Re: [Nel] RE: Nel digest, Vol 1 #214 - 9 msgs

[Tony Hoyt]

"Jon Watte" <address@hidden> wrote:

> If this is a real problem, you should ask yourself what your game 
> offers a real human being to actually enjoy. If the game is reducible 
> to a simple series of scripted actions (or even a complex series of 
> scripted actions) then it'll become monotonic for a human sooner
> rather than later. Witness EQ: if you didn't have the human
> communication element, it would SUCK as a game.

  This problem is evident in all games, From Quake to Dark Age of
Camelot.  I spoke to a man who claimed to have develop a dual bot
application, where computers, playing a game with two accounts, had the
two characters work in sync to automaticly fight in a small area over..
and over.. and over.  He took the work out and just recieved all the
reward.  Now if you believe this claim, and I can't say honestly I have
any real evidence that his claim is true, I would be seriously concerned
about this kind of player.   True, it took a lot of work to make the
bot, but once done, this guy, can leave the bot alone to successfully
advance his characters without much intervention.  That's just plain
unfair in my book.  Little work for a great deal of reward. 

> Security through obscurity doesn't work.

  The the examples I gave where really just simple ideas to just like
you said, Slow them down a little.  To make this soulution work would
require you to constantly make these changes on at least a weekly
basises.  In other words, constantly updateding the packets, the
encription, etc.  And a lot of this could be done without much testing
between builds at all.  This would then make the whole process much more
annoying to reverse engineer.  I'm not saying that you should trust the
client more even after these tacktics, it's just you as the developer
should at least feel a little better that these simple tactics will at
least give them constant headaches.  But there's almost nothing you can
do to stop them.

> Proper design and tight server-side control is the only way to avoid 
> hacking users to have an advantage over non-hacking users.

  This is true, and this was implyed(sp) from the begining.  I'm just
trying to offer ways to help deter hackers,  But when you got 100
people, many of them working together out to cheat and create these
applications then your going to face an uphill battle no matter what. 
You must address it strongly with clear design that can address the
issue without much impact to development and testing, or embrace it in
some fashion.  Then again you could just make it not worth it at all and
have a non-game chat world.  Then there's no point in doing anything but
just have fun. :-)

> PS: To the others replying on the list: PLEASE don't quote the ENTIRE 
> messages. It's quite annoying in digest mode.

  That was an honest mistake, I ment to remove the text from the end in
my last post, sorry.

  Tony