TECHNOLOGY
From Issue #16
Cheaters Beware
Video Game Designers Are On To You
By Ted Kritsonis
Back
in the day, if
you wanted to rule
competitive gaming, you
hooked up with friends at your place
to get some gaming happening. But that
may be history thanks to Xbox Live and the
PlayStation 2 Network Adaptor, which are
storming the console gaming world, allowing
gamers to take you on online.
Add-ons like communicating in real time through
headsets, keeping track of stats on the Internet and even
challenging a rival through your cell phone are only
broadening this experience, but with online gaming technology
growing so fast, problems can follow just as quickly, including
cheating online.
Microsoft has suggested that as many as 750,000 people have
subscribed to Xbox Live, the console’s online community, while Sony
says it garners 2,500 new users online every day, which translates to
over one million players a year. With so many players on different levels,
gaming companies are trying to keep online playing fields among gamers
as fair and as level as possible — so they don’t lose the momentum they’ve
gained in their game so far.
Cheating online is easy — Microsoft’s PC multiplayer cult classic,
Counter-Strike had its own share of cheaters who did stuff such as using ‘Bot
clones’ (game enhancers) as decoys and camping out in one spot the whole
match. With its newer Xbox launches, Microsoft looked to ensure cheating
wouldn’t be a nagging problem with the latest version of the game. “Xbox Live
is a unified service, which means there’s an infrastructure in place that the
game developers put the game on top of,” explains Chris Wolfe, Xbox Product
Manager. “For instance, the way Counter-Strike has been developed, cheating
isn’t an option because gamers don’t have the ability to modify aspects of the
game by using Bots like they could with the PC version.”
Chris adds that Xbox Live is always being tweaked to enhance performance
and reliability, as well as keeping things competitive using Live’s Optimatch
feature, which allows gamers to track down online games in progress that fit
their requirements. It is one way Xbox tries to keep things competitive
among gamers online.
However, he also points out that game developers
sometimes don’t use a skill rating system. “A game like Crimson Skies will
rank each player based on how many kills they got using a star rating up
to five, while a game like Return to Castle Wolfenstein doesn’t use a
rating system at all,” he says. Sports games, in particular, really show
the differences in talent level among those playing online, though it’s
fairly easy to figure out who’s hot and who’s not based on the stats
available for each gamer.
Naturally, if you were a beginner,
you probably wouldn’t play against someone who’s won 15 games
in a row.
Cheating aside, there are certain aspects of a game you
stand to lose when going online or playing in real time.
The online component changes the replay value of any
game, especially considering the endless hours of
multiplayer mayhem available to gamers.
It’s definitely not a perfect system, and
frustration with some of the people you
encounter online might cause you to
stay away, but this is competition
and you have to learn how to
lose before you learn
how to win.
