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

[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? :)