way2slo's Journal: How to deal with Cheating and Griefer's in multiplayer games

I believe that cheating is a symptom of a logical game design flaw. Solutions are either a better way to implement what they are exploiting, or a workaround in the game that makes it the cheat irrelevant to other players (somehow design it so that the other players don't mind that others are cheating).

The first is very hard because network games rely on sharing data and off-loading some of the work to the clients. Even if every computation was done on the server and your computer did a remote GUI login, you could still figure a way to exploit it. (perhaps by sniffing the video packets for something that looks like a player's head and then having it automatically send the proper mouse/keyboard commands to aim at it and shoot). Trying to prevent it is a never ending battle. A more elegant solution would be the latter.

Have a system built into the game where the players not care if the others are cheating. How? Well, why do players get mad at cheaters? Because they are so much better than they are and never have a chance to do well against them. The same can be said for very gifted non-cheaters. The problem is not the cheating, it's the lack of balance between the players skill level, artificially enhanced or not. Therefore the answer is to build in a balancing system into the game, often reffered to as ranking. Rank the players according to how well they do in the game, wheither it is acquired by cheating or not, and make the rank public. In a short time it will be obvious which players are in your rank range and which are not. Each game will be more enjoyable because each party within your rank has a good chance to be victorious. It will be a fun challenge, not excersise in futility.

Of course, how do you do it in an MMORPG where everyone is interacting with everyone else? Well, fortunately in this case "everyone" is a relative term and can be redefined. I have seen implementations that keep users of different levels in different areas. Newbie areas, secret passages that cannot be seen until you are a certian level, etc. Mostly, the level difference in RPG's are not that much of an irritation however abusive PK'ing and griefing are. A couple of ideas. First, keep the people that want to PK away from the non-PK'ers. How? Different sever or different world. You can do the same for griefers too. Send them to a "grief" version of the world and let them grief themselves to their hearts content. This grief world could even be on their own client machine. A private hades just for themselves. They may have to work at a few tasks before being allowed back to the public server. Anything is possible.