It’s an arms race. You can still write cheats with computer vision and automated control input and have an unfair advantage, and that has nothing to do with client and server responsibility delegation.
There are a lot of games that get this wrong but even games that get it right can be cheated.
It's quite possible. I'll agree that sometimes, making the client authoritative for some stuff can reduce load on the server, but generally, it's both simpler and less "cheat prone" to make the server authoritative for everything, and have the client just send "here's the player's input" and then apply client side prediction (this is a common cause of "rubber-banding" in multiplayer games: poor client side-prediction)
In video games, it's usually the simplest model to apply, and most common (when combined with client side prediction). The main alternatives are p2p, which is for when you don't have a central server, and hybrid, mainly for when you have large open world type MMORPGs (and also well known to be vulnerable to client side hacks...)
It's mostly impossible because basically game client can't be dumb terminal that only send commands and display graphics. Good luck replicating everything server side, if it was easy to do it would have been a while that every dedicated game servers would have eliminated cheat in games which is not the case.
It's actually quite common to do that... Yes, the game usually does more then just "send commands and display graphics", it's doing a lot of the stuff the server is in parallel, which is called client side prediction, but the server is still authoritative, and doesn't care what the client thought actually happened, what it says goes.
Game servers don't verify everything that the client is sending, not everything is replicated / synchronized because when you add AI / physics ect ... it's very heavy on the CPU / bandwidth so off course you can't check everything, every games have exploits because of this reason.
Since you mention MMOs, most or all them don't check for movement even popular ones like WoW.
Everything needs to be replicated for that stuff, or different clients see different things. Plenty of games DO this, so yes, a game trusting clients is a bug IMO. Yes, WoW doesn't do all the movement serverside, cause it can be expensive. But even WoW does checks for "are you moving faster then you should be".
Is that a question? Cause no, if they care about preventing cheating, they generally don't trust the client. WoW is a good example of this. Every action requires a client->server before it actually starts, though they are generous enough to allow for lag in that, and to do client side prediction so you don't notice. (I think movement may be partially/mostly client side, but they do do checks for people "speedhacking" for that on the server side as well)
It's generally simpler to do everything server side then it is to try to keep x clients synchronized in their simulations of everything (physics, random number generation, multiple players all contributing movement and such)
This reminds me of a court case a decade ago when Blizzard sued the creator of a popular World of Warcraft botting program called MMOGlider on the grounds of copyright infringement. Blizzard won and was awarded $6m. Not a lawyer, but maybe there's some legal precedent?
That may help Golden Modz - in the appeal, the Ninth Circuit said it wasn't copyright infringement:
Were we to hold otherwise, Blizzard or any software copyright holder could designate any disfavored conduct during software use as copyright infringement, by purporting to condition the license on the player's abstention from the disfavored conduct. The rationale would be that because the conduct occurs while the player's computer is copying the software code into RAM in order for it to run, the violation is copyright infringement. This would allow software copyright owners far greater rights than Congress has generally conferred on copyright owners.
The Blizzard argument was that because the license is granted to you only under the EULA, breaking the EULA then becomes copyright infringement. That didn't hold up.
No, what worked for Blizzard was DMCA. Because they had an ineffective "anti cheat" system in place, somehow they found a judge willing to consider a bot evading that a violation of a DMCA copy protection device.
"Copyright infringement" maybe should stick if they hacks include reproductions of Epic's code, but "breach of contract and tortious interference" is a load of horse shit. Game EULAs are not the law.
I agree if they distribute modified binaries then the copyright could apply,
IMO creating the trainer/cheat program or instructions on how to cheat should be perfectly legal, the cheating though may breach the TOS but that would just terminate your license so your account should be banned from online mode, the only way Epic could win this if they distribute the modified binaries instead of some binary that injects itself into the original one.
MMOGlider basically lost because they said it "copies parts of the game's memory while running"... copyright laws in this way are a load of horseshit. I own my CPU, my RAM and my disk and I have every right to control your code if it runs on my computer.
It seems pretty strange that they can do this. How does copyright even apply here, other than for the defendant? If I buy a book, I now own the artifact 100% and the first sale doctrine would tend to indicate that nobody else can tell me what to do with that book (with the caveat that I can't make more copies - the whole point of copyright).
So these folks bought a book and have figured out how to cut out a page and glue in another one. Seems totally OK.
Now they're selling a kit that helps you "mod" your book by teaching you how to cut out a page and replace it with another one. Still no problems IMO.
