Game design and its impact on cheating
I have played a lot of games, from single-player to multi-player, web-based to platform, board games to ORPG. I have observed many people and seen a pattern in many games. Almost every single one of them has cheaters. Even a f*ing single-player game like the famous Super Mario Bros. 3 has a cheater who now claims the world’s fastest speedrun record.
Cheating is not limited to logical bypasses, add-ons, or security exploitation (like SQL injection, memory manipulation, etc.). Auto-play bots, macros, and buying accounts or in-game currency are also common forms of cheating. Developers could patch vulnerabilities, setup monitoring system, or even apply behavior analysis to catch auto-playing bots, but cheaters will eventually come back. Its nature is that of a cat and mouse game.
Wouldn’t it be great if we were able to reduce the number of cheaters in the design phase?
As we all know, not all game developers suffer similarly from cheaters and I think the reason lies in the game design. Unless I can collect stats from several games, I can’t prove such conjecture in this article. I still hope you can pick up some ideas however.
Reward and Punishment system
When talking about game design, one important focus is on the reward and punishment system. You can find some interesting articles on reward systems at the end of this article. Games are usually designed based on giving rewards to legitimate players. These rewards keep the players playing and generating revenue for the game companies.
Each game, even in the same genre, has different characteristics. For the sake of this article, I divide these characteristics into discrete rewards and abstract ones. Let’s start by going over possible rewards and punishments in games, including some you may have missed.
Discrete reward and punishment
Rewards that the game can give you at a certain game events.
- Rewards
Exp and loot from killing monsters or from quests
Big prizes from opening treasure boxes
Special cumulative rewards for logging in daily
Achievements
Storyline
Trophies, Leaderboards- Punishments
Losing gold/exp when dying
Energy reloading times
Ban upon being caught cheating
Other game constraints- Can be either rewards or punishments
Ranking systemsAbstract reward and punishment
These are emotional, hard to design precisely, and depends on each player’s favor, community impact, etc. These rewards are usually given out through the overall game process as part of the gaming experience.
- Rewards
Game art, models
Gameplay experience (Control of the action, strategic movements, etc.)
Openness of the game (Open worlds, multi-endings, etc)- Punishments
Repetitiveness and boredom
No events / updates
Unfair balance between players (Free VS Paying. Old VS New. This also include how cheaters are presented in the community)- Can be either rewards or punishments
Ability to trade (game currency or real cash)
Difficulty (Effort + Skill)
Multi-player, Co-op
Ability to socialize, chat freelyPunishments for cheaters
Cheating isn’t fair and discourages legitimate players. Many game companies try to solve this by adding punishment for cheating. Possible punishments for cheaters are:
Bans (temporary, permanent)
Mutes (disable to chat, scam, trade)
Making it harder to cheat (more effort)I found that some companies decide to leverage this punishment further by requiring identity authentication during the registration, such as mobile phone binding, citizen-ID, etc. Pay to play and subscription games also have more impactful permanent bans because their accounts are more valuable.
Rewards for legit players VS Rewards for cheaters
This is main point of this article. I find that all of the cheaters are also cheating for rewards. To answer why the very famous Super Mario Bros. has cheaters: firstly, people want to see the later game content. Secondly, it has a speed-running contest, a prestigious reward in reputation that encourages some players to exploit the game. Some games even give rewards with the ability to make real cash like many ORPGs; sounds great right? These rewards not only attract gamers but also cheaters, more or less.
As mentioned before, companies usually handle these issues by giving out punishments to cheaters. However, sometimes increasing punishments for cheaters is not an easy task, we have another option to reduce cheaters: reducing rewards for cheaters and increasing rewards for legitimate players, so that cheating is less appealing while still attracting legitimate players.
The solution is to increase progressive emotional intangible rewards for the players over a lump sum large chunk discrete reward. Entertainment from game experience, art, co-operation and fine tuning the difficulty cannot be earned from cheating. This is where legitimate players earn more rewards than cheaters.
Why and How?
Since people usually set long-term discrete rewards as their final goals, we should be cautious on designing those. Any progress to those goals are sometimes neglected by players. When choosing a path, people will look for the easiest, shortest, most rewarding path for them. How can we persuade players to pick the legitimate path when the final goal is the same but the cheating path is much shorter?
Clearly we must give our players the rewards during the progress to their final goals too. It could be small discrete rewards, such as gold and exp. You have to make sure that those events are not too far apart, too difficult or too boring to do (repetitiveness).
But discrete rewards can usually be done by cheating. Do you care you are missing happiness of getting +200 Gold in progress while you can cheat for final +100k Gold? Your rewards might not be so convincing.
