[quake3] Re: non-cheatable game

[Mariano Ceccato]

Dear Nicolai,

I found your classification very useful to focus the effort of 
anti-cheating.
I also think that different classes of cheat require different approaches.

Regards,
Mariano

Nicolai Hähnle wrote:
> On Tuesday 15 May 2007 10:23:59 Tim Angus wrote:
>  > David Jackson wrote:
>  > > This is untrue, on many levels.
>  >
>  > No, it's entirely true. You can't prevent cheating in online games. You
>  > can possibly put protection in place which makes it harder to cheat, and
>  > you can potentially detect when unsophisticated cheats are being used,
>  > but there is no global panacea that will ever prevent cheating. Get over
>  > it.
>
> I've always felt it useful classify cheats into different "cheat types" to
> make statements that are more precise than a simple "you can't prevent
> cheating". I prefer a classification into:
>
> 1) Game mechanics cheat
> This is the kind of cheat that hacks the underlying "physics" part of the
> rules of a game world. Classic examples would be things like god mode,
> flying, increased speed, infinite resources, quicker building speed in RTS
> games, breaking the rules in chess, etc.
>
> 2) Knowledge cheat
> This kind of cheat reveals some knowledge to the player that is expected to be
> hidden. Examples would include wall hacks, lifting "fog of war" in RTS,
> knowing the resource amounts available to opponents, etc.
>
> 3) Skill cheat / Doping
> This kind of cheat enhances the player's natural abilities, such as her
> dexterity or problem solving skills. Examples would be aimbots or a chess
> computer that a player uses to calculate her next move.
>
> Game mechanics cheats are easily stopped in client-server architectures (just
> verify everything on the server).
>
> You can make Doping difficult, but you can never stop it completely. Period.
> As somebody mentioned in this thread already, a player could (in the extreme
> case) build a robot that connects to the keyboard and monitor and does the
> playing for him.
>
> Knowledge cheats are a grey area. In theory, they can be stopped entirely in a
> client-server architecture by streaming the entire audio and video output in
> real-time from server to client. However, this is prohibitively expensive,
> and completely undesirable for twitch games due to latency issues that simply
> cannot be solved (speed of light, and all that). So in practice, one has to
> find a reasonable balance in what is exposed to the client.
>
> ~Nicolai
>
>   


-- 
Mariano Ceccato
ITC-Irst
Via Sommarive, 18
I-38050 Povo, Trento - ITALY
email: ceccato at itc.it
web: http://sra.itc.it/people/ceccato
tel: +39.0461.314.577
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ITC -> dall'1 marzo 2007 Fondazione Bruno Kessler
ITC -> since 1 March 2007 Fondazione Bruno Kessler
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