By Nathan Grayson on June 13th, 2012 at 12:00 pm.
Apparently, the ability to slow the passage of time - perhaps mankind’s most potent enemy of all – wasn’t enough for some Max Payne 3 players. They needed more an edge. An upper hand. A fool-proof means of killing you and your fun. So, of course, they added the requisite loadout of cheats and hacks to their arsenals, and now honest players are getting quite Mad Max over Max Payne. Happily, however, Rockstar has proposed a rather unique solution.
The paradoxically sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll-obsessed developer explained its take on crime and punishment in a blog post:
“Anyone found to have used hacked saves, modded games, or other exploits to gain an unfair advantage in Max Payne 3 Multiplayer, or to circumvent the leaderboards will be quarantined from all other players into a “Cheaters Pool”, where they’ll only be able to compete in multiplayer matches with other confirmed miscreants.”
“In the event we decide to absolve any of these cheaters for their past transgressions they may re-enter play with the general public, however a second offense will result in their indefinite banishment. In either case, we will be removing invalid leaderboard entries to ensure that the players at the top of the charts have earned their spots fairly.”
Meanwhile, Rockstar also recommends that you report any suspected cheaters to maxpayne3.banhammer@rockstargames.com, because we’ve yet to figure out how to enchant any other tool with swift, brutal banning capabilities.
At the very least, though, this is an interesting way of dealing with it. And while it’s certainly a solid discussion topic in itself, I’d like to widen things a bit: Have you ever out-and-out cheated in an online game? If so, why? Did you feel bad? Did you have a good reason? Conversate! I command it!
13/06/2012 at 12:04 Belsameth says:
I find this a brilliant move!
Far better then outright banning.
Besides that, no. I never did. I don’t have a compulsion to win tho, just to have fun. That, and I don’t play with randoms.
13/06/2012 at 12:22 Ringwraith says:
I think Marvel vs Capcom 3 (or some other fighting game at least) had a similar system with dealing with disconnectors, you’d be put into matches with other disconnecters until you redeemed yourself by not doing it for long enough.
13/06/2012 at 13:21 Malibu Stacey says:
Dota 2 also does this for people who quit a game & don’t reconnect within 5 minutes. If you do that a few times you’ll end up in low priority matchmaking with similar miscreants.
14/06/2012 at 00:19 Edradour says:
As did Hon for whatever amount of years have past since it came out
14/06/2012 at 01:22 Tortango says:
Yep, MvC3 did the same thing. My roommate ragequit a game once, and the next time I played there was a big scary warning about it.
13/06/2012 at 12:04 Jim Rossignol says:
MaxPayneDev7 is such a noob.
13/06/2012 at 13:57 Tom De Roeck says:
lulz
13/06/2012 at 12:05 sinister agent says:
Brilliant. That is so clever it makes everyone who didn’t think of it before look like a colossal idiot.
13/06/2012 at 15:13 Heisenberg says:
its is brilliant.
14/06/2012 at 07:58 MultiVaC says:
Isn’t this what just happens in many games anyway, though? For example in Valve games there are servers that don’t have anti-cheat enabled, so the cheaters, pirates, and banned people just end up playing in those, while legitimate players just avoid them. I don’t see how this is much different.
13/06/2012 at 12:05 HexagonalBolts says:
ooooooohh this is good. This is very good. Can you imagine the sheer horror of starting up a server and finding out that everyone else is unfairly exploiting the game as well?
13/06/2012 at 12:25 Fanbuoy says:
It does sound like it could deliver some pretty interesting games though. Just imagine a game where every player is a cheating miscreant, whose character is running around like a rampaging Hercules on steroids.
13/06/2012 at 13:45 Gundato says:
Actually, back in the days before Steam, a few friends and I would regularly play Counterstrike with every hack we could possibly find. When EVERYONE has wallhacks, aimbots, and speedhacks it gets really crazy-stupid, really fast.
13/06/2012 at 15:54 Renfield says:
Thank you for that mental image.
(@Fanbuoy – reply fail)
13/06/2012 at 20:03 LionsPhil says:
A world in which everyone is a reality-warper.
Probably a bit boring if it’s susceptable to That Cheat Where Everyone Suddenly Just Drops Dead, mind. (Also known as Hidden & Dangerous mode.)
13/06/2012 at 12:44 InternetBatman says:
That sounds amazing, not terrifying.
13/06/2012 at 12:05 kregg says:
The only time I ever “cheated” in an online game was in TF2, and that was idling.
After having nearly half of my backpack gone, I’ve never bothered with multiplayer “cheats” ever again.
The kicker? Valve was doing it to punish people who were trying to get hats. I only did it to replace the weapons I stupidly deleted when the backpack system allowed you to permanently delete weapons. In the end I ended up with less weapons than before.
Really isn’t worth it IMHO.
14/06/2012 at 11:57 stupid_mcgee says:
That wasn’t even true idling, then. You could and still can idle. What you can NOT do, is fool the TF2 item servers into thinking that you are connected, when in fact you are not.
That’s the funny part. Tons of people idled responsibly (by actually running TF2) and still got to keep their stuff. Only those that tried to hoodwink the system were punished.
http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Idling
13/06/2012 at 12:06 SanguineAngel says:
I love it. Also no I’ve never out and out cheated in an MP game. Possibly due to a lack of knowledge? I suspect it would be relatively easy to find out but why ruin the fun for myself and for others? That would make me a double dick.
13/06/2012 at 12:22 jrodman says:
Speaking for myself, I would love to see the reverse engineering that went into it: the design of the system, the protocol details, how the safeguards are defeated. It would be neat to run the tools under packet inspection and debuggers and stuff.
But the actual motivation to cheat online? Eh, I don’t like competing. The only fun for me would be to have some kind of bitter joy at utterly rendering the idea of the challenge pointless. But that would be unsightly. So I’d give it a pass.
