We all hate cheaters in our games, but with the games industry growing bigger and bigger, expect to see more of them as a matter of course.

On May 7^th 2015, Guild Wars 2 sentenced a player, “DarkSide”, to virtual death for using hacks in their game. In a video publicly shaming the hacker, his character was stripped, thrown off a bridge and then deleted. Guild Wars 2 Game Security Lead Chris Clearly confirmed the banning of every account the hacker used, posting the video in the Guild Wars 2 forums. On May 20^th, H1Z1 devs told cheaters who have been banned to post a public apology video to become unbanned, re-banning them if they ever take the video down.

The message was worth much, much more than the accounts unbanned. H1Z1 blurred the lines between reality and virtual reality by bringing forward the “face” behind the avatar, giving real-life consequences to otherwise fantastical offences. Today, Destiny faces cheaters who are “lag switching”, exploiting the in-game netcode to grant their characters invulnerability by sending the server false client-side messages. Everyone enjoys the game differently, and cheaters go out of their way to enjoy the game at the expense of others.

Just for an example, there is nothing more satisfying than being seemingly unkillable in-game and taking down tens of hundreds of enemy players, but going on a killing streak in PvP games is very rare. Cheaters pay hackers for cheats to consistently have this experience. Cheaters don’t cheat just to make others miserable, they cheat simply to make themselves feel good. It’s kind of like taking virtual drugs, which have virtual spill-over effects to the players around you. People become frustrated in literally being unable to kill the opponent, and their future game experiences are also ruined when they have to question if their opponents are just really that good, or simply hacking.

In Japan today, a man in his thirties was arrested for selling hacked weapons and characters in his webstore. It was alleged that he earned over 20 million yen (USD168,000) over five years from selling his hacks on website haxxjp.net (now haxx.webnode.jp) which has since been taken down. He was charging an admission fee of 17,000 yen, with cheat downloads costing 3,000 yen each (from Kultur). It seems to me that a black market of cheating is rapidly emerging from gaming culture, and it will only grow as gaming grows. When money is involved, people in general want to stop others from making money through at the expense of others. You can call it criminal behaviour and moralize it, but the important part is to earn money without infringing on the fun of others.

The black market of cheating can only be actively discouraged by game developers, and players can help by not buying the cheats. Willing buyers of cheats either need to be educated on the consequences of their actions or be deterred from cheating by associating their real-life “face” to their virtual identity. The anonymity that the internet grants us makes people act irresponsibly at times where they would not, and reactionary deterrents are ineffective: the damage would have already been done.

Perhaps if we were not limited by technology, the server itself could monitor and judge player activity and stop them from cheating by actively warning them about how they are ruining the game for other players. I’d be really annoyed if my game chastised me for cheating, even if I was doing it knowingly.

For that, we’ll probably need artificial intelligence which can think on its own, which will lead to a technological apocalypse when the watchdog A.I. realizes how shitty people can be and starts attacking all of us, but hey, at least that would stop people from cheating right? Probably not, but at least my IDDQD code in Doom only hurts the A.I. in my game.

You can follow me on twitter @TheFreakofnatur and email me at [email protected]. Until next time!

Chen Yiji
The Gaming Ground
Twitter: @TheFreakofnatur

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Tags: Cheaters, Death Penalty in Video Games, Guild Wars 2, Video games, Virtual death