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This video dives into the ingenious tactics used by developers to combat cheating in online games, featuring examples from titles like Grand Theft Auto Online and H1Z1 where punishments are as creative as they are effective.
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00:00Given the amount of money that's in online gaming these days, it's little surprise that
00:03developers funnel considerable resources into combating cheaters. Beyond the obvious solution
00:08of simply bringing the mighty banhammer down upon mischievous players, these games came up with
00:13more novel means of dealing with hackers, bots and other nefarious ne'er-do-wells.
00:18I'm Sy for WhatCulture.com and these are 10 Genius Ways Video Games Fought Cheaters.
00:24Number 10. Making modded cards explode upon entry. Grand Theft Auto Online.
00:29Trust Rockstar Games to come up with a totally hilarious way to flip the bird at cheating players.
00:34The Duke O'Death is an armoured muscle car in Grand Theft Auto 5 which originally was only available
00:39to those who upgraded from the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game to PS4 and Xbox One copies.
00:45And more to the point, it could only be officially used in the single player portion, not Grand Theft Auto
00:50Online.
00:51However, in 2015 players found a way to hack the Duke O'Death into GTA Online but rather than merely
00:57ban offending players, Rockstar came up with an altogether more emphatic way to give them a telling
01:02off. Basically, the developers patched the game to ensure that the Duke O'Death would instantly
01:06explode the moment that any player set foot in it, killing them instantly. On the one hand,
01:11it was an ironclad way to stop players from circumventing a restriction and on the other,
01:15it sent a rather firm yet playful message to offending players that cheating wouldn't be tolerated.
01:209. Banning Cheaters Until They Post An Apology Video H1Z1
01:26Battle Royale game H1Z1 encountered a serious problem with Cheaters shortly after launching
01:30in early 2015, with over 25,000 players being banned in May of that year. At the same time,
01:37developer Daybreak Game Company's president John Smedley announced an outrageous initiative
01:41to discourage cheating, promising to only restore banned accounts if the culprits posted apology videos
01:47on YouTube, citing remorse for their actions. Smedley revealed that he'd been sent many apologetic
01:52emails from affected players but felt that this wasn't good enough, requesting a more intimate
01:57personal video lamentation instead which he could then retweet. Smedley added that he encouraged those
02:02who were apologizing to direct their regrets to other gamers rather than the developers themselves,
02:08as he felt it was players who were truly suffering from most of their actions. Ultimately,
02:12the limited time offer came and went without many players taking Smedley up on it, which,
02:17while a bit of a shame, isn't really remotely surprising.
02:208. Hijacking Their Character In-Game Guild Wars 2
02:23Guild Wars 2 evidently doesn't suffer Cheaters lightly and made one hell of an example out of
02:28one especially prolific rascal back in 2015. A player character by the name of JT Darkside reportedly
02:35spent around three weeks wreaking havoc throughout the massive multiplayer online gaming world,
02:39attacking other players and teleporting around the map with impunity. Players reported Darkside to
02:44developer Arianet in swaths and after a surprisingly lengthy period of inaction they finally decided
02:50to act. But Arianet didn't stop at merely banning the cheating player, they bodied him so thoroughly
02:56that it sent a triple stamped message to anybody else planning to ruin other players fun with cheating
03:01ways. Guild Wars 2 security lead Chris Cleary eventually took to the game's official forums to
03:06reveal that not only had Darkside been banned, he'd been jettisoned from the game in the most comically
03:11theatrical manner possible. Cleary posted a video of him logging into Darkside's account, stripping
03:16his character naked, flinging him to his death and then deleting both characters registered on his
03:21account. Needless to say, sympathy for Darkside was few and far between, even if this was an especially
03:26performative act of quite literally parading a cheater's humiliated corpse through the digital streets.
03:317. Sending Mr Rossetti to Hassle Save Scummers Animal Crossing
03:36The Animal Crossing series allows players to cheat by quitting out of the game without saving,
03:40moving the system clock forward to the next day and returning, letting them access replenished store
03:45stocks, amongst other things. However, players who quit the game without saving their progress will,
03:49upon reloading, be met by the supremely angry Mole Man, Mr Rossetti, whose central preoccupation is to
03:56pester players who attempt to exploit their way to riches and success. At first, Rossetti will be
04:01polite but firm, but the more that you abuse the reset exploit, the more insistent and annoyed he'll
04:06get. His actions vary in severity and weirdness across games in the series. He might simply talk
04:11you to death for a few minutes or force you to type responses back to him such as forgive me
04:15and
04:15Rossetti rules. The piece de resistance though is threatening to delete your entire save game as
04:21punishment for your abuses, yet after apparently doing so it thankfully ends up being a fake out
04:25intended to scare the player straight. 6. Watermarking their health bar, Outriders
04:31Online only co-op action at Outriders may not have set the world on fire when it released in 2018,
04:37but developers People Can Fly did come up with a neat way to deter cheaters after encountering a
04:41higher than expected volume of them during the game's demo period. The devs issued a warning prior
04:46to the game's release that they could tell who was cheating while playing the demo and vowed to
04:50permanently brand any re-offending players in the game proper with a discreet but visible spiderweb
04:56watermark on their HUD's health bar forever outing them as a bad egg. Given that Outriders isn't a
05:01PvP game, cheating perhaps wasn't as egregious as it could have been, but all the same the hope was
05:06that permanently altering a player's HUD robbed them of the glory of posting screen grabs of their
05:11in-game accomplishments. Considering that players are only likely to cheat at Outriders for vanity
05:16reasons to boast to others how far ahead they are, this was a pretty inventive way to invalidate that
05:21and make the cheaters consider the ultimate futility of their actions.