13/06/2012 at 12:40 jimbobjunior says:
The same. I can see the appeal and real fun behind creating the cheats, the aimbots, wall hacks etc. But using them? That would be dull as anything.
13/06/2012 at 13:17 Ninja Foodstuff says:
On a slightly tangential note, why is cheating in a single-player game considered such a big deal these days?
13/06/2012 at 13:23 Rinox says:
Probably a consequence of the relatively young ‘achievement culture’. You could get achievements or Xbox live points or whatever virtual e-peen currency they use without putting in the same effort as non-cheaters, thus raining on their parade.
Of course, why anyone would care about other people’s achievements seems hard to understand, but a lot of people see to do so…
14/06/2012 at 00:44 Boosterh says:
I prefer to think of it with a sports analogy. MP games are directly competitive, like hockey, football, or MMA: you are directly competing against someone else. SP is indirectly competitive, like running. As long as you are just running for your own health and pleasure, there is no harm in taking some shortcuts. But it is no more fair to post your results on the leaderboard with cheats on then it is to expect your 5 km time, run indoors, on the track; to count against the racers running up and down the hills outdoors in the 35 C weather. Some might call it “e-peen;” I just call it friendly competition.
14/06/2012 at 01:28 Saldek says:
A difference remains, tough. When I play certain SP games my results are posted by the game, not by me. I don’t get the option to go “just running for [my] own health” and to choose my own conditions. I get entered into a competition.
13/06/2012 at 13:29 Mordsung says:
I don’t think it’s a big deal to most as long as your scores aren’t showing up on leader boards.
The consolers are a bit more obsessed with stuff like achievements but I’ve yet to meet a PC player who doesn’t either hate achievements or are indifferent to their existence.
14/06/2012 at 00:43 VelvetFistIronGlove says:
I kinda like them—well, some of them. I like it when a game records of interesting or challenging things I’ve completed. Primarily as a single-player thing for my own enjoyment. They’re less annoying on Steam than they are on the Xbox, where they play a big chime and pop up an enormous message :-/
13/06/2012 at 13:33 Hmm-Hmm. says:
Probably because multiplayer is so widespread these days.
13/06/2012 at 18:44 psyk says:
“In either case, we will be removing invalid leaderboard entries to ensure that the players at the top of the charts have earned their spots fairly.”
13/06/2012 at 19:11 Chorltonwheelie says:
Is it? I really should get out more.
Though I’m not a dedicated single player cheater I can’t see the harm in loading up Doom and tearing around on Nightmare level in God mode.
More recently I tried a hack on Metro 2033, a game I love and have played through many times, that spruced up my ammo and filters. It was lovely to get all the gizmo’s and enjoy the environment in a different way (ie not sweating, shitting bricks and dying a lot).
I don’t see the problem. After all your only spoiling it for yourself if you haven’t played it through as best you can in vanilla.
As for MP cheaters……burn the bastards.
14/06/2012 at 02:52 GreatGreyBeast says:
I dunno, but I was just noticing that in the latest SimCity comments, wherein people were actually defending the lack of savegames by saying that having them was “a form of cheating.” Oooooooooooooo-kay….. maybe it kinda sorta is, but the question remains: so friggin’ what?
14/06/2012 at 04:56 Secundus says:
before this the arcade mode leaderboards were trashed with cheating scores. oh man your so funny getting 1337 seconds in every level on new york minute
13/06/2012 at 12:08 GallonOfAlan says:
Never cheated, since apart from being the online equivalent of shattering a bus shelter on the way home from the pub out of pure dickness, the uber-faff involved was also off-putting.
13/06/2012 at 12:10 SanguineAngel says:
nicely put
13/06/2012 at 12:19 noodlecake says:
Me neither. If I play against someone who takes advantages of exploits or even purposefully takes advantage of an obviously unbalanced aspect of a game I happen to be very good at, I go out of my way to hammer them into the ground using very obviously fair and clean methods. It’s very satisfying. Although very aggravating if they manage to win.
13/06/2012 at 12:09 DanPryce says:
I can see the Cheat Pool becoming Max Payne 3′s arena of champions. If you can win in a cheaters vs cheaters match, surely that’s a greater challenge that playing by the rules?
13/06/2012 at 12:14 sinister agent says:
You can also win by going round their house and beating them to death with a rubber hose. I’d definitely consider that a more worthy challenge.
13/06/2012 at 12:17 jrodman says:
If somewhat unsanitary.
13/06/2012 at 12:41 Fuzzball says:
Well, that’s what the hose is for!
13/06/2012 at 14:34 Soapeh says:
During a hosepipe ban for irony.
14/06/2012 at 01:33 Saldek says:
Don’t bring a rubber hose to a gun fight.
13/06/2012 at 13:39 Mctittles says:
There used to be this online cart racing game “Re-Volt” that I played quite often. It was packed full of rampant cheating, although you could usually tell a cheaters car because the skin didn’t download.
Anyway, as a non-cheater my friends and I would often host games and in the description note that cheater cars were allowed to join, but you would be largely ridiculed if you loose even after cheating.
The thing is we would often race better against the cheater cars because they put their speed up so high they weren’t able to react fast enough to the corners so would actually race slower.
14/06/2012 at 20:11 Snargelfargen says:
Re-volt was a lot of fun! It played sort of like Mario-Kart at double-speed, and the environments were really interesting (you drove miniature rc cars through houses, lawns, etc.).
Anyways, making the cars even faster than they already were was suicidal, especially considering the twitchy handling. Those cheaters are colossal idiots.
13/06/2012 at 19:25 Ragnar says:
I thought you were going to suggest that the cheaters arena could be the ultimate challenge. Those gaming gods who are “sick of pwning newbs all day” could enter the cheaters arena and try their legit skills against the overpowered cheaters.
