Article - Xbox 360 cheats never prosper, do they?

[HEXUS]

Cheating on Xbox live has been rife for a number of years, but who are these individuals and how can it be stopped?

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[TooNice]

I do not have an Xbox 360, nor have I ever played on the Xbox live so I may be missing something, but I am not sure I understand the problem with quitting a game prematurely when the outcome is clear.

I know when I played Warcraft 3 on B-net, it was, AFAIK, acceptable practice to quit when one side is pretty much obliterated. I know there is some satisfaction in destroying your opponent to the very last peon, but I also understand the player on the losing side would want to type 'GG' and move to the next when the game is clearly set. As long as it is not done in the first two minutes in a team based game (dooming their team), I don't understand the problem raised (assuming quitting is recorded as a loss in a ladder game).

[Johnny Bravo]

While I accept that this is a story about xBox live I do wish to veer a little off topic onto another source of really annoying cheating I've come across - Mario Kart Wii online.

As Steven mentioned in the UEFA 2008 people can just exit before the end of the game to save face. MKW suffers for the exact opposite issue, if you were to do that then you'd be placed last - great way to stop cheats, except when you loose your connection and 177 points along with it!!!

Nothing narks me more than people who somehow manage to cheat on this game with instant respawning when they do off the track - if you don't have the skills then why bother pretending you do?

[Steven W]

Sure you can't stop quitters, but on that particular game you're playing one on one.

I'm not kidding you, it's every other game that someone quits. A game is 15 mins long. Some of them will quit on the 14th minute as they haven't got a goal back. That' s plain cheating. This game in particular at the moment is so bad it really isn't worth playing online unless it's with a friend.

There's no punishment, so why would they care.

We'll never stop quitters, but they should at least have to pay for it.

I think etiquette on the likes of Warcraft makes quitting in certain situations acceptable. In other games though, it's not.

[Mr Pants]

Cheating on consoles is a lot harder than the PC and I dont think it is as rife as the article claims.

Since the traditional Action Replay (Memory Editing not saves) has been killed off it makes it much harder for people to cheat unless they are using exploits or really know what they are doing.

[Stewart]

If its a ranked game, or race, or whatever, why isn't the game set up so that if you quit, you loose, the other player gets the points or whatever.

On Burnout, if you are racing 5 or 6 of you, and someone quits, they just get marked down as finishing last, get no points, and the race carries on.

So why aren't all games set up for quit= loose?

On your football game Steven, when the person you are playing against quits, what happens? Counts as a draw? Or no game?

[Hicks12]

cheating is pathetic and annoying, only time i ever cheated was to get to the last level on some random game(single player) which is acceptable imo. Sometimes quiters cant be sorted because some times its a genuin issue such as your internet died, power out. Laggers are just as bad tbh, someone with dial up starts playing and lags the match or kills everyone cos they are lagged so you miss them, happened to me in cod4 on pc as id always die even if i was shooting a whole clip at them >.<. Main reason is because its all little imature kids playing 18 rated games which is odd, granted ive got loads of adult rated games(like gears of war) but im 16 and take it seriously (with fun ofc), if im losing i will keep playing to try and win back if its a game like gears but if its a game that rates it as a loss like an rts then id just type "GG/good game" or something then quit depending if they are destroying my base fast or taking the piss .

Cheating is never goin to go away unless PROPER measures are taken, punkbuster needs help on pc lol and it should be mandetory for servers to use it (look at crysis, half the servers are full of cheats cos no PB and hosts suck). I remember the horrible online issues with halo 2 and it was really annoying, spent most of my time waiting to play the game than actually playing it.

Good article, should bring in pc aswell though

[Silent Shark]

If its a ranked game, or race, or whatever, why isn't the game set up so that if you quit, you loose, the other player gets the points or whatever.

On Burnout, if you are racing 5 or 6 of you, and someone quits, they just get marked down as finishing last, get no points, and the race carries on.

So why aren't all games set up for quit= loose?

On your football game Steven, when the person you are playing against quits, what happens? Counts as a draw? Or no game?

The reason that quitting is not always punished is because this can end up punishing people who genuinely loose their connections (for a variety of possible reasons).

I'm not sure about UEFA, but I think in FIFA08 they implemented a system where if the game is abandoned (quitting or loosing connection) at any point after the 70min mark, the result at that point is taken as the final result. At least that's what I heard. I find the people I play against are generally pretty good when it comes to loosing gracefully.

[Stewart]

The reason that quitting is not always punished is because this can end up punishing people who genuinely loose their connections (for a variety of possible reasons).

Yeah, but thats such a balls argument. Yes you might sometimes loose your connection, every now and again, but how often does that happen if there is nothing wrong with your connection?