Could someone prevent you from running a service where someone mails you a book, you cut out some pages and replace them, and then mail it back? I don't think so.
These aren't great analogies obviously. But it's hard to understand how they have standing given that they sold the copies of the game already. Seems like they'd have better luck going on some kind of contractual violation like their EULA or their agreement you have to subject yourself to in order to connect to the game servers.
It probably has something to do with the investment that would be required if the original item didn’t exist.
Suppose it costs you 10 million dollars to make product X, and you are able to make that money back barely (say 11 million). Then, someone else comes along and builds something quickly on top of your expensive investment and is able to make 5 million of their own. Wouldn’t you be mad? They’ve essentially found a low-effort way to make returns without taking any of the risk you did. Without you, they wouldn’t be able to do what they did unless they came up with the whole original item on their own and then built on top of it. Therefore, in essence they are profiting off of your investment.
The law may be significantly more complex and nuanced than this but it’s not hard at all to imagine scenarios where the original producer of a product does not want to enable profits of spin-offs from their work.
Edit: This is one reason patents exist. You are allowed to protect your massive investment for a period of time, no matter how much society may benefit from building on it immediately.
That argument never made sense. If a farmer sells some rice to someone else, who then turns around and sells it for profit, the farmer doesnt get to dictate what the trader can do with the rice.
Copyright has no legitimate economic or technological grounds.
Maybe you'd be mad, but would that anger be justified? We all benefit from each other's work in society. The person building on your work wouldn't be harming you in any way (except perhaps by competing with you, which we all agree is a good thing for everyone in the world except for you), and they would be beneficial to their customers by a significant $5M. Only a foolish society would subtract that from itself because for some reason a platform supplier got "mad."
I don't think it works like that, you can buy whatever you want and resell while adding value. Just like a printing press that buys paper and then makes millions from it by printing books.
> Suppose it costs you 10 million dollars to make product X, and you are able to make that money back barely (say 11 million). Then, someone else comes along and builds something quickly on top of your expensive investment and is able to make 5 million of their own. Wouldn’t you be mad?
That's a terrible analogy. Practically everything is built on using materials built from others. That's essentially specialization.
What you've described is called "capitalism", and "progress". Epic Games did not invent GPUs, which are way more expensive than their product; however, try running Fortnite without one. 1FPS and unplayable.
Fortnite's EULA [0] and virtually any EULA for any software produced in the past couple of decades includes the following bit:
The Software is licensed, not sold, to you under the License. The License does not grant you any title or ownership in the Software.
First sale doctrine does not apply. We don't own many things anymore. Books, music, software, movies—they used to be products you bought but now they are services you subscribe to. It is not a trend that I like.
There are myriad situations where contracts are written which aren't enforceable, but that doesn't make writing the contract illegal, nor does it make _trying_ to enforce it illegal either. That might be a shortcoming of our legal system, but that's how it works.
Your arguments come from a traditional point of view. With laws like the DMCA and it's successors, copyright is an entirely different beast when those copies are digital. You can't make more copies, but you also can't circumvent any copy protection in place.
Most re-edited movies are mostly composed of parts of the original movie, so there is redistribution. The most similar case here is ClearPlay, which only instructs the video player on how to skip certain parts of the video, and that was not considered copyright infringement.
exactly. for example, if i download a movie and edit it, then show it to friends, I'm providing a service in the sense you're arguing, but it's covered by first sale doctrine.
same with fortnite. just because he's using (sharing) the mod doesn't make him any less protected under law
The hacking comparison is a really slippery slope though. As long as I don't harm another actual human there should not be anything wrong with me manipulating how I access a service or how parts of that service behave on my machine.
I'm thinking browser extension that alert Gmail for my use cases or alternative clients for hardware a service provider like Netflix or Spotify has no incentive to care about. We should really make it possible to talk about these issues akin to a right to repair for software, not by criminalizing every deviation from the corporate norm as computer misuse or copyright infringements.
The lawsuit does also contain many claims of breach of contract, and goes beyond that, saying that they are also interfering with other peoples' contractual obligations since they have promoted something that has resulted in other people breaching the game's contract.
> It seems pretty strange that they can do this. How does copyright even apply here, other than for the defendant? If I buy a book [...]
It might be significant that in this case it is not a book. Copyright is a bundle of different rights, and some of them usually only come up for certain kinds of media.
