Archive for February, 2008

Why do people cheat?

That’s a question I’m sure I’ll never understand the answer to, but it’s also one that comes to my mind frequently.

Specifically, I don’t understand why people attempt to cheat at C:SI combat.  There have been quite a number of people who’ve done so, and most of the time it’s the most naive, blatantly obvious, pitiful kind of cheating that just makes me shake my head in disgust.

Take, for instance, this guy I was fighting several months ago in Samurai Edo.  He had on an attachment that, when he pressed an attack key, would just hammer me with invisible physical spheres.  Of course, he wasn’t even sly enough to make these prims silent, so my first clue was the massive collision noises I heard every time he slashed.  Secondly, the collision of these prims with an avatar creates a pretty noticeable impact effect, and only someone relatively new to Second Life® would fail to notice.  I could quite clearly see them in View Transparent mode, so I asked him what the heck he was doing it for (since it simply would never work), and…  He denied having any such device.  I mean, seriously, that’s an insult to anyone’s intelligence.

Recently, Shindo mentioned to me that he’d seen someone that was using another extremely obvious cheat that allowed him to remain blocking at all times.  Um, like nobody is going to notice that, right?  Esprite mentioned a similar cheater to me the other day, but I’m not sure whether it’s the same person or someone else.

There have been countless other examples, but the point is that I can’t understand the confusion of thinking and absence of character that drives people to do this stuff.

So, what gets done about it?  Well, here’s what I think is likely to happen to someone that is caught cheating at C:SI, though every situation is different :

  • Their win/loss record could get permanently wiped, depending on the severity of the cheat.  This might take some of the motivation away from cheating, though I don’t understand the cheater’s mindset enough to know for sure if that’s actually effective.  This is extremely rare, but we do reserve the right to do so.
  • Banning from C:SI regions, both official and otherwise.  Again, this depends on the cheat as well as the region.  The criteria is likely different for me banning someone from Samurai Edo, for instance, than someone else banning them from Meiji.  Every region administrator has their own tolerance for cheaters, but it’s not at all uncommon to see the ban-stick come out no matter where the cheating happens.  By and large, the C:SI community is made up of honorable and skillful warriors with utter disdain for and little tolerance of cheaters.
  • Abuse Report : This is uncommon, but I have personally met people who claim to be using Second Life® exploits on C:SI scripts and objects in order to cheat (or worse).  In every case I’ve doubted that the person was telling the truth, but as they say, "tell it to the judge".  Linden Labs has the capability to verify or disprove that claim, and I believe that it is appropriate to report them.
  • Public "name and shame".  If someone is caught cheating, it’s likely that the people that catch them are going to tell others they know, with the likely result that the person will no longer be welcome in many places, and will have a hard time finding good sparring partners.  This probably wouldn’t bother many noob-farmers, but that’s a subject for a different day.

Okay, sorry for the long and pointless rant, I just get really irked when I see this kind of stuff.  I know so many people that are dedicated, work hard, and train regularly, and I respect them for it.  Cheaters, on the other hand, are just slime, and I felt like griping about it this morning :)

 

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Out of context = Funny

[8:42] Zero Linden: klaxons in the monkey house

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Testing Tools : Duel Data Monitor

I’ve mentioned many times on this blog that I’m a huge fan of the idea of gathering usage statistics, and I do my best to display them in a way that makes sense for others.

I recently read an article on Coding Horror that reinforced my belief that gathering actual "real-world" usage statistics is invaluable.  To attempt to boil it down to what’s relevant for this blog, Jeff Atwood describes important lessons learned by Valve’s gathering of hardware and gameplay metrics to discover things about their users and their game that likely could not have been gathered or understood in any other way.

Take, for instance, this (unattributed) quote from Valve about the use of Steam to collect information about Team Fortress II:

We’ve traditionally relied on things like written feedback from players to help decide which improvements to focus on. More recently, Steam has allowed us to collect more information than was previously possible. TF2 includes a reporting mechanism which tells us details about how people are playing the game. We’re sharing the data we collect because we think people will find it interesting, and because we expect to spot emergent problems earlier, and ultimately build better products and experiences as a result.

While less relevant to my point here, even last September GameProducer.net had an article on Steam’s statistics and how some surprises and quite useful information could be found there.

While Second Life® doesn’t really provide any clean way to gather those kinds of statistics, and C:SI doesn’t really require quite that level of detail, I still believe that gathering some data is not only good for the system as a whole but could be very interesting for the community members.

Popularity: 61% [?]

The Making Of Second Life® - In Book Stores Now

Hamlet Au (formerly Hamlet Linden) of New World Notes has written a book about the early days of Second Life®, and how it all came to be.  There are lots of anecdotes and stories, and the blurbs I’ve seen on the blog are actually fairly fun and interesting.

It would seem that he’s been working on the book for quite some time, the earliest reference I found was in Nov 2006 where he describes it as:

NOTES FROM THE NEW WORLD, an exploration of the online virtual world known as Second Life®, where more than a million residents live and play (some earning six-figure incomes in the process), as it transforms into the next generation of the Internet, replacing the World Wide Web, and attracting attention from MTV, Warner Brothers, Harvard, authors, even political candidates, to Ethan Friedman at Collins, in a deal that includes the virtual book rights for publication in Second Life®,

The book is available from Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble, and there’s even a machinima promo by Lainy Voom :


The Making Of SecondLife on Vimeo.

Popularity: 46% [?]



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