13/06/2012 at 12:10 Drake Sigar says:
Why not. Give the roided athletes their own separate Olympic games.
13/06/2012 at 12:18 Post-Internet Syndrome says:
IRL, they already do…
13/06/2012 at 13:03 frightlever says:
What is it? Some of those Middle Eastern competitions, for various sports, were a bit dodgy but I’m not aware of any rival to the Olympics that doesn’t test for drugs.
Obviously the real Olympics is rife with drugs, the only ones who get caught are the ones with bad management.
13/06/2012 at 14:41 phuzz says:
Why not give anyone found to be taking drugs more drugs? That should even the field a bit when some ‘roided up sprinter is trying to stroke the flowers because he’s just coming up on a massive dose of acid…
13/06/2012 at 17:33 Fiatil says:
Well, you just came up with the best answer to steroids in sports I’ve ever heard.
Though you may wind up throwing a no hitter in baseball if they give you acid. (youtube it if you’re interested, it’s a pretty fantastic story)
13/06/2012 at 15:02 disperse says:
Reminds me of this old Saturday Night Live sketch:
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/update-all-drug-olympics/1198068
13/06/2012 at 12:10 JeCa says:
Didn’t ARMA 2 have a system where if you were found cheating it wouldn’t notify you in any way, but all your weapons would mysteriously have slightly worse accuracy… Or wasagainst pirates?
13/06/2012 at 12:11 SanguineAngel says:
That is also pretty brilliant. Although a little bit annoying if you are wrongly accused as you would not be able to appeal.
13/06/2012 at 12:34 Post-Internet Syndrome says:
That’s the FADE system against piracy. Remember: Original games don’t FADE!
13/06/2012 at 13:02 The Sombrero Kid says:
These piracy only bug systems are idiotic in that they make your game look like it’s broken to potential customers.
13/06/2012 at 13:20 misterT0AST says:
“potential customers”, read: “pirates”.
13/06/2012 at 13:49 The Sombrero Kid says:
Pirates and people pirates talk about games to, I know I personnally have quite a lot of influence over what games half a dozen heavy gamers buy (& they, me) not to mention all the casual gamers I recommend to.
13/06/2012 at 13:55 The Sombrero Kid says:
Also I’m a developer & there’s nothing worse than seeing pirates spit rage onto app store reviews about your game crashing & knowing other people are being put off by that, it’s also difficult to tell if it’s a legitimate crash or the deliberate one. Also you’d have to be a bit dim if you have an opportunity to advertise to pirates (who almost certainly didn’t buy your game because they can’t justify the money, not because they take great pleasure in fucking me, Andrew Haining, over) & you decide to shove the fact they’ve no money in their face rather than say hey isn’t this a great game, if you buy it, it’ll be even better!
13/06/2012 at 13:56 hello_mr.Trout says:
but those very same pirates might develop brand loyalty to whatever games they pirate, and invest money later on at some point? – okay, maybe farfetched, or only happens in small percentage of cases but still – blanket statements aren’t so great, and the whole piracy vs. lost revenue debate is pretty complex. there are lots of factors involved!
13/06/2012 at 14:05 Joshua Northey says:
I don’t think it is 1/4 as complex as the pirates would have you believe. I mean by the time you are an adult you have learned the basic human skill of figuring out who is lying when a store owners accuses a kid of stealing a cookie. (HINT: Not the store owner).
13/06/2012 at 14:54 Aedrill says:
That’s a very nice post, Joshua. Would you mind adding some actual argument to it? Because hello_mr.Trout’s comment didn’t say anything about false positives, he just stated that pirated copy != lost sale, which is true. I know that reading comprehension is not beneficial to publishers so you don’t want to waste your time on it but maybe you could try just this one time?
13/06/2012 at 15:01 Brun says:
Yes, since all store owners are honest and ethical people and would never lie to gain financial advantage if they thought they could get away with it.
13/06/2012 at 13:10 Salt says:
That was against pirates, also appeared in Take On Helicopters with the visuals distorting and degrading over time on pirated copies.
Of course depending on how they did it, just as liable to affect legitimate customers as any other DRM. Except they’re less likely to understand what’s happening to be able to seek support.
13/06/2012 at 13:55 dahools says:
That sounds good on the ARMA bit, but what if your cheat/ hack is incredibly accurate weapons? or bullets that never miss?
I think depending on the circumstances of the cheat or hack depends on the punishment. No good being in a server full of cheaters if they all have god mode enabled is there?
13/06/2012 at 12:11 jrodman says:
Oo mee mee!
I cheated at online flash-based chess in the sense that I had a computer pick my moves for me.
I justified it to myself by noting that there were a lot of other such players and a lot of rude players. Not that this really makes any sense.
But I had a lot of computers available at the time. I ran a distributed chess engine on like 100 computers at work on the weekend while fixing bugs and such. And I wanted to see what it could do. It could win, a lot.
13/06/2012 at 12:30 jrodman says:
Oh, I forgot.
Once in World of Warcraft in the pvp battleground called Warsong Gulch, people were making me be the flag carrier again (despite my terrible gear and low experience) and people led me up into some portion of the horde fort which was nearly impossible to get to and clearly not intended to be accessible. After about 30 seconds of being up there I decided that was stupid and jumped down. We captured it anyway.
I also cheated one time playing magic the gathering over email by mulliganing an initial draw of all land without telling my opponent. I think that rule didn’t exist yet, or I didn’t know it. So I just drew another hand, because the game would have sucked for everyone otherwise.
So all told we have: manipulating game state (magic:tg), computer aiding (chess), and bug exploiting (wow). I’m a terrible person having cheated those three times since 1993.
13/06/2012 at 17:05 Ancient Algae says:
Ha, that was hilarious!
13/06/2012 at 12:11 Kollega says:
The notion presented in the alt-text is rather controversial, Nathan. I’m not sure if world would actually be a better place if policemen could wall-hack.
