OT: Cheaters

[Atrocities]

Before you all go and freak out, I am not talking about SEIV or PBW. What I am talking about is other games.

I recently discovered that I am a naive fool when it comes to cheaters and games. In every game there will be those who cheat. It is when that game becomes so saturated by cheaters that one begins to understand that cheating has become the black market of the On line / Multiplayer universe.

Games such as Tribes, Counter Strike, BOTF, Quake 2, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and even Elite Force and SEIV have all fallen pray to these Lepers who love to cheat.

I just discovered, after nearly a month of game play, that the on line game Black Nova Traders, is a cesspool of cheating. It really sickens me to find out how naive I really am. To have been beaten by a cheater, and to have all my hard work stolen from me by a cheater just makes me want to find the server this game is one, and hack it. Then again, I have no hacking skills, so that in turn really angers me. Sorry, cheating happens, and it is an on line gaming way of life.

The sick thing is that no one seems to be able to stem the tide. The faster the game developers fix the exploits, the faster the hackers hack the game.

When Tribes became as bad as Counter Strike, I stopped playing it. The developers could care less, as they were interested in other issues such as fixing bugs. Commendable, but off target a bit. You see, once the word got out that CS was flooding and swamped by cheaters, no one played. So Sierra had to do something. They recently, Last month, released a new patch for HL to fix many of the known hacks. Well, new hacks are now popping up and the game is once again falling back into that quagmire that cheaters love so much.

Is there no light at the end of the tunnel? I think there is. I think that in time, developers will become so desperate to stop cheaters that they will make it a part of the gaming license that if the player is detected cheating, more than once, then their CD code, registered to them, will be Banned from all game servers for X amount of time. If cheating continues, it will become a permanent ban.

With the ever increasing anti-theft, owner verification programs, and smarter copy prevention systems becoming more and more aggressive, I can see a time when using a pirated copy of a game to play on line with will be a thing of the past.

People say it can not be done, or where there is a will, there is a way, but I say to that, your right. And those who develop these games will eventually find a method that will ensure that although the game can be hacked and copied, it can't be played on line.

In the end, cheaters will loose the incentive to cheat. Cheating is a self-destructive pattern that can only lead to one's loosing interest in a game. If you know you are always going to win, winning becomes less and less important. Once people know that you�re a cheater, who'll want to play with you?

I have learned my lesson about Black Nova Traders, and have stopped playing that game. If the cheaters are so fricking desperate to be top dawg in that game, then I say they can have it. Besides, the banner pop-ups were getting to become a major nuisance.