Needs to be a law against the taking away of product functionality after the sale, even if it's contractual/EULA. A ban should never take the game away from the owner, and in cases where it does then they need to be refunded (treble damages on top of license, lawyer, and court fees if it takes a judgment to induce the refund). Getting banned on Steam, say, in the sense that all of one's purchases are invalidated should be impossible legally. In cases where an account is prevented from login, items and inventory must still be accessible for trade as those represent real time effort put in by a paying customer. Want to enforce your code of ethics in a multiplayer game? Can't charge for the game or users legally have rights against bans, and bans must follow a proportionality continuum and you must have a human-attended cost capped (at license cost, and only on loss) appeals tribunal system with record.
Cheating is ultimately a human problem. You can have some safeguards and heuristics like the ones the article describe, to weed out 90% the most blatant cheaters, so I think anticheats like these are fundamentally a good thing. But the anti-cheat can and should err on the safe side because ultimately it should be the players and admins themselves that sort this out.
Online multiplayer games must (yes must) take place on servers with human admins. Admins should be present for a majority of the time any players are playing.
Ideally with admins the players recognize. Bonus points if players themselves can perform some moderation when no admin is present (votekick, voteban etc). There is no difference between kicking cheaters and kicking people who are abusing chat etc. Obviously this means that "private" or "community" servers are the only viable types of server for online multiplayer games.
This process of policing cheaters and other abuse can not be something that is done via a reporting system and handled asynchronously. Kicking/banning must be done by the admins of the game, and it must be handled quickly.
If you are considering buying/playing an online multiplayer game and it doesn't have this functionality (e.g. the only way to play online is via matchmaking on servers set up by the publisher, and the only way cheaters and chat abusers are policed is via some web form) then please, avoid that game. Vote with your wallet.
I'm very curious about the jump obfuscation. Maybe somebody who's done more reverse-engineering can answer this for me:
a) Are unconditional jumps common enough that they couldn't be filtered out with some set of pre-conditions?
b) It seems like finding the end of a function would be easy, because there's a return. Is there some way to analyze the stack so that you know where a function is returning to, then look for a call immediately preceding the return address?
Apologies if I'm wrong about how this works, I haven't done much x86 assembly programming.
mdswanson ·6 hours ago
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rustcleaner ·3 hours ago
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alkonaut ·2 hours ago
Online multiplayer games must (yes must) take place on servers with human admins. Admins should be present for a majority of the time any players are playing.
Ideally with admins the players recognize. Bonus points if players themselves can perform some moderation when no admin is present (votekick, voteban etc). There is no difference between kicking cheaters and kicking people who are abusing chat etc. Obviously this means that "private" or "community" servers are the only viable types of server for online multiplayer games.
This process of policing cheaters and other abuse can not be something that is done via a reporting system and handled asynchronously. Kicking/banning must be done by the admins of the game, and it must be handled quickly.
If you are considering buying/playing an online multiplayer game and it doesn't have this functionality (e.g. the only way to play online is via matchmaking on servers set up by the publisher, and the only way cheaters and chat abusers are policed is via some web form) then please, avoid that game. Vote with your wallet.
adiabatichottub ·11 hours ago
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shj2105 ·12 hours ago
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