GoodGuy
Posts: 1467
Joined: 5/17/2006
From: Cologne, Germany
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Arjuna
What's to stop someone doctoring the AAR screen in photoshop? What if you had an actual recording of the game you had just played and you had to submit this as well as the AAR screen. The recording could be played back within the game to verify the results. Would that be of interest?
Actually, the doctoring will happen sooner or later. It may take a while in smaller game communities, but at some point ppl will be either tempted or willing to push their rank/reputation on a ladder. That's why serious ladders have a report system where both players have to report the scores. If there are discrepancies, an admin will have to jump in, in case a civilized discussion between the 2 players won't happen.
On the dev side, you can actually counter such potential quirks by introducing something I would call an AAR report file function, that creates an encrypted file with the same Checksum for both players at the end of a match. If you then load the AAR report file inside the game, you will be able to see the complete AAR. If then a ladder makes it mandatory to upload that AAR file, an admin could check the AARs (so both files) himself, and false reporting will be useless.
Many ladders demand the creation of demo files (a recording uses to be called "demo" in many game communities since the 90s already, like in the Starsiege:Tribes community, Counterstrike, Quake, GrandPrix and the NeedForSpeed community as well as in many other communites) already, which even enables an admin to skip through all players of a team in some games, in order to see if someone is cheating, for example, or to verify the final score. Ladder rules usually give either the opponent or the admin the right to demand getting a demo, in case accusations had been made. Still, an encrypted AAR file would make it pretty hard to tinker with reports or even AARs. I doubt ppl with the knowledge to re-engineer such files would care for small wargame communities.
If a community is big enough, it will attract hackers, though. For example, with Starsiege:Tribes, released around December 1998, it took until late 2000 until someone finally had come up with a working cheat, and that cheat worked for the chaingun only, because the movements in the game happened across 3 dimensions, means you could walk/run, jump, strafe and fly with a jetpack, and you could "ski" (a glitch that was used by all players using the contours of valleys to ski downhill, then - at the bottom of the valley - they would use the jetpack in order to propel themselfs uphill like on a giant ski ramp or a giant halfpipe. This high speed environment made it very hard for an aimbot to keep up with the enemies' movements. On top of that, all the other weapons were slow velocity projectile or slow build-up energy guns, which made aimbots useless.
With the chaingun, the projectiles were fast enough, so a chaingun aimbot made some sense at least, despite the opportunities for an enemy to escape with highspeed movements or unexpected manoeuvres midair. The aimbot would always target the enemy's left eye, IIRC. Pretty sad. Since the gun wasn't an instant kill weapon, the cheater had to chase, at least. 
In games like CS, Quake, Battlefield 2 and the like, footsoldiers don't have these possibilities (using jetpacks, skiing downhill), so aimbots work on most if not all guns, as the general movement speeds are way lower. An aimbot will then always aim for the head, the cheater just has to pull the trigger and make sure that there's no obstacle blocking the LOF. If you have a sniper rifle or a big calibre gun, each shot will be an instant kill. In more realsitic games like Armored Assault / Operation Flashpoint, every calibre will score an instant kill with a headshot.
With wargames, cheats that remove the fog of war are quite popular. In games where you can also influence supply and resources, cheats will tinker with say fuel or ammunition numbers in favor of the cheater.
< Message edited by GoodGuy -- 10/5/2012 12:22:13 AM >
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More scenario packs? - 
) reliable sources of something called a "Westwall Expansion pack" but details are very few and far between. 
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