In particular, one of the rights in the bundle is the right to publicly perform the work. Perhaps broadcasting playing the game could violate the performance right?
> Could someone prevent you from running a service where someone mails you a book, you cut out some pages and replace them, and then mail it back? I don't think so.
I wouldn't be so sure. Here are two cases, both involving a company that apparently buys works of art, mounts them on ceramic, and sells the result.
In the first case [1] they bought books containing good quality prints, removed the prints from the book, mounted each print separately, and sold the tiles separately.
The 9th Circuit found that this was a derivative work and was infringing.
In the second case [2] it was apparently again the same company buying and mounting art. This time the works they bought and mounted and sold were notecards and small lithographs. The 7th Circuit said that this was not a derivative work and not infringing.
Suing teenage brats is not an appropriate use of our legal system. I'm not sure of the policy implications but if someone brings an obviously frivolous suit they should pay a large fine. The legal system is being used to bully rather than dispense justice.
This 'brat' is no different than any other theif. If you defraud a company, and further, make a profit doing so, you deserve what you get. Don't excuse terrible behavior.
Their behavior might be terrible, but calling it 'defraud' is a bit weird, isn't it? Sure, we should be able to have gameplay without cheaters, but copyright, EULA and making money off of that is hardly comparable to any physical thing.
Imagine someone making paper boats out of a book, selling them for one dollar each and the book has 300 pages (but costs 20 dollars). Is making paper boats suddenly copyright infringement? Or breach of contract? I think mangling law for profit this way is a load of bs and if this needs to be handled in court, the way to do it would be finding something that actually applies.
At the same time, if the law doesn't provide anything for this type of cheating or selling software to help you cheat, then that is something that could be addressed, instead of hacked together (pun intended) by applying some bs law that should have nothing to do with this. Also, it would be much better if Epic gave the money to the security department instead of lawyers to actually fix the issue (it's an engineering/security issue, not a law issue).
I'm glad this nonsense lawyering pretty much only exists in the USA and not the real of the world.
> Imagine someone making paper boats out of a book, selling them for one dollar each and the book has 300 pages (but costs 20 dollars). Is making paper boats suddenly copyright infringement? Or breach of contract?
This isn't a good analogy. Creating and distributing cheats ruins the play experience for everyone. Making paper boats doesn't detract from anyone else's enjoyment of reading a book.
This analogy is growing very thin. If you've got a business operating board games, and I start a business to flip your board games thus ruining your business, what recourse do you have?
Hacking software and hacking an online service are not equivalent activities.
I think your recourse should be in a real world solution and not a soft-lawyery-fake-solution. I.e. with the board-flipping-case, glue your board to the table. Pretending copyright is a thing you can use to prevent people from flipping your boards is just stupid and ruins the copyright system even further, beyond the broken mess it is now.
In real life games, say, a tennis match, you have someone sitting outside the playing field checking if you are playing by the rules, and stopping the game if you don't. That is the correct way to to things. You're not going to sue all the players that don't follow the rules, you just kick them from the playing field.
But, in this analogy, one should assume that the copyright owner of these books can and does implement restrictions on "making paper boats out of a book" (analogous to restrictions on what code one can run on their own PC while the game is running). Should they be able to do so in such a situation? If not, why is it justifiable to allow copyright owners that level of control over their work?
Now, creating and distributing cheats doesn't ruin the play experience for everyone. It's evident that it doesn't ruin the experience for those using the cheats. It's also possible that there are groups of people who wish to use cheats when playing separately from non-cheaters. Instead of suing this guy and shutting down the cheats entirely, I would suggest they should put those players on their own server, where they won't encounter any players who wish their experience to be cheat-free.
This comes as a surprise to some but sometimes you can't put people in "their place". You just have to accept that some people are assholes. You can try to mitigate their behavior but you have no right to legal recourse.
I remember hearing about games that clusters cheaters together, so it takes longer for them to find games since the cheater population is lower than the general population and it's cheaters against cheaters which must be not fun at all.
I'm a bit perplexed anyone would pay that much money just to cheat in a videogame. What's the point? Are they just really sore losers with too much money? Do they get any money back from cheating?
Pay-to-win and microtransaction models have proliferated the gaming industry over the past decade or so. I'd wager that purchasing of cheats/hacks appeals to the same sort of gamer.
I think it's similar to any other discretionary product where people pay for after market accessories or additional add-on real and cosmetic features.