Then again, i’m basing my assumptions off Russian police. Perhaps in civilized world the ability to invade privacy so grossly wouldn’t be misused as much.
(And for the record, no, i’ve never cheated in online games. Didn’t play too much of them to begin with.)
13/06/2012 at 12:14 SanguineAngel says:
Like heck it wouldn’t. Most of the policemen I know are massive nobs and exactly the sort who would cheat in a game of CoD.
Although to be fair personal experience only counts for so much.
13/06/2012 at 12:17 sinister agent says:
It works a lot better if you remove the words “of wall hacking”.
13/06/2012 at 20:44 LionsPhil says:
Yeouch.
13/06/2012 at 21:12 Droopy The Dog says:
Ba-dum-toosh indeed
13/06/2012 at 17:02 Grargh says:
Civilized world is a nice illusion. Rest assured that at least here in Germany the riot cops are exactly the same type of person – not to think about the militias the call police over in the US. When they begin to use wall-hacks and the likes, I’m definitely changing the server.
13/06/2012 at 18:41 Johnny Fronthole says:
They already do:
http://www.infowars.com/4th-amendment-violating-mobile-x-ray-scanners-hit-the-streets/
13/06/2012 at 12:16 Mungrul says:
Pretty novel way of dealing with cheaters, and I can’t see anything inherently wrong with it.
Thumbs up R*
Related, I saw that Blizzard brought the banhammer down on cheaters earlier in the week.
What nobody expanded on that I was quite interested to hear was what the effect of the ban was. Have these people been permanently banned from being able to play Diablo 3?
If so, that strikes me as being a very bad thing.
Do they get a refund?
13/06/2012 at 12:24 jrodman says:
Oh no no, I’m sure you’ve quite misunderstood. They just can’t play *online* anymore.
13/06/2012 at 12:16 domizindahawze says:
I got kicked out for cheating once on a Day of Defeat playing on Snow Bridge.
Some german sniper was shooting people right at the exit of the american base. He was hidden inside a rock just above the base. So I inched my way up to the glitchy rock and killed him, then killed a couple other guys from up there, my bad i know, and got kicked out.
13/06/2012 at 12:18 Captain Captane says:
The only time I’ve used cheats during multiplayer was quite a few years ago when I had some friends over for a mini LAN party. After playing all sorts of stuff we all got an incredibly obvious aimbot for CS:S and went into some random non VAC servers. Yes it was a dick move but it was hilarious with company. We then played against each other which became a sort of wild west scenario of fastest on the draw wins.
13/06/2012 at 12:20 Jnx says:
This will lead into some awkward matches, as the most obvious and commonly used cheat in MP3MP is invulnerability.
Glad that they are doing something, I thought this would die in a month due to shaky connectivity and cheats but maybe it’ll live.
13/06/2012 at 12:33 gwathdring says:
That’s awesome! They still get to play, but they’re on their own as far as protection from other cheaters goes and everyone else gets to play in peace.
13/06/2012 at 12:39 Web Cole says:
Does screen looking count? :P
13/06/2012 at 12:43 Staal says:
Just registered to say how fond I am of this website and its commenters. I’ve lost count of how many times I had to clean my coffee -covered monitor because of you guys. Thanks!
13/06/2012 at 12:44 The Smilingknight says:
Oh..hohohoho – ho!
This will turn out to be a bad, bad move… its going to shoot them right in the face.
Get ready for “enhanced MAx league” and “King of the worst” throne and people intentionally cheating to get in that exclusive league of badass playahs (thats what the will call themselves).
btw… if i have a copy of the game that came to me through other channels i had no influence over, without me lifting a finger, and this copy is just sitting on my hard drive without being installed at all for days now… am i stealing money from Rockstar?
(i never had any inclination to buy or play the game at all too)
ha! hahahaha! whoeee…
13/06/2012 at 12:49 Kdansky says:
So what? If the cheaters have fun with that and don’t bother me, I really don’t care.
13/06/2012 at 12:44 mr.ioes says:
Not really cheats, but nonetheless dickery: hosting wc3 games and kicking people for various reasons, wasting their time. I’m guilty of that. Imagine Dota 2 where you are one keypress away form kicking unpleasant players. Yeah …
13/06/2012 at 14:14 RandomNext says:
I did that a lot too. Honestly most of them deserved it. Writing “Go/start” repeatedly even after they got told that I intend to wait for more players or getting insulting was more than enough reason for me to kick players right before I started the game.
Still laughed my ass off everytime though ;-)
13/06/2012 at 12:45 The Smilingknight says:
I also had a copy of the new batman game just sitting on my hard drive for months until i finally deleted it cause i needed space.
How much damage did i do?
:rofl:
13/06/2012 at 12:47 InternetBatman says:
This is a great solution, and I imagine the cheating servers could eventually become quite fun too. If only there was a way to load hacks just to go on cheat servers, and then come back to normal later.
13/06/2012 at 12:48 Post-Internet Syndrome says:
I’ve been accused of hacking in bf3 twice. I’m very proud of it.
Never cheated in a mutliplayer game, but when I was little I cheated in SP all the time. Many games I have not to this day completed without the aid of cheats. Most notably the original Commandos and its expansion, G-police and the Aladdin platformer. Many years later I managed to get to the final level of the commandos expansion, but the original game I have only gotten to like the 11th level or so legitimately.
I was immensely proud when I finally beat Oni without invincibility.
More on topic, I recently read that reddit post where a bf3 cheater came out and told exactly how the hack he used worked and what it could do. I found it pretty fascinating actually, how they only cheat a bit, to avoid being obvious. So the hack actually enables full invincibility and instakilling of any player on the server, but most people would only use the map- and wallhack, and maybe the damage hack. (Snap aim is very recognizable on killcam, so they are smart enough not to use it too much.)
13/06/2012 at 12:49 Kdansky says:
I play to win.
