jm2207 wrote...
If what you got out of my original post was a defense of cheaters I suggest you might need to improve your reading comprehension skills. As for your analogy to criminals: if there's a loophole in the law, then strictly speaking the law hasn't been broken and your criminals aren't criminals. Glitchers on the other hand are indeed breaking the rules, I just happen to disagree with the "solution" to what I have already said is a problem.
Banning a few hundred people every few months is not going to stop people from cheating. They can just buy another online pass for $10, make a new gamertag or something to that effect. I don't know what's required but (at least on the consoles) it doesn't involve buying a whole new copy of the game.
You say that I merely have to quit when someone begins glitching — that's a waste of my time and my equipment. Some people might prefer quitting, but others might want to stick it out and should not be guilty by association if an intent to cheat on their part can't be clearly demonstrated.
P.S. "Not knowing the source of the problem well enough to put a fix in place" is what I referred to as "can't fix" in my original post.
As long as there is client-side information flowing back to the game server, there will always be cheating in ANY game, online or otherwise. Bioware is not the first company to discover this, and they won't be the last. I work in computing as a software engineer, it is simply technically impossible, short of really incredibly intrusive and annoying security and validation measures that would bog the game down to an unbearable snails pace that lagged like crazy, and even then doubtful, to utterly remove all instances of client-side cheating, such as aim-bots, modding enemy/gun stats (which could still be done even if the game downloaded the stats at the start of each game from a server), memory over-writing, and so on.
People exploting unintended bugs/glitches in the game, such as missle glitchers, well yeah. Name me any game, or any software for that matter short of:
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("Hello World\\n");
}
that doesn't have a bug, and even then, the above program can still be exploited in certain ways if it's given administrator privileges. Bugs/glitches simply are a fact in software, no matter how hard we try. Mind you, I'm a little unimpressed by Bioware's QA team's ongoing performance in letting obvious stuff slip through. In time they get fixed though (or hopefully they do).
In short, bugs/modding/glitching is simply a fact of life. All that any company can do if it wants to keep the playing base fair and even for all players is to make VERY clear Public Service Announcements as to what's considered exploiting the system, and then make it so unattractive for the glitchers/cheaters that it doesn't become worth their while. Still, there's always some real die-hards out there. You just gotta keep knocking them on the head, much like us software engineers do with bugs. It's a two-fold strategy. Kill the bugs and kill the cheater's accounts. Do them equally, and overall the game should be fairly even for all.
Retour en haut
wth is going on???