People pay $$$'s to mod their sports cars with additional speed but drive them in urban areas. Or they'll add cosmetic exhausts for looks.
Gamers might want to skip levels or access advanced locked features without investing huge amounts of time. Gamers might also enjoy the thrill of playing the game in a way that it wasn't meant to - with hacks or cheats.
I do lament the seeming death of single-player cheat codes. It was a lot of fun screwing around with invulnerability or noclip mode turned on, or some of the weird easter eggs that were included in games like Age of Empires. In single player, the only person you're cheating is yourself, and if I want to bypass some sucky level or fiddly puzzle, where is the harm in that?
For PvP cheats are about winning and people not being able to win. Fortnite could curb this by doing skill matching and occasionally bumping players into a lower bracket after x losses.
Epic stop the cheats working, within 24hrs he has them working again. It’s a continual game of cat and mouse, and a kid over summer has way more disposable time than your average game developer. Eventually you can get to a stage where you make it too hard for some of the hacks to work - and then they just find another route.
You can sometimes make a valid copyright claim if they are using your game logos in their advertising, but unless you have the budget of Epic it’s pretty hard to even get an effectual site or YouTube video/channel take down.
Realistically a developer has little alternative than to attempt both code fixes and social ones - once a game has a reputation for being full of hackers it can quickly become the end of it (though again, probably less of a concern for Fortnite due to its scale and popularity)
Good for Epic. Distributing hacks like this actively harms the game experience for everyone else and damages Epic's brand and business. It's not so dissimilar from DDoSing a SaaS company and encouraging others to do the same.
Putting the lawsuit under "Copyright infringement" is a strange choice, but I have to agree that fighting cheaters in video games is a good fight.
In one hand, the user should have ownership of their computer, and what happens in it. The user should not be prevented from testing and modifying whatever occurs in their memory, in the same way, I can load Adblock, or Reddit Enhancement Suit, to make my experience on a website better.
On the other hand, online gaming has become a sport. Having cheaters in-game is almost like bicycle racers using enchantment drugs for a competition. I would hate to lose a bicycle race for having another athlete using illegal unhealthy drugs, as I would have to lose an online game for other players paying hundreds of dollars for a significant unfair advantage.
For me, there should be a new kind of law that would cover gaming cheating behavior under unfair gameplay. Users are detracting from the experience from the other players, who are playing the game on an even playing ground.
I find GTV 5's strategy particular interesting, that instead of banning cheaters in online servers from playing, they just moved players to a "cheaters pool," in which cheaters can play with other cheaters. It still allows everyone to play the game, but now they are put up against other players who also have an unfair advantage, and have to compete for a better strategy.
The problem with that is, where would you law draw the line?
My main software is a digital copilot for starcitizen.
It does voice control, screen verlay and eventual screen grabs to load states. It perfrms nothing a skilled pilot cannot do, but makes it so almost anyone can match with those skilled pilots. Is it considered cheating when it makes me a much better pilot, faster reaction speeds and easily performing difficult movements?
What about my testers why are physically challenged in some way? There's no way they could keep up without my software, but I can understand the arguments that a pilot of equal skill vs one with my software will be at a large disadvantage.
It's a difficult thing to codify into law I believe.
Would you be alright if the game publishers can publish guidelines for what is acceptable?
Much like StarCraft, I think there would be interesting competitions and challenges for people to develop AI for the game. There could also be challenges for games in developing better interfaces, helpers, and plugins.
Hell yeah, i have written so many emails to CIG (who run star citizen) trying to find out whats acceptable and what isnt (eg: i can let a pilot lock up 3-4 missiles by saying 'lock 3' but i cant let them lock up all missiles by just saying 'lock missiles'), is such a pain in the arse. Most of the time i end up speaking to someone who doesnt really know and just chooses the safest option.
Which honestly is what probably would happen from guidelines (sigh) - which will put me and my users back to where we were :P
Epic Games = Epic Assholes... Boycott may be in order. Or we could all just pirate their software for a few months until they get the hint. Vote with your wallet people!
The train of easy hackable throw away game-engine-networkcode continuous. (Remember the Division debacle?) Well, a industry that treats its employees like this is always going to be a cesspool of incompetence.
Interesting is the reaction here - the externalisation of the cost of security incompetence.
This here is the deterrent law model sneaking in, basically a industry shirking responsibilities - like building cheat safe game code by lobbying to make exploits of that lousy network architecture a crime. The result is fable, untested infrastructure.
