I don't agree with banning anyone for any reason that isn't outright cheating or doing something like TKing in a team game. If it's that annoying, move to a different server or get better. Playing against noobs gets boring after awhile and they are bound to get tired of it. I know this because I got tired of it, and people I know got tired of it.
I do like handicapping myself though. Fight 1v5 in MMOs. 1v3 in RTSes. 1v20 in FPSes. Use only specific units, shit like that. Melee only in games like Call of Duty. I usually push it to about 50% win ratio in that regard, so I figure they can't be that unhappy dog piling the fuck out of me.
Lieju said:
klasbo said:
Too bad most servers just ban you for "cheating" when they actually mean "stop killing me".
I don't play games online, so I don't know, but can the person running the server tell if the person indeed IS cheating, or do they have to rely on the gut-feeling of 'S/he is just way too good NOT to cheat...'
Depends on the type of cheating, but in short catching cheaters is kind of a difficult prospect unless you are under constant scrutiny like most pro gamers are. And in long:
Glitching can usually be pretty clear as there's unintended game behavior occurring that can be easily recorded, everything is sent server-side in that regard so you have a clear data trail. Not that all glitching is cheating IMO but that's another topic.
Then there's scripted actions through custom code which can be fairly easy to see depending on how it's done. Some popular aimbot scripts had telltale signs like weird cursor shaking that any player viewing your screen would notice. Or the characters target box would immediately snap to the persons head without any movement inbetween.
Some aimbots are trained to only fire when they will hit a target or that targets head(however you calibrate it) Meaning that you will behave normally with regards to aiming, but the script will ensure your timing is perfect. This is much more difficult to detect as there aren't really any telltale signs.
There's also less visible changes depending on how a game is made. If things like textures are stored locally and aren't constantly checked you can do things like changing textures of enemies to a highly visible neon green, or background textures to clear. You can mess with alpha levels to see people through walls or you can remove the fog of war in RTS games. These are a lot less clear to admins, who have to go more off gut feeling which isn't always right. My brother was banned from several servers for wallhacking because he would line up shots through walls on common camping places and then shoot there. If someone was camping they would be dead, if someone wasn't then he just wasted shots and demonstrated his knowledge of the map and its play styles.
Then there's that use autotargeting schemes where once a target is selected it's just queuing or casting spells on that target. Which again is a difficult to really detect without watching them. They could be performing all their actions or a complicated script could be determining the best spell combos to use for any given situation while reading health and mana inputs. For example a game I played(Ultima Online) was heavily about being able to synchronize attacks with your allies and heal through synchronized enemy attacks. Thus having extremely perfect timing was highly important. On a server I played the admins instituted a system to read spell casts and then match them up against each other on a time log, it only went to 6 decimal places. With a 5 person sync 3 of us including myself got a .000000 seconds off from the first cast, meaning that the server could not tell any difference between our cast times to 6 decimal places. The other two were within four zeros on the decimal places IE as I recall one of them had .000032 seconds after the first cast. Now we didn't get banned for it because I can be a smooth talker and it's hard to ban one of your top guilds off of suspicions, but we did get some videogame jail time for being too good. So it's not always clear to say what is humanly possible unless you've been there yourself.
The biggest problem is that a lot of admins are little more than children with their own personal satrapies. I find that a lot of lower level players assume there is a lot more cheating going on than there is with higher level players. It takes a player who is really good at the game and has pretty good technical knowledge of cheating methods to be able to really root out cheaters effectively. And neither of those describe most server admins I've run into.