I do not cheat.
See sirlin.net/ptw , a must-read for any player of a competitive game.
13/06/2012 at 12:56 The Tupper says:
They should do it for the Olympics too. Then that cheating bastard Dwain Chambers might win a medal honestly.
13/06/2012 at 12:56 The Sombrero Kid says:
I don’t cheat in life, there’s even less incentive to cheat in a game, so I don’t do that either, this is a good solution though.
13/06/2012 at 13:11 NathanH says:
About eight years ago I got my computer to check my analysis in an email chess game. I did it because I was winning against a much stronger player but it was really complicated and I didn’t want to screw up. But it was naughty and bad and I will not do it again.
I played BG2 pvp with two items that weren’t actually attainable in the game (standard acceptable practice was to cheat your character to the xp cap and then add your wanted items in Shadowkeeper). In my defense I had seen both items on other characters that looked legit, they seemed like proper items with sensible descriptions, another player thought he’d acquired one of them in-game, and everyone thought they looked genuine. Since everyone else used them shortly afterwards it was probably not a big deal. I also had a BG2 character with +3 AC and +3 thac0, but that was because a bug that I could reproduce with witnesses, and I removed them once I learned how to edit PC’s innate abilities.
13/06/2012 at 13:16 Jeremy says:
The only cheating I ever did was back in Counter Strike days, and it was more of a study of the different hacks out there. We were in a fairly competitive clan, and we wanted to make sure we knew what to look for if people seemed a little “too good.” It was on a closed server, and everyone involved knew there were hacks in play, so I don’t know if that counts as hacking in the legitimate(illegitimate?) sense.
13/06/2012 at 13:27 Rinox says:
I think a lot of it is peer pressure. I’ve been in clans too, and I was convinced that some of my fellow clan members were using hacks or at the very least ‘assistance tools’, but no one said it out loud. It was this public secret, and if you wanted to stay in the picture it was more or less expected of you to ‘do the sensible thing’ and use some hacks yourself. Of course nothing too outrageous, because if you’d get caught your cheating teammates would be the first to condemn you.
It’s surprising how many similarities this shares with doping culture in sports.
13/06/2012 at 13:21 db1331 says:
I wish they would do this with people who camp in FPS’s. Round them all up and let them play by themselves. No one would ever get a kill, because they would all just sit in a corner somewhere near where they spawned. Imagine if they took everybody who snipes from the main in BF3 and made them play together.
13/06/2012 at 13:25 Maldomel says:
That’s not cheating though, even if campers are the bane of many a player in fps.
13/06/2012 at 14:15 MD says:
In a well-designed game, camping isn’t a problem. To counter it you just take all the items the camper isn’t challenging for, bunnyhop over and rocket them in the face.
13/06/2012 at 14:18 BillyIII says:
Unreal Tournament has anti-camping mutators. May be BF has something similar?
14/06/2012 at 00:51 VelvetFistIronGlove says:
They should make it that if you camp too long, ants come and crawl all over you, and you do an involuntary crazy dance for 30 seconds trying to get the ants out of your pants.
14/06/2012 at 01:00 Boosterh says:
Okay, this might be a legitimate complaint in a run and gunner like HALO, but in BF3, if they give you a bolt action rifle with a scope, and a map measured in kilometers, I think that long distance firing from cover is one of the ways you are supposed to play the game. I mean, that’s the way I train in the army, and BF3 was pushing its whole “just like real life” aspect pretty hard.
13/06/2012 at 13:22 Binary77 says:
I’ve never cheated online, but I remember about 10 years ago i fired up Counterstrike on a mate’s PC & he had a bunch of wallhacks etc activated. I questioned him about it & he claimed it was “just a test, out of curiosity”. But the same guy also used to put his cat in the tumble-dryer as a kid, so i guess that shows you what kind of person cheats in online games!
13/06/2012 at 13:24 Maldomel says:
Very interesting move from Rockstar. We need more situations where people are not just banned, but rather kept in check to make them understand their wrongs.
Also, I never cheated in multiplayer or online, and I despise the people who do that.
13/06/2012 at 13:29 dudeglove says:
I used to have terrible ping and would grief players that way in TF2 – does that count?
13/06/2012 at 13:32 marcusfell says:
I used cheat codes all the time in the Age of Empires II single-player. It was actually kinda awesome, because if you type “howdoyouturnthison” you can spawn cadillacs with machine guns. Also, it turns out the computer controlled monks could totally convert them, but their colors don’t change. I will never forget the sight of fifty blue cars shooting at each other.
13/06/2012 at 13:34 PoulWrist says:
Never cheat or exploit. It is the lowest you can sink. Accept that you suck or find a way to enjoy it without ruining it for others. If that is what gives you your kicks, something is wrong with you.
I have quit raids in my mmo of choice when something failed and the only way to avoid starting over another day was to exploit the game. I want nothing to do with such behaviour
cheaters and sploiters are the lowest of the low. Despicable.
13/06/2012 at 13:40 Sinomatic says:
Genius, Rockstar, just genius. If we could expand this to all games, and widen the scope to do the same for all the abusive bigots, I would be the happiest little gamer there ever was.
Never cheated myself. I used to get laughed at in Diablo 2 in Baal runs because I was seemingly the only sorc on earth who didn’t use Maphack (and that was a hack of convenience rather than anything competitive). I just don’t understand the mentality behind cheating. Other than the really obvious ones (who obviously do it to grief), what’s the point? What does it get you?
13/06/2012 at 13:41 paddymaxson says:
I wouldn’t say I’m proud of cheating in games, but I’m not exactly ashamed either.
I used to be in a middling-at-best CS Clan, the clan leader hated me, but I was decent enough and the rest of the clan liked me (let’s not get into me indiscriminately photoshopping erect penises into photos of him smiling like he might really want a penis near his face).
