthy grind to get a specific item and you accomplish it – there is a huge feeling of accomplishment – which was the whole point of playing the game to begin with.

If you change a few bits and get the same result – what was accomplished ?

I reckon cheaters are searching for a different mental achievement feeling – dunno. I guess beating the game via a hack has it's own thrill for some.

Case in point was when I had my two purple main weapons with 4 modes each – was a great OH YEAH moment which would not have been there had I gotten the weapons with 4 mod slots right out of the box instead of only one each. Nor would it have felt as good if I could type a script and hit Enter to 'get er done'.

Good post on the bot/hack methods NOTTURNO – never saw it put quite so plainly.

As far as people playing badly - I actually quit a guild once because of all the whine. Every time certain people got killed it was a hack, cheat, whatever. Never was it just bad form on their part. Got old heh heh.

[HexCaliber]

Please no, cause there will be people who report everyone who's better than them.

You don't think losers do that already, happens all the time; if you suspect a cheat report it, but include detail so anyone checking the report can quickly discard the nonsense reports.

I used to work for a volunteer group, we would track down hack sites, register, download their software and submit it to evenbalance (punkbuster) so that it could be analyzed and banned. There are a number of groups who report hack sites and their software to parent companies and third party vendors like evenbalance, but companies still need player cooperation to help catch cheats.

[Notturno]

Good post on the bot/hack methods NOTTURNO - never saw it put quite so plainly.

Thank you!

If a game has a lengthy grind to get a specific item and you accomplish it – there is a huge feeling of accomplishment – which was the whole point of playing the game to begin with.

If you change a few bits and get the same result – what was accomplished ?

I reckon cheaters are searching for a different mental achievement feeling – dunno. I guess beating the game via a hack has it's own thrill for some.

These are just my own personal opinions, and feedback I've gathered from actual cheaters in another game.

A lot of cheaters aren't in it for the same sense of satisfaction a legitimate player gets. A legitimate player is in it for the reasons you said; we get a sense of accomplishment for achieving a high score, or beating other players in PvP. For the cheaters, they are in it for another reason; they are here to grief other players by making them miserable. It's not that they are incapable of playing without cheating programs, it's that it gives them satisfaction by ruining the experience for other players.

While I think it's safe to say that all of us have engaged in some sort of griefing behavior, cheaters are habitually doing this for hours upon hours. To me, it signals an anti-social behavior that probably stems from another issue in their life, and it shows a disregard for fairness and general morality. Now, to clarify, this is just pure speculation on my part, but I firmly believe cheaters suffer from some sort of mental defect that makes them want to engage in that sort of behavior. It just isn't a positive social behavior, it goes against common ideas of morality, and it doesn't have a long-term outlook on their presence within an online community.

Please no, cause there will be people who report everyone who's better than them.

Oh this is a fun one, “hacker hysteria” as I like to affectionately call it. All Points Bulletin is notorious for this one.

Like I covered in my earlier post, there are a multitude of ways for cheaters to hide the fact they are cheating. They can change their accuracy percentages to a more reasonable number, tick a setting to allow for a random variable to stop every hit from being a headshot, and so on.

I think there's a clear distinction between the types of cheaters, the good cheaters and the bad cheaters. The bad cheaters are the ones who are blatantly obvious with their program usage, where they will wildly spin in every direction and pick off every enemy player in sight with immediate headshots. They are usually short lived thrill seekers who get dealt with fairly quick. You then have the “good” cheaters who are in this for the long haul; they are not obvious or blatant in their usage of cheating tools. They are ones who get a sense of satisfaction every time people accuse them of cheating, it's an ego boost that complements their anti-social behavior of griefing other players.

While you do have these kinds of players, you also have players who are just legitimately talented when it comes to shooters. This is where the “hacker hysteria” comes in; players know there are cheaters, so it's easier to dismiss a good player as a cheater than acknowledge them for being great. This leads to many false positives when it comes to community perceptions of players, an ultimately detrimental community effect where nobody is trusting in anyone's gameplay.

Merely the existence of cheating in one instance leads to a widespread behavior of accusing players. It's partly because people do not have faith in the legitimacy of players, which can come from a combination one of two sources. The first being that the player does not feel the developer is being faithful to them by eliminating the problems fast enough. The second being that the player just cannot admit defeat. Traditionally the accusatory types of players fall into the second category, where they simply need a reason for deflecting blame off of someone other than themselves for their own shortcomings. In a twisted way, the public accusations to compensate for your own shortcomings is worse than the cheating itself. It tarnishes two reputations, and plants a seed of doubt in many minds. It's more damaging to the community than any cheating spree.