Hacker News Reader

Comment by dzek69 | Hacker News Reader

Meh, unused to play GTA online a lot. On worst days (when new cheat was released or leaked or whatever, I don't know) it was almost uplayable because of players that could for example: - Instantly kill everyone - randomly teleporting people around - crating explosives around players - blocking movements of other players

Spawning UFOs, a lot of cars, attaching Christmas trees as hats or spawning a cat that follows you around on a BMX could be fun. But half of the times I spotted a cheater - he was ruining other people game.

View on HN

Isn't this on Rockstar to fix? How is it even allowed in their game code for a bag of money to be spawned in... there's no mini-game, heist, or mode that does this, so why is the code even possible?

Same with attaching Christmas Trees to people (very annoying), or killing everyone, or setting everyone on fire. Their API seems to be enabling this behavior (and the server gladly accepts the state change, impacting all other players), even though it's not used anywhere else in the game for legit reasons.

It's not easy to prevent cheating, especially in open world games. There's a pretty good high level read on this here - https://www.pcgamer.com/why-is-it-so-hard-to-stop-cheating-i...

In essence you pretty much have to delegate some of the computation of game physics etc to the client - doing everything on the server isn't going to scale. But the moment you delegate that to the client you open the door for cheating.

The current best practice in preventing cheating seems to be "referee" code that performs checks that what a player is doing is actually "sane" within the rules of the game. But in the end it's an arms race between cheats and anti-cheats, which means game companies are always going to be playing catch up.

Yes, that makes sense... but a bag of money exists nowhere else in the game... so why can the assets be spawned at all?

Part of that policing should be done server-side, especially with a max player limit of 32 per server instance (that's manageable).

The server should recognize not every single player in the instance can be set on fire simultaneously... and when a player dies and respawns, why is their player-state not reset? Instead, they remain on fire and die again and again and again...

There's definitely some low-hanging fruit Rockstar could fix to combat a lot of the griefing that goes on.

No, it would be very easy actually. For example...

Problem: Other players can change your player's player model with cheats: Solution: Ignore that message if its from another player

Problem: Other players can spawn in massive Ferris wheels in the middle of the map in Freeroam Solution: Ignore that message if its from another player and we're in freemode.

So on and so forth, It's not difficult.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com