How to Cheat at Online Games

[shannon_a]

For this Thursday, I'm planning to write an article on how to cheat in online games--mainly as a warning to game designers about things to watch out for. Here's some of the main areas I've laid out for discussion:

• out-of-band communication
• scripting
• disconnecting/consequence avoidance
• bug exploitation
• social engineering

I'm not going to try and explain all those brief terms right now, but I figure for those of you who play MMORPGs, many will be obvious. And, speaking of obvious, what obvious categories am I missing? I'm sure I'd come up with more when I write, as is usually the case, but I'm curious for thoughts now, for those items I wouldn't have come up with while writing.

Comments

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Collusion. Or is that covered under OOB communication? You can collude in-band, but the point is that designers sometimes don't think of how games can break if some players form an alliance and share data that was meant to be secret.

There's also the issue of reverse engineering the network protocol to spoof or otherwise get in under the covers. You could view this as bug exploitation, because the protocol ought not to be susceptible to this kind of attack, but it can be tough to make everything secure.

Denial of service attacks might fit under the "consequence avoidance" category... or vice versa?

[odheirre.livejournal.com]

What's a phrase for "creating multiple accounts to make dummy characters just to get their starting gold and then trashing them?" This was a problem for one of the games I've seen. Call it multiple characters per player or something like that, maybe? Or just include it in scripting.

[seidl.livejournal.com]

Definitely multiple accounts/characters. Both for consequence avoidance (use the throw away character to harass someone) and for resource accumulation.

I might be tempted to add spoofing as a category, but its pretty complex. Like putting up a good client for other people to use, that secretly records either communications or login/passwords and reports home.

Not sure what exploiting out of game resources comes under. Either using a faster network or more powerful computer to do things your opponents can't, or doing something like offering to host some game resources, then cheating by ignoring the protections on those resources (example: if I was to read everything I could read on the marrach twiki that I host).

Would playing a short lived but repeating game multiple times and accumulating information be out-of-band communication? Like playing a fixed LARP a second time as a different character, but using what you know from the first time through to achieve a better position.

I don't suppose it can be considered cheating if you just lose your job and/or drop out of school to play a game 100% of your time, can it? :)

[shannon_a]

All very good ideas; thanks. I'd come up with the multiple characters this morning, but a lot of the others are subtleties I would have missed.

[christophera.livejournal.com]

No april fool's column this year?

[shannon_a]

Not unless something strikes me at the last moment. I don't have a good collection of quotes like I have in previous years, and in generally haven't been much humored in the last 12 months.