--- Justin Dugger wrote:
Of course, there is also the concern over cheating made simple with open source. ... Personally, I think that this is a failing of the server design. If a player is being excessively disruptive, there should be a social mechanism in place via the server to manage, arbitrate and facilitate the curtailing of that disruptive player, either by kick\bans or other means of punishment. This is probably one of the most important aspects of multiplayer gaming that has gone unsolved, but not for a lack of trying.
Not being a gamer [for health reasons. ;')], I don't know all the issues here, but it seems to me it should be fairly easy to deal with the cheaters. Of course it really does seem to depend on handling it at the servers. It seems that some fairly decent coders could write a routine to detect the cheaters and either ban them or strip their powers and points. Alternatively, it should also be possible for some decent coders to write a plug-in for users to download andinstall that could detect cheaters and take some action based on that, by any or all of: posting to everyone in the game the "identity" of the cheater, cheating back against the cheater, using some force to terminate the cheater from the game, intercept the cheats and reverse them, etc. Now like I said I'm not a gamer but it seems some of these things should work, or I may just be uninformed to how it all works. I'm assuming all the servers are owned by the game vendors and thus out of the control of the players? It seems to me that this would be a good use for p2p to build rogue servers, with ligitimite clients. Should someone build a server that valdiated legitimite copies of the game software, then there really wouldn't be any angle the vendors could use to sue the servers/clients. I know that someone in St. Louis did build a server for some game, but I don't believe they included verification of clients, which of course just leads judges to believe they are up to something.
just some random thoughts, Brian
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