by Jeromy “Doc” Adams
Inspired by: CNN
Rampant cheating on PC games is turning off more gamers than a Rosie O’Donnell swimsuit calendar. It’s why I stopped playing most PC games in the first place. Before you start looking for my golden halo, I have to confess something that I have carried around for years.
I have cheated at video games.
There, I said it. Guilty, your honor. I feel whole again.
Back when CounterStrike ruled my life, I was plagued with (gasp) dial-up for several months due to some geographic issues. My ping SUCKED. I was getting pwnd at every turn. I wasn’t having fun. Then I discovered the magic of Aimbot. It’s a month of my life that I’m not too proud of, but it was mad fun. I cheated and I griefed. When PunkBuster caught up with my Aimbot, I tried to play without it, and realized I was even worse than when I started using it. Even when my Internet situation got ironed out, I still couldn’t play anymore. I had RUINED Counterstrike for myself. What’s worse, is that I probably ruined it for several other people in the process. I swore off cheating, and without realizing it, began my departure from PC Gaming.
Enter PS2. My PS2 was a dream come true for me. I loved that freaking console. One of my favorite games to play online was Tribes: Aerial Assault (one of the most under rated PS2 games ever in my humble opinion). I’m a Tribes fan from way back, and it was so nice to finally have the game on a relatively cheat-free console. Right? Sort of.
The problem with playing games on the PS2 versus the Xbox at the time, was that any doofus with a 2400 band modem and a network adapter could play online. In Tribes:AA, a bad ping actually equaled a BETTER score. You literally warped all over the place, in the eyes of those with good connections, an impossible target at times.
Was it cheating? Probably not. But it was still unfair, frustrating, and a turn-off. Sony’s hands-off “free love” attitude to online gaming was admirable, but unproductive. It still is.
Enter Xbox-Live. With the simple mandate that everyone have at least a DSL connection, the aforementioned issue with bad pings, faded to just an occasional annoyance. Cheating was vanquished forever. Right?
It depends on how you define cheating. If you define it as screwing with code or software to give yourself an unfair advantage, okay. But there’s another form of cheating, that is a bit more innocent at first glance, but can have equally devastating consequences to a game’s online playability.
Glitching…… is cheating.
Ever played Battlefield 2: Modern Combat (BF2) on Xbox (original)? If you played online for any amount of time, you most likely ran up on one of the rocket-surgeons who had discovered the wide array of glitches, that allowed players to fall through the map, or into walls. They then became invisible to other players, impervious to attack (the walls shielded them) but they could see out and FIRE out. It became rampant. My favorite game was ruined. Just as much by the people that glitched, as by Electronic Arts’ refusal to address the issue.
Unless they literally did not EVER play their own game online, there is no way that they didn’t know about the problem. It was freaking everywhere.
So why did they choose to ignore the cheating and bring us yet another map pack, full of exploitable desks? (inside joke for BF2 players)
I submit to you that console developers undervalue the effect that cheating has on their franchises.
While PC developers like Blizzard, spend a lot of money and manpower, trying to keep their games as cheat-free as possible, console developers seem to have a “fire and forget” attitude. Patching games is expensive, time consuming, and not really profitable in a direct sense. Blizzard’s World of Warcraft makes money on monthly subscriptions, so they have an incentive to keep players happy.
But there is an incentive for console developers as well. It’s called reputation. Street cred. “Your good name.”
Bungie is notoriously wonderful about supporting their games after release. Seems like they were still fixing things with Halo 2, well into the Halo 3 development cycle. They listen, and openly communicate with their players. The result is obvious. $170 MILLION dollars on the first day of Halo3’s release.
People buy from Bungie, because they TRUST Bungie. They know that by buying a Bungie title, they are assured a quality product, with support and upgrades for the full life cycle of the game. They were, whether consciously or not, buying BUNGIE.
I’m not beating up on EA here. I know from talking to many of their people how committed they are to bringing the best games possible to fruition. They aren’t “evil people,” but BF2 was the biggest heartbreak of my console life thus far.
I am happy to say that the incidence of glitching on the next gen consoles seems to be waning. With the exception of the occasional goober on R6:Vegas, who learned to climb the rail and get on top of the roof on the Calypso Casino, I really haven’t seen as much glitching.
With that said, there are still sound principles that more developers should adopt.
If you make a game, support that game after it goes gold. Patch it. Get involved. Find out what’s going wrong in online play, and fix it. Penalize cheaters. Make cheating as risky as possible. Ban consoles. Make a name for yourself as a game provider that KEEPS PROVIDING long-after the game has moved to the “Platinum Hits” status.
Developers should realize, or be made to realize with your gaming dollar, that the gaming experience does not end at the moment I plop down my 70 dollars for a new game
It ends when I stop playing that game.
Developers should recognize yet another form of cheating. When you ignore the cheating, YOU become the cheater.
Now some questions for you.
- Have you seen a reduction in cheating with the newer consoles?
- Are you a PC Gamer who’s had it with cheating?
- Do you think it’s a non-issue?
- What publisher/developers do you think do the best job of supporting their titles after release? The worst?
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I’m a BF2 player on the PS2 and I agree with everything stated above. I refuse to play computer shooter games or anything else online because of the modding and the hacking. I play console because I figured it would be more of an equal footing. But it isn’t. Now, they have aimbots for the consoles, as if the wallglitching and quickswitching wasn’t bad enough. The only way the quikswitching got fixed was because, with a little work, you could use it to lag out the servers and no one could play the PS2 version for about 2 months. Once threatened with a lawsuit, they fixed it. Since then, they have done NOTHING to the game except boost the damage/rate of fire of the US SMG on Deadly Pass.
Screw EA.