The Air-Speed Velocity of Unladen Gaming
Some solutions to on-line cheating…
By Brad Wardell
You’re having a great day at Counterstrike when someone
called "nimr0d" joins the server. Suddenly he’s dominating with
10 head shots in a row with his AK47. You know he’s cheating, everyone
knows he’s cheating.
Some of the better servers have set up systems in
which they can kick someone off or even ban them by player vote.
But that’s really only a bandaid.
As more and more people get on-line to play games,
they are finding them increasingly ruined by the small percentage
of people who take delight in wrecking the experience for other
people.
What can be done?
I’ve thought about this a long while and the answer
lies in the online communities themselves. Take the burden away
from the game developer and put it into the hands of the people
who play the game itself.
How?
Most games have a central nexus – a master server
that lists all the other servers. This server could contain a database.
If games came with a specific ID code that had to be used to get
on, then each player can have a unique ID of some kind. Then, put
into the servers a way in which players can kick someone off if
they’re being obnoxious or they’re cheating or whatever. If they
get kicked off as a result, this information is passed to the master
server (The nexus). If enough different servers and enough different
people ban the person, then there can be penalties.
For instance, when I start a server, I could have
a threshold of how much bad karma a player can have against them
to get onto my server. The individual running the server could decide
how many black marks against someone they would allow before not
letting them onto the server. Maybe someone got a raw deal and got
kicked off once or twice for reasons that weren’t his control. I’d
probably let that kind of person on. But how about the guy with
20 black marks by his name? Whether he cheats or not, the guy just
has a problem getting along with people and I’m not going to let
him on my server.
This mechanism could be applied to all on-line games.
When someone goes onto Battle.net, I could set a karma threshold
when I create my Warcraft III game. Maybe I wouldn’t care about
someone’s karma. Or maybe I’d only want people with good karma to
be able to join my game.
Even in massively multiplayer games like Everquest,
UO, Asheron’s call, you could have a karma system in which players
could report people who are ruining the game. If they got enough
bad karma stored up against them, perhaps the game could show a
scarlet letter by their name or something to let others know that
for whatever reason, the guy seems to have serious problems getting
along with others.
If multiplayer is going to really become mainstream
– and don’t kid yourselves folks, you reading this may think it
already is but it’s not anywhere near mainstream, then it is going
to need to be cleaned up. The game companies don’t have the resources
to police jerk users. The community though could and there’s no
reason why that couldn’t be implemented today.
See ya on-line!
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