Cheat-Proofing Dead Reckoned Multiplayer Games (Extended Abstract)

THE multiplayer game (MPG) market is segmented into a handful of readily identifiable genres, the most popular being first-person shooters, realtime strategy games, and role-playing games. First-person shooters (FPS) such as Quake [11], Half-Life [17], and Unreal Tournament [9] are fast-paced conflicts between up to thirty heavily armed players. Players in realtime strategy (RTS) games like Command & Conquer [19], StarCraft [8], and Age of Empires [18] or role-playing game (RPG) such as Diablo II [7] command tens or hundreds of units in battle against up to seven other players. Persistent virtual worlds such as Ultima Online [2], Everquest [12], and Lineage [14] encompass hundreds of thousands of players at a time (typically served by multiple servers). Cheating has always been a problem in computer games, and when prizes are involved can become a contractual issue for the game service provider. Here we examine a cheat where players lie about their network latency (and therefore the amount of time they have to react to their opponents) to see into the future and stay