His argument was that I wasn’t good enough at CS to remain in the clan, so myself and the deputy leader hatched a plan:
I would cheat (skillfully – if you configure your aimbot right and use the right weapons and are at least good enough to aim in the general vicinity of the enemy then you’re quite hard to delect) at CS and become the best person in the clan quickly.
Anyway, long story short, the clan fell apart after their FINEST player got banned from Enemy Down.
I later reappeared with a voice changer and joined his new Clan but got bored before I took the charade too far.
Since then I’ve been a pretty resolute non-cheater, I don’t even cheat in single player, don’t see the point. I do bot at WoW but I don’t consider making something work more tirelessly than I do to be cheating.
13/06/2012 at 13:41 Ocho says:
I got banned for modding MW2. so worth it.
13/06/2012 at 13:42 cpy says:
Lotus 2,3 infinite time cheat, because i was too young to understand why it is bad
Turrican – inv. all weapons: i had fun so what?
Xenon – inv. well i had fun even invulnerable, when you’re kid, it’s fun anyway
and many many more games on amiga 500+
Doom, Dukenukem: oh yeah baby give me all stuff :)
CS – geometry mesh view, just for the fun of it.
Diablo 2 item duping on local MP
Titan Quest item duping, got bored due to cheating :(
Warcraft 3 – dota public game maphack, just for fun of it to have some troll time.
WoW – been botting for over 12 months and trading gold for gametime, got bored so i switched game.
Minecraft xray me baby one more time, mineral map, diamond hacks and all fun stuff on MP, where i havent intended to stay long, it’s less fun to cheat when you’re admin on one :)
Diablo 3 – only few hacks: darkd3 and loot font replace
30 facebook accounts for just game advantages, multiaccount online games (travian, LOU and many more i played)
Only bans i got is on forums and temp ingame for racism or some other jokes i pull on chat with random people, i got my accounts permabanned on wow forums just for messing with blizz by typing posts in !@#$ or !@#$% characters like so: Have a !@#$ (nice) day :)
13/06/2012 at 13:44 NeuralNet says:
Not really news, I would have assumed that MP3 did this already because it uses a modified version of the same engine that GTA IV uses and anyone with a modified version of GTA IV couldn’t join a session hosted by a player with no modifications.
13/06/2012 at 13:47 Joc says:
IDSPISPOPD
I was building maps though. Yeah, that’s my excuse.
13/06/2012 at 13:52 Screamer says:
I win so I don’t have to cheat! :P
Lol… seriously though, can’t fathom why someone would feel better after they had to cheat to be better than someone else :/
13/06/2012 at 13:58 BenA says:
All I ever did was IDDQD and IDKFA.
They’re burned into my neurons just as much as h, l, k and j are for vi. Even after all this time.
13/06/2012 at 14:06 slinkyinmotion says:
This is a fantastic idea. I love the idea of cheaters getting a taste of well deserved medicine. Will cheaters be told they have been moved to a new pool? I find it hilarious to think of a bunch of cheaters all unknowingly fighting each other pointlessly and watching them rage at others for cheating. Then at the end of the match there is no scoreboard or leader chart just the giant words – CHEATERS NEVER WIN.
Also I think it’d be great for non-cheaters to have an additional “spectate the forsaken” option to watch these knuckleheads rage at each other. Any spectator can have full voice access to trash talk and make fun of all the losers in the pool. But then, I’m a heartless sod.
13/06/2012 at 14:07 Joshua Northey says:
Hmmmm, I don’t think I have ever cheated in a game. Would kind of defeat the point, no? Especially since there are no rewards for winning other than your self esteem.
Heck I even feel awful when loading a previous save in a SP if I feel I screwed something up. 99% of the time I just restart the mission rather than just jumping back far enough to erase the mistake.
13/06/2012 at 14:13 Greggh says:
I like cheating in the GTA games: when I’m almost done with a session of playing I would save and then make all those dreamish car-flying things one can make cheating, godlike killing the entire army then just quit the game while laughing as some crazy glitchy cheat goes awry.
Kinda like when you play SimCity for a couple hours, get bored from playing seriously, save and smite down you city with meteors, godzillas and whatnot just for the hell of it
13/06/2012 at 14:27 Sinomatic says:
Cheating in a single player game isn’t really the issue though, it only affects you and that’s just funtimes. Very different story online.
13/06/2012 at 14:41 Greggh says:
My point being, aside from cheating to “feel superior” to your counterparts or whatever, maybe people cheat to enhance or change their gaming experience (because of boredom, repetitiveness etc.).
Like someone said in the comments above, if you cheat in an online game with your friends – and they’re cheating too, or not – cheating just makes it a different game, not a leverage.
13/06/2012 at 15:38 Sinomatic says:
I wouldn’t really call that cheating though, if it’s all consensual funtimes (as it were), I’d call that modding. Cheating is more something you’d do in a competitive environment to gain advantage over other people, or to get around or exploit the game system to profit in some way.
13/06/2012 at 19:18 Brun says:
Cheating in games like Skyrim or Just Cause 2 (sandbox games) is uber funtimes.
13/06/2012 at 14:35 Stevostin says:
“At the very least, though, this is an interesting way of dealing with it. And while it’s certainly a solid discussion topic in itself, I’d like to widen things a bit: Have you ever out-and-out cheated in an online game? If so, why? Did you feel bad? Did you have a good reason? Conversate! I command it!”
In TF2 I think I did until I switched to a better mouse and achieved those kind of unfair headshot on a regular basis, that I knew were completely exasperating for the opposition. That being said I’ve seen people looking strangely at walls, always lucky to find there was indeed someone coming at the corner. I also saw headshots that required insane yet clearly not impossible skills and Spies with unlimited cloak before item for that even existed. So I’d say “yes”, unless I am prove wrong, but I’d also say that on TF2 hacking while helping doesn’t necessarily push you up to the top ranking if there”s a real veteran out there. Which actually makes things complicated : a cheater can keep unoticed, being help but not insanely good either.
