As a rule, I don’t cheat in MMOs. This isn’t some moralistic smugness mind you and my online honesty is more a thing of fear than rectitude. I just assume that The Server Sees All and I’ll get caught and permabanned so fast my feet won’t touch the account cancellation page, and anyway, how do even go about it? Using leet hacking skillz out of War Games or Johnny Mnemonic, I’m sure. Everything I learnt about hacking, I learnt form Disney’s seminal work on the theme, Tron and I just look daft in a glowing blue cycle helmet.

I’d also just sort of assumed that because I don’t cheat, no one else did. You’d hear about these faceless ‘hackers’ of course, and the measures that MMO companies proudly (or sometimes apologetically) talk about to combat them, but I’d never had any hacking affect my own gaming on a personal level. Or so I thought…

So there I am, in PlanetSide, trying a bit of cloaking for a change on a freshly rolled alt. The cloaker uses an Infiltration Suit to hide in plain sight. When switched on, this suit makes the player invisible. Somewhat powerful, it is balanced by having the cloaker ‘ghost’ when they move, showing a faint outline which becomes more pronounced the faster they move. Its a bit like being a Predator, only with less gleeful howling.The cloaker also can’t carry rifles and has no actual armour points with the suit, making them one-hit fodder by all and sundry if they are seen.

In addition to the cloakers own impatience, there are other ways they can be detected; sensor equipment, audio amp implants, and the ‘darklight’ implant, which lets troops see invisible things, but only at a distance of 30m or so, and adds a load of fog while active, making it quite hard to see anything else. An engaging kind of gameplay and on the whole, reasonably balanced, I always thought; the power of being an almost invisible ninja assassin regulated by the extreme consequences if you are spotted.

The base assault was in full swing, with us defending. I’ve taken it on myself to creep about the surrounding hills, primarily looking for the similarly cloaked spawn trucks which are supplying the assault. These are key objectives, and if I can find them, I can try to steal them with my (ironically enough) hacking skill, which will flip them to our team's spawn points. Aware of my visibility issues, I’m taking great pains to crouch-walk for extreme slowness, which should make me barely perceptible at all, certainly by casual glances, when suddenly, PAF! Instantly murderized by a chap with a sniper rifle.

Having been a sniper myself, I appreciate the almost supernatural skill that making a shot like that entails, but that’s usually against running cloakers or ones that are on fire at the time; you need some kind of visual giveaway. I pass it off as bad luck…maybe he was aiming through me at something else – it does happen now and then. I head out again, different route, same speed and POW! Dead! A few of these and I work out where its coming from, a ridgeline around 350m away and all I can make out by squinting are five pixels of the top of his helmet. And then PAF! Dead, and this time, I was stationary; i.e. totally invisible, theoretically.

Clearly something amiss there! Either this chap has REALLY good eyes or for him, the invisible things aren’t invisible at all. I logged in a huff and then spent a bit of time surfing around the subject of PlanetSide and Cheating, which was all a bit of an eye opener. Turns out, the Cloaking Cheat is one of the easier ones to perpetrate; since the cloaked person is still actually there, and needs to become slightly visible if they move, etc, they are still rendered, only with 100% Alpha texturing. So all the unscrupulous technical type has to do, is intercept those textures at the Direct X and/or Graphics Card level and replace them with, say, glowing fuchsia ones instead, and all supposedly invisible things light up like Xmas trees, and are probably very easy to snipe from 300m away on the first and only shot. (Apparently, massivley adjusting your Gamma settings can also ruin cloaking somewhat)

All of that happens on the client PC; the server doesn’t get involved at all, making it more or less undetectable. I have no idea how you’d do it, but I expect enough people do. The client-side nature of PlanetSide does allow a lot of this kind of thing, and my explorations uncovered ‘trainers’ which purport to offer all sorts of jiggery-pokery, including teleporting about the map, running through walls, infinite afterburner on the aircraft, speed-hacks, lots of messing about with the cone of fire, a necessary balancing feature which makes powerful guns artificially inaccurate, and reloading times too, making the big sniper rifle fire with perfect accuracy at machine-gun speeds. I'm sure some of that is just lies intended to get the greedy to download viruses, but a lot of it squares with things I've seen in game.

Seems not much can be done at the server end for such things, as the client-side hit-detection method means that the server generally just accepts what it has been told by the individual clients. Official advice is to use the somewhat cumbersome /appeal system, (which dumps out to a web page form filling exercise, somewhat breaking game flow) and wait for human intervention at the GM level; not terribly reassuring.

I know I’m not great at FPS games, but now I doubt the game itself. Was it always that I was rubbish at PlanetSide specifically, or was the playing field never as level as I naively assumed? I have no way to tell. The idiots are easy to spot and shut down; they’re the ones going berserk with flat-out impossible feats, sudden superhumanism. It’s the more cunning kind of cheating scumbag that is hard to do anything about – they’re clever enough to artificially boost their prowess just beyond everyone else’s reach, to always win, but only just. Their more lowkey kind of improved prowess is eminently plausible, and might go unnoticed for years. Aw, good fight! Try again! Next time you might beat me! All this in a PvP-only game where the /appeal system must see dozens of whining and false accusations every day. Any kind of benefit of the doubt will see them just let off the hook. I wonder if Darkfall has similar problems?

And over it all, my own paranoia…perhaps I’m just imagining it all…afterall, it isn’t the done thing to accuse someone of cheating! That's weakness and poor sportsmanship!

Anyway, it hasn’t quite driven me from the game just yet, but certainly has made me give up on cloaking; what is the point of an invisibility class if they can’t reliably be invisible? As for the other kinds of cheating which can apparently be accessed by merely finding the right download, well, now I know what to be looking out for, perhaps I’ll begin to understand some of the more extreme acts of superhuman ownage I see in there, and in turn, some of the reasons PlanetSide seems to be far less popular than its premise would suggest.