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Analysis of state exposure control to prevent cheating in online games

Published: 16 June 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Cheating has become a serious threat to the online game industry. One common type of cheating is accessing game states that are not supposed to be exposed to the players. In this paper, we evaluate a few information dissemination strategies that limit the state exposure to the client, measuring the delay introduced to the players and the system resource requirements at the game server. Our measurement is based on OpenGladiator, a multi-user, real-time strategy game that is similar to Warcraft but in open-source. We found that by performing careful on-demand preloading, we can significantly reduce the unnecessary states exposed to a client without introducing any additional delay to the players. Our measurement results show that the on-demand strategy comes with a increment to the server's CPU load. However, it also significantly reduces the server's network bandwidth consumption, which is a major cost of running a game server in the current Internet.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      NOSSDAV '04: Proceedings of the 14th international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video
      June 2004
      168 pages
      ISBN:1581138016
      DOI:10.1145/1005847
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 16 June 2004

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      Author Tags

      1. anti-cheating
      2. online games

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      View all
      • (2024)The Big Brother's New Playground: Unmasking the Illusion of Privacy in Web Metaverses from a Malicious User's PerspectiveProceedings of the 2024 on ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3658644.3690249(2162-2176)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2024
      • (2020)Using Escape Rooms for Conducting Team Research: Understanding Development, Considerations, and ChallengesSimulation & Gaming10.1177/1046878120907943(104687812090794)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2020
      • (2019)Anti-Cheat Tool for Detecting Unauthorized User Interference in the Unity Engine Using BlockchainData-Centric Business and Applications10.1007/978-3-030-34706-2_10(191-209)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2019
      • (2018)Match+GuardianMultimedia Systems10.1007/s00530-012-0291-z19:3(303-314)Online publication date: 27-Dec-2018
      • (2016)Swords and shieldsProceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference on Computer Security Applications10.1145/2991079.2991119(386-397)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2016
      • (2016)The rationalization process of online game cheating behaviorsInformation, Communication & Society10.1080/1369118X.2016.127189821:2(273-287)Online publication date: 28-Dec-2016
      • (2013)Peer-to-peer architectures for massively multiplayer online gamesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/2522968.252297746:1(1-51)Online publication date: 11-Jul-2013
      • (2011)SpotCheckProceedings of the 10th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games10.5555/2157848.2157857(1-6)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2011
      • (2011)SpotCheck: An efficient defense against information exposure cheats2011 10th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games10.1109/NetGames.2011.6080984(1-6)Online publication date: Oct-2011
      • (2009)Online Multiplayer GamesSynthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services10.2200/S00232ED1V01Y200912ICR0131:1(1-113)Online publication date: Jan-2009
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