Revisited: Anti-cheating measures in PSO

[Bman]

The Original Post

About two weeks ago, I asked whether or not you believe the draconian and fragile measures PSO takes to discourage cheating are misguided.

LastUtopia's post reminded me of this topic, and I want to see what you think now. We have now established these facts:

* The anti-cheating measures in PSO do not prevent cheating, nor do they even make it inconvenient.

* The anti-cheating measures in PSO put the average player's character at extreme risk every time he plays. A power outage (not unheard of in California these days), a crash, a strange disconnect, a flakey memory card, a tripped-over power cord, or - god forbid - a player accidentally turning off his DC could result in a player losing hundreds of hours of character development.

With these in mind, do you still believe that the ineffective PSO anti-cheating methods are appropriate?

[Josh]

They are not appropriate at all. They did not stop cheaters (like they said they had blocked out before the game was released) and now Sega really has to do something with the PSO servers. I guess I'm lucky. I've only ever bsod'ed once and i was a low level so i didnt have much in my inventory...

[Tkc613]

The main reason Sega went through the trouble of making PSO so strict was to stop simple cheating (dropping stuff in a game with a friend, taking out the card, restoring your old character, and picking up your items again) and other methods of duplicating.

Also, black screening and oopsies on your part are not PSO safeguards. Those erases are due to clumsiness and imperfect VMU's. Besides, there are known ways to avoid and recover from black screens.

Same goes for outages. If it happened in most other rpgs, you would lose what you have done so far since your last save also. In PSO's case, you may or may not lose anything.

In all the outages I've had with PSO on, I never lost anything. In fact, I've always kept everything right up to the point the power went out (stuff I just found in dungeons). Yes, I kept it despite not saving. Apparently, PSO incorporates a save-as-you-go procedure.

[Sylvette]

In single player mode, sure.

[Rei]

Remember SEGA claimed that DC GD-rom was "Uncrackable"??

[iNiGHTS]

On 2001-02-23 10:53, Rei wrote:
Remember SEGA claimed that DC GD-rom was "Uncrackable"??

Remember that those words took place a while back... yes.. while back. Like 2 years ago since Dreamcast was launched in Japan.

If god made me... He is pathetic...


<font size=1>[ This message was edited by: iNiGHTS on 2001-02-23 11:13 ]</font>

<font size=1>[ This message was edited by: iNiGHTS on 2001-02-23 12:24 ]</font>

[Craig]

Personally, I do not think there are many if any anti-cheating devices in PSO as of now.

The serial number garbage i think is to curb piracy of the game. (Yes, it has been cracked but online play is impossible w/o the serial)

Any way, server side saving would be good..or atleast an easy way to back up your char.