AlexMax
Forum Regular

Posts: 757
Registered: 01-03 |
Carnevil said:
AlexMax: You can't rely on self-policing because you can't always tell when someone's cheating. It's not like someone has a massive sign above their head saying "I'M CHEATING." A cheat isn't any good if it's detectable.
And if it's not detectable by any human means, than the cheat is either ineffective or the community is ignorant
Personally, I prefer being ignorant. Giving other players the benefit of the doubt avoids the drama mongering that "OMG YOU'RE A FUCKING CHEATER" ends up doing. And if it turns out they were cheating, then who cares, it's not like the time was lost, I still had fun playing against the cheater precisely because I was ignorant, and now that the cheater is shunned from the community I never have to play with him again.
The crux of my argument relies on good faith, however. If a community is filled with more hackers than legit players, then it is natural to assume bad faith by someone who beat you. However, from my observations, the only time that hacking starts to become ridiculously commonplace is in abandoned closed-source projects that are no longer updated, such as many commercial PC games after the developer has dropped support for the game, and even in those situations it's a bit of a stretch.
I will also freely admit the case of the ginormous community where there are a ciritcal mass of hackers proportional to the userbase wherein human policing is simply impossible or at the very least impractical (Counterstrike: Source and World of Warcraft). However, it's funny to note that in the case of the former game, where it is possible to write modifications for the game, people have deemed the existing closed source security checks implemented by the developer ineffective and have made attempts at their own security checking plugin, made possible only by the fact that it supports modification. And it goes without saying that Skulltag...or any other multiplayer Doom source port...will never ever ever ever have the problem of being too big of a community to police effectively.
I've already gone over why self-policing works for small games like Skulltag in my past posts, and have now defended against two potential other situations where closed source might actually be beneficial. The ball is in your court.
Last edited by AlexMax on 06-27-08 at 21:26
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