On the other hand, why don’t people just cheat Monster Hunter for powerful weapon. Are you interested in starting Castle Crasher (co-op) game at lvl 100 or Terraria with end-game weapons? Who would buy Stardew to start with all achievements complete?
This is where the abstract rewards shine. Players must progress through the game legitimately to earn them so they decide to pick legitimate path. We as game designers should make sure to maximize these rewards for the players to persuade them to play our games legitimately. Put more effort to improve game experience, co-op system, actions, art and effects than to give more final gold/exp. Of course, your punishments on cheaters can still be there.
Sometimes you should add new rewards into your game, sometimes you can improve the existing ones. If your game contains so much repetitive actions but you know people love to chat during their workings on final goals, then you should improve chat system so that people at least enjoy chatting during their progresses. If you know your players love looking at characters’ model. Then you should improve these models, how about giving your players ability to customize their characters?
It is obvious that different genres have different advantages and disadvantages. Co-op and action games benefit greatly from their passive reward system. ORPG games, on the other hand, are full of repetitive discrete rewards. That’s why there are fewer cheaters in action, co-op, puzzle games than ORPG games. But there are still a lot of rooms for improvements.
For example, some ORPG games start to handle auto-playing bots creatively by adding legitimate “automate playing” feature. Those games also introduce easier friends system that link you and your friends automatically through 3rd party social network. You can enjoy co-op tasks with your friends much easier . Look good to me. There might still be advantage but very low from setting illegitimate auto-playing bots so you can focus on preventing other cheating now.
Even MOBA games like DotA can also be suffered from cheaters. Winning is a discrete rewards so you can expect to see some people try to cheat the progress by having macro, script or even a stupid overpowered bug that completely destroyed many games for few days. Sadly, I don’t see anyway to increase rewards for legitimate players so traditional punishments have to be done here. At least Valve offers us a permanent ban for anyone who tries to hack the game engine.
However, there was an interesting history in DotA2. At one point, there was an auto-playing bots in DotA2. You heard me right!! In 2012–2013, DotA2 used to give a lot of trade-able cosmetic as rewards at the end of each game. During Diretide event, you could make around $1 for every 4–6 game plays. If you were lucky, you will encounter some bots. Now, Valve makes these drop-able items untradable. Even though they mainly did this for their business, I have never seen bots or complains about them ever again. While you can’t remove all kinds of cheaters from your game, you can still remove some by removing their potential rewards.
Game’s art can be seen as an emotional reward but it is NOT always an abstract reward as you may think. Some games design it to also be a discrete rewards such as in achievement collections or galleries of rare items. Then you will have to review the reward system during the progression to obtain those. I have seen several art-based games got hacked because they put art as a discrete reward without proper abstract rewards to entertain the players. Focus on abstract rewards!!
Note that even game implementation is not included in a design phase. Vulnerability means huge rewards for cheaters; sometimes even as huge as non-existent item generators which even the best player couldn’t get their hands on. Make sure you implement with the best effort to prevent security vulnerabilities or logical bypasses. Don’t give cheaters these superior rewards.
This does not related to this article but I like to add it. Some cheating is good for the game itself. Such as the Mario code exploit, legitimate mew encounter on Pokemon Yellow, bending of rules on board games (For example, billions of way to play UNO), etc. These create more excitement for the game even the developers did not planned. The reason is very much the same with bad cheating: some players get bored with the original design. This is somewhat nondeterministic so, in my opinion, I wouldn’t risk this.
Summary
Just like how you attract legitimate players with a reward system, you can repel cheaters and persuade players not to cheat using this very reward system. We all know that game design for players can be represented by the image below:
The cheaters are falling into the very same system. Even though there are always cheaters, you can control their tendencies.
I have seen some businesses trying to include virtual games into their applications with valuable rewards in the end. Unless it’s easy to verify cheaters in your business, you should think again before doing this. Rewards always attract cheaters and hackers so it might give you a headache during the production.
It is gonna be hard work and requires a lot of effort for a whole new design domain: reward system from the cheaters perspective. But the way I see it, it’s a very legitimate solution unlike manual punishment which require tons of effort. Even if your game is ORPG that’s very prone to getting cheated on in nature, it’s still not bad to include this consideration into your game during design phase. Now scroll up and see what abstract rewards you could add or improve in your games.
Now, scroll back to the top of this article and look at the image again, you can see: people are taking shortcut because that path is more promising in that environment. Fortunately, game designers are omnipotent in your own games so make sure you create the right environment for your players.
Lastly, be reasonable. Business creates money. A perfect game without business does not. You might have to let some bad things go through while maintaining the business side and also ensuring that those bad things will not completely destroy your business. I hope you enjoy designing the game. =)
Some interesting topics on game design
Big Thanks:
Eleven, Rippy and Neon for an English writing course
- July 13, 2019 -
