Cheating prevention in multi-player online games Essay

Cheating prevention in multi-player online games - Essay Example The games allow people to collaborate or play against each other irrespective of the location they occupy around the world. The use of the internet has made this possible because people far away from each other can connect and play without having to meet or see each other face to face. Many only games have become famous where players can form friendships. However, multiplayer games have been subjected to issues of cheating and hacking. Hackers can interfere with the graphic rendering to reveal information that would be hidden in a normal game. Cheaters, on the other hand, can use software robot to play the game automatically and gain an unfair advantage over their counterparts. Because of the above weaknesses, some games have released software patches or anti-cheating software to detect the known cheats (Yeung, Lui, Liu, & Yan, 2006:1180). However, this has not been a success because cheats still find a way of bypassing such software because the software creates a difficulty for deployment but cheats still breach the normal game logic until the patches are available. Moreover, the cheats can still bypass the software by hacking them. There are many different ways of cheating in multiplayer online games. However, this paper will focus on two types that include cheating by exploiting misplaced trust and cheating by abusing game procedure. In this type, the game player is given to a game client that performs a number of functions. It directs commands to the game server, receives commands from the server and uses a graphical engine to make a graphical representation of the game on the player’s computer screen (Webb, 2006:25). Here, the game client is a target to a player who has the ability to modify the client using a disassemble. The fact that it is in the cheaters possession makes it complex because the cheater can reverse engineer it passively. This modifies the client to perform cheats such as the wall hacks and map hacks. Map hacks occur when the player