I've had my 360 for a good few years and I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times my connection just dropped.

People quit all the time.

Is anyone really going to mind if, in order to sort out the rampant quiting early problem, every now and again someone gets a few points knocked off because their connection dropped?

I, like Steven, am sick to death of tonking someone on whatever game, and then they quit, and for some reason it doesn't count as a win to me.

Also, the reason why people quit is because they know they can and get away with it.

Big deal if sometimes a genuine connection drop happens - set every game to 'quit and you loose' and a lot of Xbox Lives problems would be solved in an instant.

[TooNice]

I am surprised that a dropped connection isn't recorded as a loss on Xbox Live. I understand the reasons against such system, but there is no perfect system, and I am so used to the 'quit/dropped = lose' system.

[Cannyone]

I only play with people that I know from real life. That way I can hunt them down and publicly humiliate them if need be!

[Dareos]

ranked matches in Halo 3 are rife with this kind of behaviour atm.

There are a few categories

1. Restarted accounts, trial accounts used to boost players already at a high skill level to give them a false rating. Whats really infuriating about this practice is that all the genuine players have to play against these people, so a lvl 15 coming up against players whose true level is 40 or so, isn't going to have much of a chance to progress.

2. IP flooding. Using a program on a pc they can detect which players have which ip addresses and flood their connection, lagging them out or kicking them from the game.

3: Host booting : similar to above, the host of the game is kicked, causing map and weapons to respawn, meaning that if all your team are in position they can easily get all the power weapons upon restart, against a team that is a man down.

I am sure there are other methods, some snipers appear just too damn good, far better than anyone i have seen on TV in these MLG competitions, some players appear to take far too many hits without dying etc etc, now some of this can be attributed to lag, but not all.

[CrazyMonkey]

I see where you are coming from, i've had more than my fair share of 'cheats' in my gaming lifetime.

But what pisses me off most is a whiner, i hate every essence of them.

[slugs]

i gave up playing halo 3 for the very reason listed above. people with levels that in no way reflected thier true skill. level and its no fun to spawn and die over and over.

i play cod4 now and ive lost count of the number of times the host ended the match, or a clan ended the match early. and then two more members apeared when the game started again.

and when you go into a cage match and someone shouts challenges at you. and all they want to do is shoot you in teh head or something to get a better score. ive seen people logging on with guest accounts to do just that

ive always though giving them a negative rating on xbox live was too strong. but its getting worse.

it would be better if the rating system ranked different games and you could exclude certain people or devices from playing.

but they would just sell there device on and someone else would end up with the negative feedback

[SmileyUK]

aye footie games seem the worst for this, fight night used to be a nightmare as well. there are some who do it in ranked soulcalibur 4 matches when my very camp chef spanky beats them to a pulp using a ladle and saucepan lid.

erm yes i have been getting into the create a soul mode.

[finnrogers]

Right I've got a problem with this article. In my opinion, it is wrong to put campers in the same category as cheaters. I think it is important to differenciate between exploiting a design flaw/bug and exploiting a strategy that works (albeit irritating for everyone else).

Exploiting a design flaw/bug is more about boosting your score, unlocking difficult achievements, gaining an unfair advantage by doing something which, by design, you're not meant to be able to do. This is cheating; Plain and simple. There are, of course, other forms of cheating. However, camping IMO does not fall into this category. Camping is more about trying to adopt a strategy which is repeatidly successful. I think it is worth mentionning though that this is rarely the case. In my experience from most games, camping can have some short term gains but eventually leads you to become a primary target and ultimately fails to reap (m)any rewards. To top that off, alot of games make it arguably harder to win by camping and sniping. Battlefield Bad Company is a perfect example: you might be able to pick a few people off and laser designate tanks, but stick in the same spot for any longer than a couple of minutes and you'll either be sniped by someone who you've just killed or someone will walk up behind you and casually carve their initials in your back and claim your dogtags!

I agree that some of these tactics are irritating, but I just wanted to speak out to make sure that we don't confuse irritating tactics with cheating as the latter is a far worse problem.

In response to the bit about "what can we do about it", I would like to see the categories on xbox live reinforced with rules: "recreational" players should be allowed to play without all of the above cheaters and campers and people who are clearly out to boost their score, win win win, etc - Maybe the feedback system could incorporate some extra options to say "this player is trying too hard" sort of thing - if the user gets 5 of those then he's penalised by being put in the "professional" category for 2 weeks. Of course for this to work, games would have to have the option of being able to play only with people in your category of choice.

Basically, I think the system of dividing players up depending on their style of gameplay just needs beefing up. Although realistically, I can see this problem being one that will never really go away.