How hard would it be if I sponsered a contest

[Cartoon Corpse]

Let's say Gothic 3. In which the contestents had to find ALL (or as many as possible?) the healing roots, or morning dew, etc?

My first question is. What are the methods of cheating on this? Could I go to Piranha Bytes (or the code itself) and find out where every demon toadstool is? Can the player collect them all in their inventory with a cheat (ie "give all toadstools")? Can it be verified that the player actually visited EACH location?

Say I offered $1000 bucks for the person who could find the most of some substance(s). Charged a $5 entry fee, gave a 30 day time limit....If it was cheat proof, I'd make a mint, I'd say.

I run around in games and wonder...did I get all of the stuff? How easy is it to verify this?

What if it were a $10K prize and....$50 entry fee?

I realize that many aspects of programming are truely static. But what about stuff in games? It's object oriented right? How is it placed? Is it the same for every game? I'm pretty sure on older games it is (same king sorrel in same location as usual), but could I glean this from the program by say searching the executable after converting it to text? This is exactly how I beat rogue on unix. I called it dogue.

 

[hoho]

Memory editor = you can do whatever you want with the in-game inventory. Pretty much the only way to prove anything you'd need to have a video recording of the whole item hunt. Good luck judging things with 30 days worth of videos

Also, didn't those kinds of things respawn shortly in the game?

 

[homerdog]

Also, didn't those kinds of things respawn shortly in the game?

In Gothic 3 the answer is no I believe.

 

[Cartoon Corpse]

Hmm. I suspected that. I wonder how secure gaming would work. Games that are fundamentally (like board games) unhackable. Doesn't the industry need this? For that level I mean.

I realize that my original question was naive (unless there was something I didn't realise), but I feel there is a chewable field here...I like to be alone in a field, as opposed to running neck and neck with imaginary point scorers (don't you just HATE those pirannha?).

What are the open frontiers in game development?

 

[MrGaribaldi]

This sounds like something you could do with OnLive, since you would have control over the game system with, probably, the possibility to log what the player is doing.

I wouldn't be surprised if OnLive would be interested in such an idea...

 

[deeFive]

if the players game or world state data was stored on a secure (until hacked) sever not player data, just game state that might work as it would all be logged in the same place with history. you can also cheat at board games i have seen this first hand over the last few days, with people bringing there "own" monopoly money round to play and unspoken "co-op's" taking place

 

[Sxotty]

Lots of games randomly assign items though so there could be more or less to be found.

 

[dlm]

Aside from the technical problems, I don't think that many people would be willing to pay any sort of significant fee to enter a contest like that.

Any reasonable person is going to know that the winner is likely to be the one willing to expend the most time, and most people aren't going to be willing to spend that kind of time and are thus simply not going to play.

There's also a lot of legal muddy ground involved. I wouldn't want to get anywhere *near* something like that unless I was the developer of the game and had really good lawyers to underwrite the rules for the contest to protect myself.

The final problem is that even if you could run a couple rounds of something like that, if there's enough financial incentive, people are going to bring bots to the table, and the second the word "botting" got bandied about, it would be all over.


You might remember that game companies used to do contests based on doing stuff in-game back in the 90's on a semi-regular basis... and now it's almost never done (the only example I can think of in recent memory was the one to ptich a perfect game in some NBA game or another a couple years ago, but even then, that was on console). The technical, legal and admnistrative overhead is a big part of the reason why this sort of thing died.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

There wouldn't be any legal ramifications as it's similar enough to many other tournament type things (gamecons, for example or the various electronic sports leagues) just make sure to check with your local business bureau to see if there's any licenses you need to run such an event.

As to cheating that will be inevitable if you allow people to use their own machines in their own homes over a long period of time unless it's something that at least has some form of enhanced security (Online Starcraft 2 for example).

Your better bet for the original proposition would be to hold the contest over a set period of time, ideally held on computers you or a local business (advertising opportunity for that business) provide. If using personally owned computers then make up a randomly generated name (I'm assuming that Gothic 3 has character generation with player assigned names, never played it) and prior to the start time of the tournament go around and make sure everyone creates a character with that name on their computer.

Then it isn't necessarily about finding all of X item. Then it's reward based on either first person to find all of X items or person who the most of X item within the timeframe of the competition.

Either way it'll have larger costs associated than the OP is thinking of.

Anything else held over the internet is going to require something with strong and somewhat enforced security or crossing your fingers and hoping people are honest and truthful (some will be and some won't be). Other than that the only type of internet tournaments which are possible are ones featuring head to head competition where results are reported. Preferably with referee's that can monitor (spectate) the matches to try to catch anyone cheating.

Regards,
SB