Re: Open Source Games and Cheating - a paradoxum?
On Tue, Jan 21, 2003 at 01:42:52PM -0500, "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> was heard to say:
> Therefore, if you want a cheat-free game, what you *really*
> want is not open/closed source, but a game design that only trusts the
> server. There *are* some of those games around already, and they are open
> source. Their being open source has nothing to do with whether players can
> cheat.
Actually, that doesn't even help -- I think most people will agree
that (eg) asking gnuchess for advice in an Internet chess game is
"cheating", but no software modification can keep me from doing it --
even if you lock my computer down, I can get a handheld chess computer
and ask it. In fact, this same sort of problem crops up in real-life
chess tournaments!
The fundamental fact here is that *cheating is a social problem, not a
technical one*, and the solution to cheating is to not play games with
cheaters.
And, for some hard(er) data: bzflag is a free game (not unlike quake) which
is primarily played in multiplayer mode. You should check it out, it's
fun :) It's rather poorly designed in some ways, making cheating easier
than it could be, so by your logic cheating should be rampant and the game
should suck in open multiplayer.
I don't play it often, but I have played it from time to time, with
several sessions lasting many hours. In all that time, I only enountered
two cheaters. It's true that they made the particular games they were in
rather pointless, but there were a number of games active at that point, so
I jumped to another one. My experience with online non-free games -- Jedi
Knight in particular -- was significantly worse, IIRC.
Daniel
--
/-------------------- Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> -------------------\
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