Anti-cheat measures... good thing or bad thing?

As I'm working on my game, I came to the realization that some people are gonna cheat and give themselves weapons that should not be acquired early... so I'm wondering... should such cheaters be punished? Like... you should not have the Red Ring until ACT05, the Blue Ring until ACT08, etc. If the player has these during an earlier map, should I cast them into a tall pit full of spikes for being a cheater? :) Or is that kind of a dick move to do? I've got mixed feelings on such a move, so I figured I'd ask the community at large what their thoughts are on this.

Definitely a dick move. Not that I ever really use cheats outside of the convenience they can bring during development, or to just screw around with (but even those days are mostly behind me now).

"Sorry - you ran out of tokens. Would you like to play again, WITHOUT cheats this time?"

I would think of this as a good thing, and fun thing too :)
Or you could make a, uhh.. "secret" level you could send them to.

I'm sure they'd find another way to cheat anyways :p

I say go ahead. I don't even know why cheats exist in the first place. They only belong to the developers and designers, there's no reason for the average player to be allowed to cheat, unless they find a way to hack into the engine.

In my opinion Doom cheats should have been only available with -devparm, or after an esoteric key combination, and using them should have had a negative effect on any honour system, such as level end percentages (keeping them at 0%).

Unfortunately reality is different and marketing dictates cheat codes to be present. Doom probably wouldn't have been as popular if people weren't able to IDDQD/IDKFA their way and advance through and see how the whole game looks, without feeling punished by anything. It's the same reason why so many games are easy and challenging settings are locked, too.

Cheats make games more customizable. They're a good thing.

Actually it's WADs which make the game customizable.

I find it pretentious when someone tries to disable engine cheats. "You will play my masterwork piece in exactly the way I intend you to play it."

Fun fact: you can't stop cheats. You may put in certain measures to foil people who use "give all" or "idkfa", but they can still noclip, godmode, and use "give weaponname". So, it's pointless.

All you can manage to do is annoy people who will bitch about it afterwards -- look at the Aeons of Death thread on the ZDoom forums, at time there have been dozens of pages of insults and flames against the modders because of anticheat measures coded in. If you want to deal with that kind of pressure, be my guest.

Also, Printz thinks it's a good idea, so if you still needed any argument not to do it, that would be it. :p

Dick move. Just think how many people would have deleted Doom if they couldn't play it with cheat codes (myself included).

Gez said:

I find it pretentious when someone tries to disable engine cheats. "You will play my masterwork piece in exactly the way I intend you to play it."

Of course the flipside is if you have certain engine trickery or workarounds in place that using the hardcoded cheats would actually break the way your game is meant to be played, then perhaps disabling them (or at least providing a warning on game start that cheats will break the game) is not such a bad idea.

I don't believe disabling cheats is the same as your quote, though. New games don't have readily accessible cheats but you can still play the game YOUR way, not always exactly as the dev intended (Keep in mind I'm talking about good games that don't guide your every move like CoD). Cheats are a kind of breaking-the-4th-wall wildcard that aren't really part of the original game experience, it's just that they've become so commonly used in Doom that they ARE in fact now part of the game experience. In that case it's the modder's call if they want to preserve their anti-cheat vision of the game at the cost of alienating the experienced Doom players...

printz said:

I don't even know why cheats exist in the first place.

They're fun.

If people noclip and get into a HOM, it's their problem; not the modder's.

Likewise, if they godmode and aren't getting a challenging game experience, it's also their problem.

There are ten thousand ways to cheat in Doom. You can use the good fashioned cheat codes, you can use console commands in ports with a console, you can edit the mod, you can edit the port... Trying to block one or two of the cheats that are the easiest to use will not do much to "protect" the intended gameplay; it'll just annoy the cheaters a bit, so they'll either work around it or just stop playing.

Note that some people may cheat not because they want to win the game easily, but because they want to check some technical aspect of the mod, or try to understand what causes some bug they've noticed, or whatever other reason.

