Cheating in Networked Computer Games
ABSTRACT
The increasing popularity of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) – games involving thousands of players participating simultaneously in a single virtual world – has Client/Server (C/S) architectures. Researchers are proposing Peerhighlighted the scalability bottlenecks present in centralised to-Peer (P2P) architectures as a scalable alternative to C/S; however, P2P is more vulnerable to cheating as it decentralises the game state and logic to un-trusted peer machines, rather than using trusted centralised servers. Cheating is a major concern for online games, as a minority of cheaters can potentially ruin the game for all players. In this paper we present a review and classification of known cheats, and provide real-world examples where possible. Further, we discuss counter measures used by C/S architectures to prevent cheating. Finally, we discuss several P2P architectures designed to prevent cheating, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
C.2.0 [Computer-communication networks]: General – Security and protection.
General Terms
Algorithms, Security, Human Factors, Theory, Verification.
Keywords
Cheating, client/server, networked computer games, peer-to-peer.
1. INTRODUCTION
Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGS) differ from traditional network games as they present a single universe in which thousands or tens of thousands of players interact simultaneously [16]. Further, the state of the game world and player’s avatars progresses gradually, lasting months or years. In the last five years the popularity of MMOGs has increased dramatically; enabled by the explosive growth of the Internet and the availability of broadband connections for home users.
Most networked computer games use a Client/Server (C/S) architecture where all players connect into a central trusted server that simulates and validates the game. To support that massive number of concurrent players, the vast majority of commercial MMOG available today use multiple co-located servers to distribute the processing requirements of simulating the world. C/S architectures are ubiquitous for MMOG as they have the following benefits. Firstly, they have proven successful, an important factor when approaching venture capitalists for funding. Secondly, they are secure against most forms of cheating. Thirdly, centralised architectures give the publisher strong control over the game. Finally, developing centralized architectures is easier than distributed architectures as the communications model is simple. Unfortunately C/S architectures have poor scalability, as the server(s) are often a processing and/or bandwidth bottleneck [1,8,14,15,16,23,33].
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