I've heard of people actually working on the binary, and as far as tweaking game mechanics goes, that might be sufficient. Has anybody considered actually distributing altered clients? (and servers with that???) AoS allegedly was better tweaked in the past.
Another option would be to fully rebuild the game: client and server. It would take considerable effort, but with the right design could deter cheaters and enable a free version of AoS to have some added features. (Everybody loves vehicles
). You could even design it to be way more moddable than the current client. (For those exceptional cases who don't like vehicles ;) .)As far as programming goes I'm a noob. I'd take at least 10 years to produce a buggy proto-type, I estimate. The most viable option would be open-source, unless a team of good programmers could be formed and managed. (Unless somebody's going to give some in$entive, they need a kick in the rear
). Open-source opens a whole can of cheater options, and something needs to be thought to deter them.Here's a fair discussion which treats everything except for packet injection (which is a MAJOR problem):
http://www.gamedev.net/topic/368086-ope ... nti-cheat/
The things I could think of after minimal research are: (advanced) server heuristics, such as Hack cam; enabling first person spectation by default; generally centralizing banning; specifically making a central "reputation" record.
The latter would be a player registration. It could work like a level-up system, where only people who invest an amount of time and effort are granted abilities that enable full griefing; and likewise are banned if they are cheaters/unpleasant. And/or it could work with a fee to deter cheaters. Yes, cheaters will always find ways. This does add the need to manage servers which are allowed to change a player's status in the registry. For the people who don't get my drift: I'm talking about an infrastructure to empower crowd-sourced on-line moderation (synnovation >_>). In less fancy words: making moderating by users easier and more effective.
I think a lot of people agree that the current game could use some anti-cheating measures. I'm certainly not saying I have answers.
Of course IMHO all of this is moot, if Jagex succeeds to properly make a "classic mode". But there must be other people thinking about tweaking the current version.
First relevant hit for "Iceball". So the original is still marked as "buldthensnip"...