The only anti-cheat measures that I support were the iddqd and idkfa cheats in Heretic, that give you the opposite of what you wanted. However there were alternative cheat codes that gave you god mode and all the weapons and keys.

Why would we need anti-cheat measures in singleplayer when a challenge-seeker hardcore gamer will play without it anyway?

Well, I'm not worried about people using noclip or godmode... I'm more concerned with having weapons not designed for the map. In my TC, the weapons are designed to only be accessible at certain parts... going out-of-order will sometimes affect the story progression, and the more powerful weapons use a LOT more magic, which becomes a problem on earlier maps where magic replenishment items are very limited. Also, certain weapons would make certain parts way too easy, since each weapon has specific special powers (every weapon has a normal attack, a powered-up attack [tome-of-power type deal], and a magic spell). Plus, since this is based on Heretic, there's also the possibility of someone using "give all" and getting a full stock of chaos devices, then using them to warp out of a closed boss room and not having a way to get back in (although I've already thought of this and have put in some measures to ensure that they can get back in). My TC doesn't use the chaos device and I'm not exactly sure how to remove it from the game.

In general though, I like having cheat codes, and trying to foil them usually leads to me figuring out countermeasures. :)

Who cares if cheating makes things to easy? Isn't that the point of cheats? Players using them should already be aware that the game will become completely unbalanced as a result.

Well, that's true as well... ok, I'll skip the extra work involved with making anti-cheat measures and just let players goon up the game if they want. :)

Yeah, and as to the other points, I think hardcore cheaters like myself are aware that cheating can make things go out of sync and whatnot and are ready to noclip through something we've messed up if necessary.

Hiya.

I'd say feel free to disable them...*if* you are confident enough in your mapping skills that your map(s) are nigh-perfectly ballanced for each level of play skill (1 - 5), as well as DM and Co-Op. Then, knock yourself out!

But, if you aren't that confident, then maybe you should leave the option to cheat in. I know I just played "Vangard" (yeah, late the the party, but hey...)...and with my skill level, there is no way in HELL I could do that map...I had to go godmode on it. Then again, I was primarily interested in the architecture. :)

Well, game balance is not the problem if your skills aren't sufficient. Try a lower skill setting.

There will always be someone who want to cheat his way through the game. There's no point in preventing someone to do so even if your wad is easy as hell.

Just tell him to STFU if he complaints about game balance. But then, I guess you wouldn't have to bother anyway as everyone will feel that guy is retarded.

While I am designing my own game on the doom engine, I leave all the cheats for the player to use. If the player gets frustrated and gets stuck somewhere (which hopefully will be very unlikely to ever happen), he uses noclip or goes to another map via cheat to see how the game progresses later on. If the cheats would have been disabled, the player would maybe quit the game in frustration and never touch it again, which would be kind of sad.

On the other hand, it gives the player a little more fun because of all the crazy things you can do with cheats and all the mindfucks that happen when you interfere with scripts because of cheating.
In fact, sometimes I play my own Wads with cheats to see what a potentional cheater could see if he ignores every rule and just does what he want with the console.
I like this kind of "freedom" in games and I think you should keep the cheats intact.

Wow, reading this post is like a tonguebreaker with all these cheat-words. Cheat cheat cheat cheat cheat.

Eponasoft said:

Well, that's true as well... ok, I'll skip the extra work involved with making anti-cheat measures and just let players goon up the game if they want. :)

I dont think cheaters really should be any of your concern. They're not your target audience so it shouldn't matter whether they ruin the game or not. As ProcessingControl said, they know in advance that what they are doing could potentially ruin the game, just as much as running it without the required dehacked patch or in the wrong source port.

40oz said:

I dont think cheaters really should be any of your concern. They're not your target audience so it shouldn't matter whether they ruin the game or not.

QFT. Trying to circumvent such is just grounds for grievance.