UKTerrorist

Erik Johnson on Cheating

Posted by Blitz at 11:47 25/1/2002.

• First up, he's been interviewed over on ShackNews. They talk about cheating and what Valve plan to do to stop it all:

  How often do you expect to update the anti-cheating software, seeing how people often quickly find new ways to cheat?

  [Erik Johnson] - There are two schools of thought when it comes to solving the anti-cheating problem. One way to attack the problem is to create the "silver bullet" that will make it impossible for a specific cheat to ever work. An example of this would be the method that we used against the speed cheat about six months ago.

  The other method is to enter an "arms race" with the cheat authors, where you make it increasingly difficult for cheat authors to trick the software into doing something unintended. Once the cheat author has spent the time to get their cheat to work, there is already a new release out that returns them to square one.

  We're going to be adopting both methods to stop cheating.

• The second interview comes courtesy of GameSpyDaily. They cover pretty much the same topic as the above interview, but they do give a bit more background information:

  GameSpy: How do cheaters exploit the Half-Life code? Do you have any ways to put a stop to this?

  Erik Johnson: Most of the cheating is done by "hijacking" the Half-Life client .dll. The cheat developers have found ways of hacking their OS into making our game do unintended behavior.