Countermeasures for Time-Cheat Detection in Multiplayer Online Games

Cheating is a key issue in online games. It is widely recognized that typical cheating prevention schemes introduce complications and overheads in the distributed game system, which may seriously jeopardize the online gaming experience. The paper review the main architectural solutions and prevention schemes to cope with cheats. Then, prevention schemes are described which allow to detect cheaters instead of preventing the cheats. It has been indeed recognized that, often, detecting the cheaters could represent a better solution. Some experimental results are presented that confirm the viability of the presented approaches