OT: Cheaters

[capnq]

Some of the trick might be, "lets see if you can find the right tell-tale signs, to indicate HOW the other player is cheating" ... producing a list of "warning signs" that might indicate possible cheating by an opponent Online.

Nearly all of the requests the PBW admins get to investigate suspected cheating turn out to be perfectly legit tactics that the accuser hadn't seen used before. A formal list of "warning signs" would just make people paranoid, because most of them would be indistinguishable from other game events.

capnq
PBW admin

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Pax:
What if they were to arrange it specifically with you beforehand ... ? 8)

If you ask beforehand, I will ask you not to do it on PBW and explain to you that any test you wish to run can be done on your own PC with yourself running all the players turns. Actually it is MUCH more efficent and much faster.

Also, dare I say it, either you or someone else (approved BY you, ofc) should be semi-regularly "testing" PBW's security; hacking into the server itself is merely another potential form of cheating, after all.

We do have someone that takes care of that for us.

Geoschmo

[Atrocities]

They need this and it drives them so that they simply can't enjoy the experience. They can't accept losing because it really makes them feel insecure.

You hit the nail on the head here.

My best friend won't play Tribes 2 because he falls into this catagory. He loves winning so much that he can't handle the taste of defeat. He is not a cheater, just someone who likes to win, and won't play a game unless he can win.

I talked him into playing a hot seat game of SEIV not too long ago. He talked the talk, but when it came right down to it, he did not know enough about the game to offer much of a challenge. (Sorry Aaron, I could not talk him into buying the game.)

A few days ago something odd occured. At first the other player and I suspected it to be unusual, and reported it to PBW Admins. It turned out to be an Intel attack that neither of us had ever seen before. A very effective intel attack I might add. We did not believe it was cheating, but we were concerned that something had happened. In the end, as reported, most concerns turn out to be ok.

In games like Diablo, the spells that sent you right to hell were -um- funny at first, but quickly lost their appeal after about the 300 millionith time. BattleNet suffored horribly because of that.

I guess one of the ways to catch a person who is exploiting the option of cheating is to know how they do it.

In Tribes it was scripts. You could write a script that said, "Give Unlimited Energy" and it would work. Of course once you survivied a direct NUKE hit, and walked away from it without so much as a scratch, you were booted and Banned from the server. That was quickly overcome by logging off, and logging back on with a new user name. Finally they went after IP's. That was very very effective. But IP change.

I could not imagine any one being so desprate as to need to cheat in SEIV. Hell if they want to win, just play the AI. You can cheat like a SOB against it without ever having to "mod" the game.

[Pax]

Personally I can take as much pleasure in losing, as in winning.

Related example to SE4, I also play in several games of --> Stars! <-- and in one of them, my poor race, the Tejari Battle Synod, have been kicked and spat upon pretty much from the moment of first contact. They only survived because another, larger neighbor valued the intelligence data that the Tejar could provide, and hoped I would be able to recover from being on the losing end of a too-early war.

Well, I never fully recovered (near constant war will do that), though I made a good showing for a while in the middle game. The Tejari are currently down to their homeworld, and only about 30 or 40 true warships (a pitifully small number in Stars!, where fleets of hundreds or even thousands regularly clash at -multiple- battle sites each turn) ... it's about as bad a loss as I've ever had in that game.

But I enjoyed every SECOND of that loss; to me, winning is NICE and I'd -like- to win, I'll -try- to win ... but whatever the outcome, it's teh journey there that's most important to me.

Losing race though the Tejari Battle Synod might have turned out to be, they were fun to play. Heck, I've only WON a game of Stars! once yet, and that was more by bluff and diplomacy than aught else!

...

... so, IMO anyone that can't enjoy a game unless they win needs to ease up on the caffeine or sugar or testosterone supplements or whatever. It's a game, not life and death, after all. It's not like Ed McMahon is going to hand the winder of the game a billion dollars or whatnot, after all! (if he was going to, I'd understand caring only for win/loss, US$1B is nothing to sneeze at! lol!)