I’m feeling rather nostalgic this week, and I was thinking about my time spent as an admin for one of the top 10% of BF2 servers.
BF2 had ups and downs during its lifespan. It has some terrible bugs that made the Blackhawk helicopter an absolute terror for a few months, and it had that one that left almost all aircraft untouchable to missiles. Good times.
One of the big changes in BF2 from most other games was the stat tracking. You could review all of your previous rounds, Check your Kill to Death ratio anytime you felt like it. However, when you start putting everyone’s names into a competition, some people will always want to have more digital prestige then their skills will afford them. So the cheaters arose to prove only that they are cheaters.
Aimbots.. Aimbots EVERYWHERE! Ugh.. How could you tell the difference between an actual cheater and one of the various ‘x-men’, mutants, or the other partial metahumans that play games online?
At first, we’d have to monitor them.. Ugh did this suck. Going into a game to kick ass and having to sit down and keep an eye on one player because of multiple ‘He’s hacking’ reports. Sometimes I’d see something REALLY obvious like a headshot from the other side of the map. Other times it was obvious because you see them with an 80-0 KDR, or one might see them slaughter 10 people in a suspiciously short amount of time. A lot of the time, it was not very obvious what was going on, and I’d spend 15-20 minutes watching a player with nothing to show for it.
This was not a very efficient way to do things. However, I noticed something after a month or so. I don’t think the earlier cheats would let people change their in game name (maybe they did and I didn’t notice for awhile). At some point while looking into a cheater, I did a search on one of the BF2 stat tracking websites. I’d usually do a search based on a unique player ID. One time doing the search, I noticed the names were different. The player ID matched, but the in game name was different from the person I saw in the server. Huzzah!
This is what I needed. A smoking gun to detect cheaters quickly, and effectively. Now BF2 would let you create new characters, but you can’t change the in game name once chosen. Apparently, you COULD change it if you used the cheating software. The cheaters in their attempts to mask their actual in game name were actually revealing to admins that they were cheaters.
It makes a lot of sense why they would change their names. I mean if you went 100-0 for several rounds, you’d probably be reported to whomever ran the stat tracking stuff at EA. It would be hard to follow up on a report if you were looking for a name that didn’t exist.
Finding a flaw with the cheaters made things a lot more relaxing for me while admining the servers. If there was a question about someone in game, I’d quickly do a search on the stat tracking to see if they were legit. If the name and player ID did not match then they got a ban, and I got to go back to playing asap.
I never had one person come onto the forums and call one of those bans unwarranted. Not one. Although to be honest, I kinda hoped one person would have tried. I wanted to call them out on the name thing so badly even though it would have given up my magic bullet. *sigh* I suppose it’s safe to mention it now since I doubt BF2 cheaters are much of an issue these days.
Stay awesome internet people. Keep learning, and looking for those minute factual details that matter. And don’t cheat at multiplayer games. Go play single player and hack the fuck out of that shit.
*No, I don’t consider a person using an aimbot to be a hacker. The hacker made the aimbot. The cheaters buy and use them.