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August 4, 1999 - Cheating in Quake(x) Games

Okay, WTF is up with all the cheating nowadays in online games? Are people so incredibly lame as to need HELP when playing online? Well folks, that appears to be awful close to the truth nowadays.

When Q2 came out, I started playing with a vengence. I even insulted a Best Buy salesperson in my quest to get ahold of Q2. Finally I got to pay extra at a computer shop in Appleton so I could get my Q2 fix. And then I got to play multiplayer. That was cool. Then Capture the Flag. VERY cool.

And then, the zbot cometh

The piece of useless humanity who came up with this totally destroyed the Q2 online scene as far as I'm concerned. From that moment on, nobody could play online trusting that the other guy wasn't a 'bot. Zbot was the end of Q2 for me. What a shame.

Now, in Q3, we've managed to totally improve the situation with the timescale cheat. This allows a player to run and shoot much faster than the people around them. What a wonderful thing. Thankfully John Carmack is vehemently against cheating, and has even threatened legal action against cheaters who release their cheats online. But in the end, it will still ruin the simple trust in skillz that existed back in Quake and QuakeWorld.

As a Quake server admin, I've wasted more time than I can remember chasing cheaters. I've seen it all. Zbot-losers. Pingflooders. Artificial ping rate limiters. Trace flooders. They all suck. Many of these cheats will still work in Q3. And any other game where the LPB can dominate simply by his control of the bandwidth. It's a shame, and I have punished offenders severely. Usually this means the entire class-C network of the offender gets banned from my servers.

There's nothing more obnoxious than having to be a 'net-cop. I never wanted the job, but if I want to run game servers, it's part of the job. Logging, tracing, verifying, refuting. Whee. But I'll keep doing it. And the cheaters better watch their butts. 'Cause if I catch you, it's not going to be pretty.