Companies selling broken games on PC and Console

[crazily]

Hello, I've got a bit of a thingy I'm not understanding. Why is it that a company can sell games (such as black ops 1 on console and cs:go on pc) where the game is near impossible to get into a game without people who are cheating.

Example: My dad plays black ops 1 on console. And on black ops 1 there's this bit of an exploit where if someone who has a jtagged xbox or an RGH xbox makes a match replay a special replay a certain way it can inject the cheat for as long as you don't leave call of duty multiplayer without you needing a modified xbox atall. So essentially you can be invisible and stuff like that.

cs:go is broken similarly. + They go about detecting cheaters the wrong way (banning them after you've already got a loss because a guy was spinbotting or walling). I am in non-prime in cs:go but that's basically not important because the hacks just get more sophisticated in higher ranked prime games. And I'm a newish player to cs:go. (Silver elite) So that means I have to wait to get high level before I get to prime anyway. But if you watch the demo it becomes obvious that he's walls or ab or both.

Anyway. Why are the companies who own the games still allowed to sell the games when it is highly unlikely you'll be able to experience the multiplayer in normal play (nobody is cheating). Isn't that similar to if you brought home a new car but the gas mileage advertised wasn't correct atall.

I'm not seeing how they're still able to sell the game legally when it's essentially not as described.

 

[asoroka]

where is the question for the community?

 

[USAFRet]

The game isn't broken, the other players are.
The game publishers try to code against cheats, and then the gamers devise new cheats. Repeat repeat repeat.

 

[crazily]

It's way less of a problem in other games like rainbow six seige + You basically can't cheat in rocket league either. And Vanilla minecraft has no sort of anti-cheat atall. And it's basically impossible to cheat at league of legends too aside from scripts. But that doesn't actually modify the game or anything.

+ Older call of duty games are pretty much abandoned

 

[canadianvice]

What you need to understand about this is that the developers, depending on their quality, do make an honest-to-god effort to stop this.

As an example, Blizzard has touted an extremely hard line against cheaters - if you are caught, you are subject to an irrevocable, permanent, cross-license ban. AKA: you will never play that game again. They also invest a lot of time and money into software means to detect and punish cheating players.

Some devs take more responsibility for this than others.

The trouble in terms of the actual cheaters is that it is a cat and mouse game - every time the devs swat down a cheat engine or a bug that was being exploited, the cheaters are already poking at the holes trying to find a new method.

Take for example, Bots (players controlled automatically by a computer program - who in this case were often pests who over-harvested resources and made it impossible for legitimate players to play), in Runescape, the MMORPG. It used to be, years ago, that you could be attacked by random events. This was interesting gameplay, but it was actually designed to stop the basic level of bot that relied on things like image recognition and OCR to navigate the game. They were unable to respond to this. So, the bots got better. Runescape then started shifting the screen and other measures for players caught doing something for too long. This mostly killed botting. But it came back.

It's a constant game - dev diligence helps, but you can't blame them entirely, particularly on older titles. Keeping it up to prevent cheating is a major cost, and often just not economically worth ti to them. They sell the game with terms of use that prohibit using these engines to cheat, the same terms they sold it to you under, and they will punish cheaters if found, but it's a losing battle. Just like piracy - always has been, always will be.

Every action the devs take is matched by large numbers of people working to poke holes in the armour. Imagine a pro fencer against even a bunch of novices - certainly, they could take 5 on one. 10 on one, maybe, but do you think they'd be able to keep their guard against 30 on one? Obviously not. Too many people cheat, and even the best intentioned company can only put so much into trying to stop it.

It doesn't help that a lot of the most powerful methods for stopping this are the most invasive and likely to get the wrong people caught in the net. For instance, Valve has had issues with people using overlays such as RivaStatistics or Overwolf (both totally legitimate apps that do not affect gameplay or enable cheats) being permabanned with little recourse because these made, much like an antivirus program getting a false positive, the mistake of thinking these players were loading bad code.

Some factors for you:
1. MineCraft cheats do exist, and are fairly easy to use.
2. League makes use of a much hated dynamic for most games - everything is serverside on clients controlled by Riot. You cannot affect code on their servers, and so it's very good insulation from cheats. Unfortunately, for many games, this means enforced online-only, and harms ownership.
3. RSS probably just doesn't have many. I guarantee you there are wall hacks and such for the game.

If it's a game with wide appeal that does not make the penalties for cheating sufficiently high, it will be subject to these issues; the trouble is that to be punished cheaters have to be caught, and to be caught.... well, that's a hell of a lot of time and money.

Focus your blame on the cheaters for cheating, not the devs. The devs are not the ones who are breaking the rules.