Infinity Ward's creative strategist Robert Bowling says that the studio has learned some hard lessons about online cheating from previous Call of Duty games, and is taking extraordinary measures to make sure that there is little (or at least less) of it in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. To that end, Bowling says that MW3 will have dedicated teams monitoring online activity and dealing with anyone foolhardy enough to cheat.
The teams of cheater hunters won't be the game's only line of defense though; Bowling says Modern Warfare 3 will also feature improved code that checks for players using hacks in the game and will take advantage of Steam's VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) technology.
"There's been a lot of work put into it. I can't go into specifics," said Bowling. "On a general high level area there's so much more stuff that we've locked down and made less accessible than we had before."
"It's also about our ability to take action when stuff is wrong so we've done a lot of work in our ability to update the game more quickly and efficiently than we have before," he added.
Modern Warfare 3 deploys to PC, PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360 on November 8.
Source: The Escapist
Comments
Re: Infinity Ward Going to War with Modern Warfare 3 Cheaters
I thought they were doing most of this stuff before? Also, does Steam's VAC only work on the PC or does it work on consoles? I thought it was only in use on PC games.
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Re: Infinity Ward Going to War with Modern Warfare 3 Cheaters
It's only used on PC because it is a feature of Steamworks. As in 3rd parties can opt to include it if they want to use the Steamworks 3rd party DRM (Modern Warfare 2, for example, used steamworks and VAC). However, it only detects changes against the executable files, not against actual cheaters. Funny thing is that VAC ended up banning a lot of people that got put into hacked servers NOT ON THEIR OWN DECISION and Valve ended up having to reactivate multiplayer for a bunch of people and gave them copies of L4D2 to compensate.
Re: Infinity Ward Going to War with Modern Warfare 3 Cheaters
That's good of Valve, but they've always been pretty good with their customer service.
These sorts of situations generally go one of two ways: They catch no one, and every curses the developer for being incompetence or; they ban people on a hair trigger, and everyone curses the developer for being fascist.
This is especially true when the story is well publicized, since it creates an arms race between cheaters and the developers. If the cheaters win, they cheat, and they'll cheat a lot (for a little while at least) to rub it in. If they don't succeed, they may try for a while, pushing the developer's watchdogs in to excessive action, and then it's banland for everyone.
Not guaranteed, of course, but if they stop the cheaters without going overboard, the chances are pretty good that we won't hear about it again anyway.