Policing Modern Gaming Cheats

Here’s a statement that won’t surprise anyone; gamers can be cheats.  People try and cheat playing poker, Monopoly, football and every other game invented, why would digital gaming be any different?  The focus of this article is what developers can do to try and ensure people who play their games don’t use cheats.

The most obvious answer is to just build better games. Have long beta periods, thorough quality assurance testing and make sure the game can’t be exploited.  This is obviously easier said than done and as said in BioShock “Sure, the boys in Ryan’s lab can make it hack-proof.  But that don’t mean we ain’t gonna hack it.” In other words, no matter how hard developers try to make sure their games are immune to exploit, people will find a way to exploit them.  I still believe developers can try a bit harder to prevent (what are now) fairly obvious exploits. The classic Skyrim exploit of making armour that boosts alchemy, then potions that boost enchantments and so on and so forth until you create a weapon that implodes anyone who so much as glances at it immediately springs to mind as an exploit Bethesda should have seen coming. I guess the problem with this though is that many AAA games are failing, and developers are feeling anxious to push them out as quickly as possible, skipping this valuable testing time.

It would be great to just press a button from the pause menu and be able to report glitches that ruin game immersion

So, what to do about the glitches that slip through the cracks?  This is where I think good post-launch support and a quick and easy to use reporting system are required.  For single player games, it would be great to just press a button from the pause menu and be able to report glitches that ruin game immersion or could be exploited.  For multiplayer games, the ability to check a scoreboard, click someone’s name and report them as quickly as you can mute them is, in my opinion, essential. Everyone who played Modern Warfare 2 must have, at some point, experienced players in their lobby with colourful letters in their names, running around invisible, or shooting through walls, or calling in constant killstreaks.  If you were truly unlucky they’d reset your account and leave you back at level 1.  Being able to efficiently report players ruining the experience for others would help create a more balanced experience so long as it was properly monitored and didn’t function like YouTube’s copyright system.  There as soon as people flag your videos the burden of proof is on the uploader, not the accuser. The main problem with this system is that it costs time and money to the developers, who have to hire people to moderate these reports.  Many online games still have active communities but no more support, as they aren’t generating money anymore so they’re a prime target for hackers.

Recently an exploit in Battlefield V was discovered where people could use… things (I’m not, not telling because I don’t want people to cheat I’m just not very techy) to lower their graphics beyond the level the developers had intended.  While this seems odd at first it meant all the clutter and soft cover on maps vanished, leaving brightly coloured player hitboxes easily exposed to the cheaters. Issues like this I suppose can only be resolved by developers monitoring what third party tools are able to influence their games and working to defend against them.  So yeah, having people on the support team WAY more technically literate than I am seems essential too.

Ironic in a game that was all about robbing people

When all these methods fail however, there’s nothing left to do but rain down swift and violent justice upon the cheaters.  My favourite example of this is from Rockstar. When GTA V Online was in its infancy people discovered ways to unfairly get money.  Kind of ironic in a game that was all about robbing people and committing heists to gain income. Players Rockstar had discovered guilty of abusing these money gaining glitches either had all that money removed or just had their balance set to zero, leaving them to grind their way to riches again without the old glitches they abused.

If you can’t beat em, join em

A final option is to just double down and go for the glitch as feature approach.  Just accept that things aren’t perfect, and players will always find ways to use things in ways developers didn’t intend them to.  Bethesda did this in Fallout 3. In the town of Megaton, you can glitch your way to a guards post above the main gate and he says “How the hell did you get up here anyway?”.  If you can’t beat em, join em. If someone hacks and beats you just make it your absolute mission to destroy that cheating scum and teabag their lifeless virtual corpse or team up with them and use the glitch yourself.  If everyone exploits the same glitch the playing field is levelled again. Then the devs don’t have to do anything, they can just sit back and watch as everyone in their game is shooting through walls, climbing into impossible spots and spending money they just copy pasted somehow.