Criminal behavior by organized crime beeing rampant until finally the cost to fix is demanded by the state via regulation.
Never going to happen in this throwaway industry though.
81 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 92.8 ms ] threadThere are a lot of games that get this wrong but even games that get it right can be cheated.
Since you mention MMOs, most or all them don't check for movement even popular ones like WoW.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/59p7qd/this-man-h...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7645059.stm
Were we to hold otherwise, Blizzard or any software copyright holder could designate any disfavored conduct during software use as copyright infringement, by purporting to condition the license on the player's abstention from the disfavored conduct. The rationale would be that because the conduct occurs while the player's computer is copying the software code into RAM in order for it to run, the violation is copyright infringement. This would allow software copyright owners far greater rights than Congress has generally conferred on copyright owners.
No, what worked for Blizzard was DMCA. Because they had an ineffective "anti cheat" system in place, somehow they found a judge willing to consider a bot evading that a violation of a DMCA copy protection device.
'Magical' powers = he was selling cheats.
That is not a comment on the substance of Epic's claims against these people; just on the clickbaity phrasing.
So these folks bought a book and have figured out how to cut out a page and glue in another one. Seems totally OK.
Now they're selling a kit that helps you "mod" your book by teaching you how to cut out a page and replace it with another one. Still no problems IMO.
Could someone prevent you from running a service where someone mails you a book, you cut out some pages and replace them, and then mail it back? I don't think so.
These aren't great analogies obviously. But it's hard to understand how they have standing given that they sold the copies of the game already. Seems like they'd have better luck going on some kind of contractual violation like their EULA or their agreement you have to subject yourself to in order to connect to the game servers.
Suppose it costs you 10 million dollars to make product X, and you are able to make that money back barely (say 11 million). Then, someone else comes along and builds something quickly on top of your expensive investment and is able to make 5 million of their own. Wouldn’t you be mad? They’ve essentially found a low-effort way to make returns without taking any of the risk you did. Without you, they wouldn’t be able to do what they did unless they came up with the whole original item on their own and then built on top of it. Therefore, in essence they are profiting off of your investment.
The law may be significantly more complex and nuanced than this but it’s not hard at all to imagine scenarios where the original producer of a product does not want to enable profits of spin-offs from their work.
Edit: This is one reason patents exist. You are allowed to protect your massive investment for a period of time, no matter how much society may benefit from building on it immediately.
Copyright has no legitimate economic or technological grounds.
Also, just because something cost you a lot doesn't mean you get to claim protection over it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#United_State...
That's a terrible analogy. Practically everything is built on using materials built from others. That's essentially specialization.
The Software is licensed, not sold, to you under the License. The License does not grant you any title or ownership in the Software.
First sale doctrine does not apply. We don't own many things anymore. Books, music, software, movies—they used to be products you bought but now they are services you subscribe to. It is not a trend that I like.
[0] https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/eula
The EULA may or may not be binding in any appreciable way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_license_agreement#Enf...
If they can establish that their EULA does bind then maybe they've got a case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-edited_film
Given that, why should it be okay to hack Fortnite, but hacking Netflix or Spotify would be considered criminal behavior?
same with fortnite. just because he's using (sharing) the mod doesn't make him any less protected under law
I'm thinking browser extension that alert Gmail for my use cases or alternative clients for hardware a service provider like Netflix or Spotify has no incentive to care about. We should really make it possible to talk about these issues akin to a right to repair for software, not by criminalizing every deviation from the corporate norm as computer misuse or copyright infringements.
https://torrentfreak.com/images/epic-golden.pdf
The lawsuit does also contain many claims of breach of contract, and goes beyond that, saying that they are also interfering with other peoples' contractual obligations since they have promoted something that has resulted in other people breaching the game's contract.
It might be significant that in this case it is not a book. Copyright is a bundle of different rights, and some of them usually only come up for certain kinds of media.
In particular, one of the rights in the bundle is the right to publicly perform the work. Perhaps broadcasting playing the game could violate the performance right?
> Could someone prevent you from running a service where someone mails you a book, you cut out some pages and replace them, and then mail it back? I don't think so.
I wouldn't be so sure. Here are two cases, both involving a company that apparently buys works of art, mounts them on ceramic, and sells the result.
In the first case [1] they bought books containing good quality prints, removed the prints from the book, mounted each print separately, and sold the tiles separately.
The 9th Circuit found that this was a derivative work and was infringing.
