A cheat controlled protocol for centralized online multiplayer games

Ordering of command messages from the clients at the game servers is an important issue that impacts fairness, response times, and smoothness of the game play. Recently, protocols based on “reaction” times were proposed to order the command messages. This paper presents a protocol that can be used to control cheating in reaction time based message ordering schemes. We examine the performance of the proposed protocol by emulating wide-area game play scenarios on the Planet-Lab. The results from the experiments indicate that the proposed protocol is able to dramatically reduce the cheating opportunities that exist for the clients. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS C.2.4 Distributed Systems Distributed applications General Terms Algorithms, Performance Keywords Cheat prevention, multiplayer online games, time cheating

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: NETGAMES
• Authors: Bei Di Chen, Muthucumaru Maheswaran
• Keywords: Command Messages, Game Play, NETGAMES 2004, Wide-area Game Play