Online cheating has become a huge problem for video game developers hoping to keep their online communities feeling safe. As more and more games offer online play, there are more developers than ever dealing with the problem of cheaters and what they do to their games.
Here are a few ways online games are handling the cheaters.
Making It Easier to Win
Not every developer knows how to handle cheaters through technical means. They may not be able to slip lines of codes in that will stop cheaters in their tracks, so they find that using a carrot rather than a stick works. You’ll see online gaming sites like casinos offering สล็อตแตกง่าย ฝากถอน ไม่มีขั้นต่ำ. These entice gamers with great deals and the chance to win something very easily. There’s not as much incentive to cheat then.
Modern game developers do this very well, particularly PopCap games, by offering players constant rewards as they play. They get this regular sense of progression and don’t feel like they need to cheat to get ahead.
Pulling Out the Banhammer
Games that have a big budget for their online components can afford to pay people to look out for cheaters and then do something about them. These may be moderators and coders who can locate cheaters and then ban them from the game. Depending on the severity of the infraction, cheaters may be banned temporarily or permanently.
Depending on the platform they’re playing on, cheaters could even be banned for life from that console or service. Usually, they would need to be repeat offenders for something like that to happen. However, when it does happen, the service, developer, or publisher may publicize those kinds of bans as a deterrent for other would-be cheaters.
In highly competitive online games, like Counterstrike, Rainbow 6, or Call of Duty, banning happens frequently. The developers know that banning people won’t usually hurt their sales. It helps improve their public profile and show that they care about keeping the game fair, and they know that the die-hard gamers who cheat and get banned will probably just buy another account and keep on playing.
Reporting Bad Behavior
Many times, video game developers will get the community involved in stopping cheating. They will call on other players to call out anyone else cheating. Some of these cheaters will be investigated, especially if there are only one or two reports against them. If cheaters have multiple reports from community members stacked against them, that can result in automatic suspension or other penalty.
This method of dealing with cheating helps to get the players involved and make them feel like they have some power to deal with cheaters that make the game miserable for them. It also makes less work for the developers and their online staff. They can essentially crowdsource their job, or large portions of it.
Strengthening the Code
Probably the most technically difficult way to handle cheaters in online games is to make the game impenetrable to them. The problem is that video games are so big and so complex these days that it’s impossible to protect against every kind of invasion. Hackers have lots of time on their hands and plenty of willpower to break through wherever they find a crack in the system.
The most that developers can do is test their game as much as possible before releasing it, looking for the cracks themselves and sealing them up. Then, they can continue to monitor the game after it releases and issue patches to deal with new cracks as they are found.
We live in an age where day-one patches are common for video games, and many of these deal with exploits that have been discovered. It can be costly to issue new patches, especially on video game consoles. In the past, Microsoft and Sony have made it difficult for game developers to patch their games more than once after release. That’s been changed in recent years, as these major corporations realize the need for continuous patching to keep cheaters at bay and to fix new issues as they arise.
