The Air-Speed Velocity of Unladen Gaming

Worst thing for a multiplayer game: Success

by Brad Wardell

If you make a multiplayer game that actually has some sort of ladder on it (high score list or ranking system) you better hope that either a) you are prepared to spend a lot of time fighting cheaters and vandals or b) pray your game doesn't become popular.

There is something about we humans and competition. If there was a world wide contest for eating tree bark where the top 100 tree bark eaters were ranked and placed with their picture on a website, you can bet that there would be no shortage of people ready to demonstrate their tree bark eating prowess.

And such competitiveness brings out the worst in some people. Some people will do anything for a high score. As Blizzard discovered the hard way with Diablo and countless other popular games have discovered, people will work hard to cheat.

Anyone reading this who's played Counterstrike recently knows the feeling I'm talking about. There are cheats for just about everything now. Some are more subtle than others and it all comes down to the desire to beat a bunch of people you don't even know.

The second problem you run into are the real psychos out there who don't try to cheat but rather try to destroy. Our own servers have suffered many times because of users finding ways to take down our servers. Nothing quite like having to spend part of your weekend creating an emergency fix for a server because some bored teenager has found a way to knock down the server and ruin everyone's fun. I used to feel bad for the nerdy guy in high school who got picked on. But these days, I'm starting to wish I'd given the class computer jerk a wedgie.

This is one of the reasons why I think Internet privacy goes too far. I think there should be a way to know who, to some degree, is behind a given IP so that we can at least more easily complain to the ISP about these kinds of people.

Our next game, Galactic Civilizations, won't have any multiplayer in it. Maybe in a sequel but not the first one. I want to concentrate on making a really good, in depth, strategy game and not have to assign one of our precious few developers to go and make sure that some kid can't hack into the server and screw with people in the middle of a game.

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Brad Wardell is the Project Manager of two ongoing Stardock games:

The Corporate Machine, a business strategy game due out December 11 and Galactic Civilizations, a turn based strategy game due out late 2001. Stardock�s website is http://www.stardock.com. Brad Wardell�s website is http://people.mw.mediaone.net/bwardell. He is also the Product Manager of WindowBlinds (www.windowblinds.net) and DesktopX (www.desktopx.net).