So I was recently playing a current favorite of mine online, Battlefield Bad Company 2. I say 'recently' although it was actually some weeks back. Regardless of time, the point is that there had been a recent update to the PunkBuster software at the time.
I chose a low ping server like always with PB enabled and logged in and basically just began my usual evening of mayhem and explosions and all the goodness that is a combat simulation game. About a minute into the game a message splashed across the screen, this server was streaming PBbans. Meaning the server had just kicked someone for having detected that their client was using a hack to gain an unfair advantage.
I sat back for a moment and chuckled to myself, the turkey deserved it and I was pleased that the message was splashed across the screen for all of the other players to see. Then, almost before I could refocus my attention on the task at hand of destroying objective alpha, another ban streamed across my screen. Wow, two cheaters caught within a minute. I thought that was pretty cool too. Twenty minutes and a dozen bans later and it wasn't so cool. In fact, it was detracting from the game itself because it was difficult to see and aim with a constant barrage of text across the view space.
Destroy the competition!! For the low price of..
This got me to thinking, how many people are there actually cheating out there? In a little under a half an hour I had watched nearly fully half of the players on one server banned for cheating. I wasn't gathering statistics so I thought to go look online for some. There just isn't that much documentation statistically on this problem. In fact when I googled Bad Company Cheats, instead of seeing a list of blogs or articles addressing the problem, I was actually introduced to pages of ecommerce sites SELLING the cheats.
Wow, really? an entire industry built on the concept of dishonest gaming? I tried to dig a little further, but most of my research ended in deadends simply stating that 'cheating' is difficult to prove. In large part because, every time someone develops a detection method, a new hack is engineered. Somewhat the way the virus writers go back and forth with the antivirus software developers. We do know that Blizzard recently banned 320,000 Battlenet accounts citing that these people were in violation of ToS and that includes using hacked client software or software intended to give those individuals an unfair advantage.
Why do people cheat? I don't know exactly. It seems to be for bragging rights, many of the games have online 'ladder' systems now. That and the anonymity of the internet and difficulty in proving a hack means that individual can gloat around a perceived dominance in a particular game. Surely its mostly about ego, and perhaps in some cases there might be prize money at stake.
So why do I care?
Ok, so why should a game designer care if people cheat? This is a tough one to answer. Personally I feel that every company is responsible to try to make a profit. Simply, a business can't take care of its employees or its customer if it is going broke. Well what if most of your customers want to cheat? Is that ok? My gut tells me 'no', but for reasons other than business. If the business is founded around people as a core resource then surely we want to engage people on a positive level? And maybe that's something that can't be measured.
In an article last month on GamaSutra, Ernest Adams refers to a presentation by Zhan Ye, the president of GameVision as he describes some of the factors driving the success of his MMOs.
"Let rich people organize family clans, hire poor people, lead them to fight with other clans, and reward them. Think about who those rich people are in the real world -- business owners and factory owners. They manage and lead hundreds of people in the real world and are used to the leadership role. In the F2P world, they still want that feeling. We just offer them that in the game, naturally. "
This hardly seems fun to me, however people are willing to pay for it. However, I think its fairly safe to assume that encouraging people to behave a certain way because they will pay you for it isn't necessarily a good business to be in. Hence the correlation between some of the early MMOs and 'crack'.
So its just a game, who cares right? Well yes and no. You can tell great deal about a society by how they play their games. Consider ancient civilizations like the Romans or Mayans and some of the violence associated with their games and what those things meant. Surely they were symptoms of a problem, but more than that they were also a driving factor in the morality and human interaction that took place in those societies.
Games are very relevant to all aspects of society and human development in this way.
So what is a designer to do?
I don't have all the answers, but the idea comes to mind that the game designers need to be proactive in creating a community which is interested in PLAYING the games. Not unleashing automation to play the games for them. Punk Buster is a good tool and tools like it should be required and used for online ranking systems. But even PB can't be expected to keep up with everything.
Having done some research, it seems that many of the 'mods' break when new game versions are patched or updated simply because the server is attempting to validate the client files as legitimate. Can this be leveraged more? The day following the most recent patch of BC2 my K/D rating shot up to 18:1 and was consistent across a half dozen servers. Within a week that rating diminishes to 2:1. I can't help but think this wasn't an accident.
What if there was a daily client build process with quality control procedures and rollback/failover present and automated? Would this kind of thinking help? Instead of forcing ourselves to come up with new detection methods, force the people writing hacks to continually update their own software. I don't know.
I think I'm ok with that.