13/06/2012 at 14:35 Soapeh says:
When I was 13 I went to BSkyB’s studios to take part in their fledgling flagship production Games World. My mission was to ask Madame Pixel for a cheat for Enduro Racer on the Master System. My two buddies asked for cheats for Sonic and some other Megadrive game. My stupid pubescent face wasn’t broadcast but theirs were. I felt cheated. Doubly so because I thought I’d meet Diane “Games Mistress and Jet off Gladiators” Yousdale but she was in another studio on a different day.
13/06/2012 at 14:36 Zankmam says:
This is interesting.
Funnily enough, their games will probably end up being better once they get bored with the cheats.
13/06/2012 at 14:41 Cryo says:
Put verbally abusive jerks in there too and we might finally have some nice things.
13/06/2012 at 14:50 Skabooga says:
This is so Jean Paul Sarte it hurts.
13/06/2012 at 15:05 lasikbear says:
Only time I cheated in MP was this one day in TF2 where the server I was playing was bugging out a bit. There was a class limiter on, but it would keep the body type of the first class you chose. This meant you could be a heavy with 300 hp holding a sniper rifle, or a Spy running at the speed of the scout (including plenty of less useful options).
I have no idea how it happened, this was pretty soon after one of the item updates, and I never saw it again, but for that one hour or so it was a lot of fun.
13/06/2012 at 15:10 Brian_black says:
I was banned from a TF2 server because the community there thought i was hacking somehow after killing 3 people in a row as a scout. Because, you know, there was no other possible explanation. Nothing raises my ire more than being wrongly accused of cheating (as in my view, you’re being immoral in a non-real environment), which led to a fantastic thread on their community’s forum. On the plus side, it incidentally caused me to find the server where a good number of my (now) online friends resided.
13/06/2012 at 15:12 Haborym says:
No, because I am not a faggot.
13/06/2012 at 16:24 BiPolar says:
Sadly, I have. The original Dungeon Siege, which I guess qualifies as a multiplayer. THere was a hack locally where you could increase your XP dramatically and get better weapons. I’d been playing the game for quite a while and got bored, so I sped it up to increase my character. Once done, I went in and helped out newer players as a guide and protector.
13/06/2012 at 16:31 brulleks says:
But will they still be allowed to use their cheats against each other in this Cheater’s Pool? That would be the best punishment – no matter what they use to cheat, there’ll always be someone out there with a bigger cheat. The developers should also play in these servers and introduce their own cheats, for a truly clinical payback.
13/06/2012 at 17:14 Chris Evans says:
Year ago on CS: Source I visited a server my friends ran, but this time I had some random clan tags on ([TeamStabby] if anyone remembers the UKTC servers) so they didn’t recognise me at first. A few lucky headshots later and I was kicked and banned for an hour or something because they thought I was hacking. Good times :)
13/06/2012 at 17:48 DrGonzo says:
Except it’s the detecting of the cheats that is the problem, not what you do with them.
13/06/2012 at 17:50 Torgen says:
This even beats Serious Sam’s immortal pink scorpion anti-piracy gambit.
13/06/2012 at 18:42 raptorak says:
I haven’t cheated, but I have “exploited” a few times.
The one I remember the most was in Ultima Online, there were certain magic weapons and pieces of armour that would boost your skills in various fighting skills over 100 (swordsmanship, tactics, archery the like). Since every skill was rated out of 100.00, I remember I used a magic bow to increase my archery rating from 76.03 to 101.03. What you had to do then was fight and practise until you gained 0.1 in the skill, and after you unequipped the bow, you would see that the skill remained at 100.
I did this for both archery and tactics, and for a couple of weeks (since they had just buffed archery, and 2 days later they fixed the exploit) I was one of the most powerful anti-PKs on the server :P Too bad I totally sucked at playing it LOL.
13/06/2012 at 18:46 PAK-9 says:
I don’t think Rockstar deserve quite as much credit for this idea as they are receiving. MP3 is a steam game and matchmaking detected cheaters against each other in multiplayer games is actually what Valve recommend to developers using their steamworks networking technology, I think it’s likely Rockstar are just following this recommendation.
13/06/2012 at 19:24 Grape says:
If the police were able to wall-hack, the world would be a fucking horrifying place.
13/06/2012 at 20:18 Torgen says:
As far as being accused of cheating myself, I’ve been accused of hacking World of Tanks, even though I only have a 55% win rate (the worst in my clan.)
If you’re going to get tunnel vision and let me shoot you in the flank *twice* from your own base (and *still* never see me on the minimap) you’re going to have a bad time.
13/06/2012 at 21:04 SquidgyB says:
Worst and only thing I’ve ever done was write my own AutoHotKey script for looting and salvaging in eve online, running Level 4 missions with 3/4 accounts on one machine.
I didn’t make silly amounts of isk, I just found it to be an interesting challenge to write the script (which got quite complex towards the end) and to run the missions as efficiently as possible. It started off as a simple “target wrecks, fire tractor beams, salvage and move loot” but ended up working out the range of the loot, transferring to the hold of another ship, warping back to station when full, ie, full automation of the salvage operation.
In the most lame defence: eve got very boring after a while…
Conversely I’ve been getting quite webwarriorish over the exploiting going on in DayZ recently – which Jim covered nicely in his story the other day. There’s also a lot of plain DCing to escape death, either from players or when playing PVE – something that’s bringing up a lot of strong emotions on the DayZ forums, with some surprisingly vociferous defense of blatant exploit use, and plain whining from (oh I hate saying this but…) people who *aren’t playing the game properly*.
So yeah, I did (PVE), I don’t now, and I get annoyed by people who do – but moreso because the exploits are used directly as a tactical advantage that is nigh unassailable to a player who’s playing “fair”.
