Massively

I care a great deal about this question, because rampant, unchecked, out of control cheating is why I quit: I couldn't find any allies, on either side, who weren't themselves either cheating or tolerating cheating. But it's hard to have an opinion about this Developer's Letter, because when I quit, third-party programs were the LEAST of our problems. Oh, there was a rumor of one that would let players fly far above the terrain, but it was easy to deal with: the cheater flying far above the terrain was visible to everybody. No, the bigger deal wasn't with third-party software, it was with Mythic's own client.

There were several powers with known-bugged effects. There were quite a few places in the terrain with known-buggy clipping. There were known, reliable ways to desync the client and the server, making it impossible for defenders to defend because as far as the server was concerned, the NPC or structure they were guarding was no longer where they thought it was, it was dozens of yards away, invisible in the middle of the attacking army. And there was a known, reproducible way to "stack" what was supposed to be a one-time buff onto yourself to the point where you could one-shot kill any player and were immune to all damage.

No attempt to monitor the player characters' computers for bad code or bad interactions were going to catch those problems. There was only one way to catch these problems: warn players not to intentionally attack people through doors or walls or hills, warn people not to pull supposedly-unpullable mobs to places those mobs weren't supposed to go, not to intentionally move back and forth over and over again in the impossible-to-replicate-by-accident pattern that would stack infinite damage bonus and infinite damage resistance onto you, on pain of being banned -- and then assign invisible referees, from among the game masters, to wander around the PvP zones and watch what people were doing. AND IT WORKED ... right up until Electronic Arts laid every single one of them off.

Whether the game is baseball or bicycling or online games, it is a flat-out mistake to think that cheating is a purely technological problem with purely technological solutions. Cheating, especially once it becomes entrenched, is a cultural problem even more than it's a technical problem. If people feel safe to cheat, because they are confident that the odds of getting caught are low and the consequences are easily avoided, then no technological fix will last; cheaters will just move on to the next cheat. If people feel compelled to cheat, because they believe (rightly or wrongly) that every time they lose it is because the other side cheated, they will feel that they have no choice but to cheat or quit.

That, not the technology of cheat detection, is what EA/Mythic completely and utterly failed to address. Nor have they said anything since then, in their official communications, to address this issue and to say what they're doing about it and what they're going to do about it. Change that one thing right there, convince me that there are once again a sufficient number of referees watching the scenarios, or at least the open RvR lakes, and punishing the obviously guilty and that the top Order and Destruction guilds on any server are terrified to have a suspected cheater in their ranks for fear of collective punishment, and I will resubscribe to Warhammer Online in a New York nanosecond.

Until then, forget it. I flatly will not pay any sum of money, however low, for a PvP game that is a cheater's paradise.

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> If people feel compelled to cheat, because they believe (rightly or wrongly) that every time they lose it is because the other side cheated, they will feel that they have no choice but to cheat or quit.

This reminded me of why I quit WAR... forgot all about this in the last 6 months. Looks like I'll have to wait a bit longer before I go back and have a look.

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Why does this even matter anymore when there are only 6 server lefts and 2/3s o them are ghost towns?

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