Editorial Rant--Cheating At Quake III Arena

is threatening to spoil the on line multiplayer aspect of the game even before the final Mac version comes out. I do marvel at the apparent dexterity of some who can make their player jump into the air, spin around with leg out and fire a single deadly shot in the blink of an eye. I say apparent because I suspect there is a script or command edit set off by a single keystroke or mouse button that actually accomplishes that move and that it is being shared among friends or via some web site that I have yet to find. Some players jump twice as high as the normal jump command and others leap right over your player from far away and shoot you dead with one shot in the back faster than you can turn around with the normal command set. These moves are not my complaint although they do kill (pun intended) the competitive fun when they are not openly available to all. Heck, I am guilty too. I ran across and use a command edit that very helpfully improves the field of vision from the default 90-degree tunnel vision.

My real objection is to cheats that make a player virtually invincible (they can take at least 3 direct rocket hits right after reincarnation before picking up any armor), that make a single shot from the default low level machinegun deadly (my player has to nearly empty my machinegun into another standing still) and that change the default weapon when a player is reincarnated to one higher than the defaut machinegun, usually a rocket launcher, or even to a weapon that is not available to others at that level. I have seen some players amass huge scores without ever encountering the player during a game. What competition is there in that?

Am I whining? Is it sour grapes from being shell shocked? I am sure that some will think so. But what can/should be done about it? First, one can avoid the servers where these cheats are obviously being used. They are easy to spot when joining the game as there will be one or two players with hugely disproportionate scores, at the end they will have a very low, mostly zero, ping rating or the server will have the name of the player like "Cyberkiller's Den." However, it seems that some can hack these cheats into their player and join a game on a more legitimate server--their number is growing. Second, the maker of the game can develop filters for the hacked cheats on officially maintained servers. This is a major job I've read, but it is the only way that the multiplayer game will survive for very long before everyone is invincible and carries a BFG. Then there will be only the single player bots which are no pushovers but don't cheat too much.