13/06/2012 at 21:19 Prokroustis says:
Cheating is bad, m’ kay?
13/06/2012 at 21:20 Hypocee says:
My little brother was/is a twitch god, played CSS for years and nearly got into CAL on a casual basis. At one point I pointed him toward Natural Selection. Watched him download it and install it, mess around a bit with me showing him how commnader worked, the weapons and alien movements. He naturally gravitated toward the Magical FPS Pistol for its huge damage, pinpoint accuracy, click-fast ROF. He joined a server, popped a Lerk and got banned for aimbotting.
13/06/2012 at 21:24 Flavioli says:
WoW did it first; in some patch that came out right before I quit, they made it so that you got experience from PvP. How did this have the same effect as this article? Well, simple: they made it so that you could pay about 30 gold to go to a special type of battleground where you wouldn’t gain exp. The result was that people who twinked their characters at early battlegrounds were the only ones who could afford this transition, so these special battlegrounds were pretty much just twinks vs twinks (read: all rogues and hunters for 10-19 and 20-29 BGs). It also made it so that twinks could never find games because there just weren’t enough twinks to fill up a battleground, especially after most of them had quit after the patch. The original battlegrounds where now obsolete for twinks because gaining experience would make it so that your twink would quickly level out of your tier. So, from what I saw, they eliminated twinking in one fell swoop. Many thought this was brilliant, but since twinked-out 19 and 29 BG were the only fun I ever had in WoW, it caused me to quit. I imagine I wasn’t missed =p.
I hear that many twinks migrated to a common shard to play against other twinks, but by that point it wasn’t cheating anymore; it was just playing 19 or 29 PvP with top-level gear against other similarly-geared people.
13/06/2012 at 21:32 El_Emmental says:
Since most cheats packages have an “invulnerability” checkbox, the “Cheaters Pool” is not going to be fun :)
The first cheater I met had that kind of cheat, apparently it’s very common.
13/06/2012 at 23:38 benkc says:
In single player? Sure. Back in the days of Warcraft 1-2 and starcraft, I would play through the campaign once with cheats to see everything, then go back and try to do it all legit. Even earlier than that, in the original simcity I would often use the FUNDS code because I was too young to figure out how to build a profitable city.
In multiplayer? I can only think of once. Back in college one of my housemates ran a counterstrike server, and gave all of us rcon privilege. At some point I discovered some of the weird variables you can set with that, and bound every key of my numpad to do affect one of them: change the bomb timer for the next round, change gravity, change the max height you can step up without having to jump, etc. My housemate ended up giving me a temp ban for screwing with those too much. ;) I really liked having a variable-length bomb timer though — you had to listen to the acceleration of the beeping to estimate how long the fuse was and how long was left.
14/06/2012 at 00:12 Bishop says:
In answer to your cheating question, I used to play Team Fortress with a whole host of cheats. I’d go into a server, say I disliked a certain feature of the game, have the usual “AHA NOOB L2P” response, and then run around as a spy at the speed of light killing only that player. I felt at least morally neutral about it and it’s the most fun I’ve ever had in a game.
Also to dispel some myths, it took 2 years before I got VAC banned despite hundreds of reports, the report button honestly does nothing, it’s a clever bit of psychology to give players a sense of revenge, I wouldn’t be surprised if the button didn’t even have any code behind it.
14/06/2012 at 01:35 droid says:
What other instruments could be used for banning. Banshovel?
14/06/2012 at 02:27 RockandGrohl says:
I’ve never cheating and I never will. Cheaters can go die in a fire.
People play games to relax, unwind, cool down, or as a hobby. For someone to intentionally come in and piss all over an entire servers worth of fun is what I consider the lowest of the lows. People like that deserve to have their computer smashed up in front of them, and then have their hands crippled. I really feel strongly about this. People steal for money, people vandalise for the thrill, but people who ruin the relaxation and fun for other people, while they aren’t any worse or better, are just sick.
14/06/2012 at 05:00 Mister_Inveigler says:
I’ve never cheated in multiplayer (can’t cheat at what I can’t play and I don’t know anyone who plays multiplayer), but I do admit that sometimes I use trainers a little in singleplayer. Not really having the time to devote to replaying massive sections of a game due to a mistake, or waiting for resources to come in through grinding or just the slow accumulation of goodies, I do speed things up a little. But never so much so as to break a game. This also depends on the game and how many times I’ve already finished it. I don’t use trainers on the first play through.
I will say though, that forcing me to play the multiplayer to influence my singleplayer game is a cheap shot and I have been tempted to play PvE multiplayer games by myself with a cheat or two on. (see ME3 readiness ratings). The idea of cheating when playing against other people though? Completely abhorrent to me.
14/06/2012 at 10:11 Corrupt_Tiki says:
I’ve only really cheated in online public games once.
CS 1.6, when I was like 13-15 or so.
The ban hammer was swift and brutal.
And as the game was 10$ I went out the next night, and bought it again, made a new steam account, and I was good to go.
Although, I found that when I got back to playing it legitimately, I was even worse than before I started using the hacks.
They make you lazy, and ruin the game for other players, not to mention take the excitement/unexpectedness out of it.
14/06/2012 at 11:49 Bob_Bobson says:
I’ve cheated in singleplayer games, especially when I was younger or when I’d got totally and absolutely stuck. These days most games reward persistence with progress so you never get truly stuck, the games that are exceptions I play until I can play no more then go onto something else. I’ve never cheated in MP but I have lied on chat (especially in the Ship) to gain an advantage. I consider that tactics rather than cheating, others may disagree.
The only time I hacked a game was primarily for the challenge of the hacking. I worked out the Temple of Elemental Evil saved character format out of curiosity then started to play it as a solo game rather than a party one with 50 in every score. That got tired fast but I enjoyed the binary editing part.