The State of Cheating in Online Games

Gary Mullins writes "GameApex has a nice article up meant to inform other gamers about the presence of cheating in online games. The article covers the types of cheats to be aware of, the type of person the average cheater is, and even includes plenty of information from anti-cheat experts from PunksBusted, United Admins, and The Cheat Police." From the article: "If recording a demo is not an option then you can always use screenshots. While these are not as effective they do work. Once reviewed by you, if you do suspect the player is cheating, forward the information to the server admin. This information is always in the listing of the server or even in scrolling messages on the server in-game. Speaking as someone who has been a server admin, when you have a player who you suspect is too good to be true make sure you check them out before immediately kick or ban them. Sometimes it is better to err on the side of caution and presume the player is skilled, than to assume they are cheating. If they really are cheating it will be proven sooner or later anyway."

Re:Does Punkbuster not work at all?

[pxuongl]

punk buster will catch all the popular readily available cheats (stuff u can find with a google search) punk buster won't catch (and never will catch) cheats that are kept secret (like the ones where clan membership or the like are required)

Re:They will break in somehow...

[code-e255]

The map function of ShowEQ was quite neat, but the real powerful thing about it was that it showed all of the mobs in the zone for you. Back then EverQuest would send mob info (names, levels, positions) of the entire zone to the client, even though one could never be in range to see them all. You could also program ShowEQ to play some soundfile when some particular mob spawned.

In EverQuest, a lot of rare NPCs exist around the world which only spawn a few times a day, or less. A lot of the competition in the game was (and maybe still is - I stopped playing about 4 years ago) beating other players to a spawn, so that you could get the loots. ShowEQ gave a huge advantage in this respect. You could just give it a list of rare mobs who've got phat loots, run around the world, and just wait for your ShowEQ machine to go "Beep" and show you a vector to that mob's position.