05:255. The Bovine Defense Force Initiative The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt
05:29Within days of The Witcher 3's release, players discovered an exploit which allowed them to quickly
05:33amass crowns by killing cows in White Orchard Village, looting their hides, meditating to trigger
05:39a respawn and then repeating the process all over again. CD Projekt Red quickly caught wind of players
05:44sneakily enriching themselves though, and a few weeks later released a patch which gave those
05:49taking advantage of the exploits a rather nasty surprise indeed. The patch resulted in players
05:54who killed six cows being suddenly faced with a mighty level 27 Chort spawning in front of them,
05:59an extremely powerful cow-like monster who could easily make short work of unprepared players.
06:04In the original version of the patch, Chorts would continually keep spawning even if the player
06:08managed to kill one, with the developers dubbing it The Bovine Defense Force Initiative,
06:12which is a fantastic band name by the way. Hilariously, some players realised that if they
06:17were strong enough to kill the Chorts, this could help them farm crowns even faster than with the
06:21cow exploit, and so CD Projekt Red later altered it to only spawn a single Chort.
06:274. Modding Bots To Only Attack Cheaters Team Fortress 2
06:31Team Fortress 2 has always had a substantial problem with cheaters, though that reached a fever pitch in
06:362020 when Valve's official servers became flooded with bots using cheats to disrupt genuine gameplay.
06:42These were typically programmed to use aim bots, spam the in-game chat, vote to kick
06:46legit players out, and even cause the server to lag. Naturally, this pissed off players who,
06:51dissatisfied with Valve's apparent inability to cope with tidal waves of bots, took matters into their
06:56own hands. Later that year, players resorted to inserting their own cheat bots into Team Fortress 2
07:01servers, yet these were only programmed to target malevolent cheat bots and leave genuine players alone.
07:07It was a magical case of fighting fire with fire, of effectively creating Terminator-like bots to
07:12take down other nuisance bots. While many understandably decried Valve's ongoing failure
07:17to address the problem infrastructurally, this was nevertheless a spectacularly smart idea on the
07:22part of enterprising, frustrated players.
07:253. Letting Other Players Publicly Execute
07:28If there's one thing you can't deny about EVE Online, it's that those who play it take it super
07:33seriously, and above all else won't abide the effort of anyone treating it like a joke.
07:37Developers' CCP games also haven't taken lightly any attempts to undermine their meticulously
07:42constructed space sim, and in 2018 EVE even organised a public execution of cheating players.
07:48One of the most common methods of cheating involves using a bot to farm in-game currency all day long,
07:53providing offenders with a substantial advantage over honest players who have to, you know,
07:57leave the computer to work, eat, exercise and actually deal with other human beings.
08:02Between this and the potential for mass botting to destabilise the game's fragile economy,
08:06CCP typically offers cheaters a warning before banning their account on a second offence.
08:11But five years ago, a series of spaceships owned by cheating players were teleported into neutral space,
08:16and players en masse were invited to show up to give them one hell of a shellacking.
08:20And boy, that they did.
08:22By the end of the massacre, more than 150 players had assembled to destroy the fleet of ships trotted
08:27out by CCP staffers, and when the ritual was repeated a week later, more than 700 strong showed
08:33up to obliterate a cheater's titan, one of the most powerful ships in the game. Glorious.
08:38Number two, creating invisible enemies to detect aimbots, Call of Duty.
08:43The Call of Duty franchise has certainly come up with its fair share of clever methods for dealing with
08:47cheaters, but Activision has truly outdone themselves with their latest gambit.
08:51The publisher recently announced an update to their Ricochet anti-cheat software which governs all
08:56contemporary Call of Duty games. This adds a new anti-cheat mechanic which introduces
09:00hallucinations to multiplayer games, fake invisible enemies cloned from actual players in the game.
09:06While in no way affecting play for regular gamers, these digital phantoms would instantly trigger
09:11cheating mechanisms like aimbot, in turn outing cheaters without any room for doubt whatsoever.
09:16As traps to catch cheaters go, that's incredibly smart and creative. Simply banning cheaters is one
09:22thing, but completely obliterating the very foundation of their cheating is another,
09:26to ensure they can't help but reveal their dirty little secrets.
09:30Number one, banishing cheaters to their own playlist, Fall Guys.
09:34Containment is an interesting solution for developers to prevent cheaters from ruining the
09:38game for honest players, yet without banning offenders outright and losing their custom.
09:42And so Fall Guys developers Mediatonic once introduced a cheater island, a secret playlist for cheaters
09:48to compete against one another, free to out-cheat their opponents in the pursuit of that ever-precious
09:53crown. According to Mediatonic, at first Cheater Iden lacked enough concurrent players to consistently
09:58fill up matches, but over time their pool of cheaters became surprisingly large, and so the secret
10:03playlist was open in earnest. However, the developer ultimately decided that there were too many cheaters
10:08to tolerate, and so decided to swiftly close their experiment down, instead handing out blanket
10:13bans to offending players, with the game subsequently adopting Epic Games' more robust anti-cheat measures.
10:19Mediatonic's own Twitter account said of the matter, our cheat detection system was good,
10:23but we hadn't expected so many players, and we had no idea the lengths that some would go to cheat.
10:29Of course cheating in online gaming is all kind of terrible, but some video games punish you for cheating in
10:34solo play. Check out Jules' video on screen now for 8 video games that mock you for using cheat codes.
10:39Don't forget to leave a comment down below on other anti-cheat methods like this video,
10:43and make sure you're subscribed. Head over to WhatCulture.com for more content every day.
10:48I've been Cy for WhatCulture, and have a good week.
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