In the second case [2] it was apparently again the same company buying and mounting art. This time the works they bought and mounted and sold were notecards and small lithographs. The 7th Circuit said that this was not a derivative work and not infringing.
[1] https://openjurist.org/856/f2d/1341/mirage-editions-inc-v-al...
[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/125_F3d_580.htm
Imagine someone making paper boats out of a book, selling them for one dollar each and the book has 300 pages (but costs 20 dollars). Is making paper boats suddenly copyright infringement? Or breach of contract? I think mangling law for profit this way is a load of bs and if this needs to be handled in court, the way to do it would be finding something that actually applies.
At the same time, if the law doesn't provide anything for this type of cheating or selling software to help you cheat, then that is something that could be addressed, instead of hacked together (pun intended) by applying some bs law that should have nothing to do with this. Also, it would be much better if Epic gave the money to the security department instead of lawyers to actually fix the issue (it's an engineering/security issue, not a law issue).
I'm glad this nonsense lawyering pretty much only exists in the USA and not the real of the world.
This isn't a good analogy. Creating and distributing cheats ruins the play experience for everyone. Making paper boats doesn't detract from anyone else's enjoyment of reading a book.
Hacking software and hacking an online service are not equivalent activities.
In real life games, say, a tennis match, you have someone sitting outside the playing field checking if you are playing by the rules, and stopping the game if you don't. That is the correct way to to things. You're not going to sue all the players that don't follow the rules, you just kick them from the playing field.
Now, creating and distributing cheats doesn't ruin the play experience for everyone. It's evident that it doesn't ruin the experience for those using the cheats. It's also possible that there are groups of people who wish to use cheats when playing separately from non-cheaters. Instead of suing this guy and shutting down the cheats entirely, I would suggest they should put those players on their own server, where they won't encounter any players who wish their experience to be cheat-free.
People pay $$$'s to mod their sports cars with additional speed but drive them in urban areas. Or they'll add cosmetic exhausts for looks.
Gamers might want to skip levels or access advanced locked features without investing huge amounts of time. Gamers might also enjoy the thrill of playing the game in a way that it wasn't meant to - with hacks or cheats.
You can sometimes make a valid copyright claim if they are using your game logos in their advertising, but unless you have the budget of Epic it’s pretty hard to even get an effectual site or YouTube video/channel take down.
Realistically a developer has little alternative than to attempt both code fixes and social ones - once a game has a reputation for being full of hackers it can quickly become the end of it (though again, probably less of a concern for Fortnite due to its scale and popularity)
In one hand, the user should have ownership of their computer, and what happens in it. The user should not be prevented from testing and modifying whatever occurs in their memory, in the same way, I can load Adblock, or Reddit Enhancement Suit, to make my experience on a website better.
On the other hand, online gaming has become a sport. Having cheaters in-game is almost like bicycle racers using enchantment drugs for a competition. I would hate to lose a bicycle race for having another athlete using illegal unhealthy drugs, as I would have to lose an online game for other players paying hundreds of dollars for a significant unfair advantage.
For me, there should be a new kind of law that would cover gaming cheating behavior under unfair gameplay. Users are detracting from the experience from the other players, who are playing the game on an even playing ground.
I find GTV 5's strategy particular interesting, that instead of banning cheaters in online servers from playing, they just moved players to a "cheaters pool," in which cheaters can play with other cheaters. It still allows everyone to play the game, but now they are put up against other players who also have an unfair advantage, and have to compete for a better strategy.
Similar category to hacking. Stricter penalties.
My main software is a digital copilot for starcitizen.
It does voice control, screen verlay and eventual screen grabs to load states. It perfrms nothing a skilled pilot cannot do, but makes it so almost anyone can match with those skilled pilots. Is it considered cheating when it makes me a much better pilot, faster reaction speeds and easily performing difficult movements?
What about my testers why are physically challenged in some way? There's no way they could keep up without my software, but I can understand the arguments that a pilot of equal skill vs one with my software will be at a large disadvantage.
It's a difficult thing to codify into law I believe.
Much like StarCraft, I think there would be interesting competitions and challenges for people to develop AI for the game. There could also be challenges for games in developing better interfaces, helpers, and plugins.
Which honestly is what probably would happen from guidelines (sigh) - which will put me and my users back to where we were :P
I’m having hard time thinking of a justification for the government fining you or throwing you in jail for cheating at a video game.
Never going to happen in this throwaway industry though.