šµ CHEATS: Gaming's nemesis is 10x in web3
How do you stop a gamer's favorite hobby? Maybe with the blockchain.
Iāve got a refrain when it comes to our industryās audience: Gamers gonna game.
By which I mean itās in the nature of gamers to beat the system, and throughout the history of gaming thatās meant using any and all means to win, from imaginative exploits to straight up cheats.
I get it: itās hard to compete against my CoD scores. Shout out to this k/d of 6.33 the other day.
Aimbots. Hacks. The bane of the ānaturalā player can come in many forms, and some estimates put the loss for developers at $29B a year in unfairly gained items and/or losses in player retention: If players feel thereās an unfair advantage held by a few, theyāre unlikely to return for another pounding.
Developers have raced against cheating since the beginning of time, but are always behind the curve when cheaters can crowdsource solutions to gain an edge. The newness and technology inherent in web3 creates additional challenges. Some manipulation can occur on platforms not owned by the gameāmainly bot trading and wash trading on third party marketplaces. Other old-school, in-game hacks could upend economies or create overpowered players.
First, a review of two mainstay web3 exploits:
š¤ Bot trades: These trades use automation to snag items faster than a human transaction can occur. While there are plenty of legit reasons for why automation would execute a trade, theyāre often employed to corner the market on certain classes of items, or even get items that maybe were listed low in error.
š Wash trades: This involves moving assets between wallets to capitalize on rewards that incentivize trades, or artificially inflate the floor price of items.
These moves can be annoying and distracting. A developer doesnāt want to spend UA cash on bots who 1) arenāt real players and 2) will churn the second the arbitrage opportunity is over. But theyāre also preventable. At AQUA, weāve developed machine learning algorithms that identify these actors and can proactively block trades from them.
But there are other ways that cheaters can mess with experiences, and weāve already seen the potential magnitude of these issues in web2.
A web2 case study
AĀ Counter Strike Global Offensive (CS:GO) skin recently sold on the secondary market for $160,000. It was a random unlock. CS:GO game items unfold a few ways, some purely by playing, some by completing certain missions. An item like that, achieved through play that has the potential to be exploited (faster/automated completes, aimbots to up your score, etc.), is a tantalizingĀ reward for any cheater, even with no in-game impact. You could imagine many accounts set up with aim assists or other hax to help a cheater wrack up rare skins like that with ease. [NB: not saying this item was gotten by cheating, but you get the idea.]
CS:GO is one of the few web2 games with a secondary market, so this is an anomaly. Ironically, since the marketplaces donāt have the security that web3 offers, many of these major deals have to be manually brokered by trusted third parties. With web3 marketplaces, this isnāt an issue, assuming both parties do their own due diligence.
The blockchain could make things worse
But as a default of all web3 games, secondary markets will be more of a focus than an sideshow. Imagine a cheater progressing a dynamic NFT more quickly, unlocking items sooner, using bots to run multiple ghost accounts, or getting power-ups at scale. Suddenly, we have players with supersized abilities. And we have the issue of cheaters cornering the market in game economies, or cashing out heavily, pricing the average player out of some of that aftermarket fun.
Like those six figure CS:GO skins, the potential to make bank could be too attractive. And easy.
Deadrop, Dr. Disrespectās upcoming web3 game, is a vertical extraction shooter. In these games, players who die drop items that can then be scooped up by survivors. Win the round and youāve gotten a haul of rare cosmetics, ammo, and weapon-improving attachments. With a few off-the-shelf hacks, cheaters could not only become unbeatable menaces, but also extract thousands of dollars of value in coveted items.
Even a purely cosmetics-driven title (like a Fortnite) could see performance suffer if players feel like theyāre being beaten to unlocking rare skins, and priced out of buying them on the secondary market because of inflated pricing and whales.
Game and economy design figureĀ intoĀ this and can be used to offset the risk of where cheaters can game the system (or lessen the benefits of doing so). But the economy design hasn't been nailed for web3 games at scale, yet. The largest titles to date have been play-to-earn (P2E), which are largely unsustainable specifically because of ways players can gain an outsize edge. The added complexity of secondary markets, digital ownership, and (depending on the set-up) anonymous walletsāon top of the usual challenges in preventing cheatingāmean developers start on defense.
Could web3 save the day?
However, web3 may also be the gaming industryās solve for cheating. Web3 games already require a rethinking of how game economies work, who a gamer is, and how to establish a game for multiple user profiles. They also require preemptive planning and infrastructure to secure against manipulation. In some ways, this complexity means developers are thinking ahead where web2 devs wouldnāt.
But there are also methods in development that would use the nature of the blockchain to determine and prevent bots and other cheats. Because actions even in a game could be verified on-chain, and because itās easy to see the entire digital fingerprint of a wallet, the blockchain can help address issues not only unique to web3, but gaming cheats overall:
ā ļø Account blacklisting: While setting up a new wallet is easy, the public historical view of all assets and all wallets makes it easy to see, for example, a brand new wallet who receives a transfer of assets that were all recently wash or bot traded. Or a wallet that gets a dump of assets from an account that was determined to be hacking, or breaking community decorum rules.
This means that new bad-actor accounts could be labeled and preemptively blocked.
While not a perfect kill, it certainly deters users who would otherwise have to start all over if they canāt move items around.
Though extreme, public wallet IDs mean that developers could work together to deny access to wallets in one game that were determined to be cheating in another .
šš½ On-chain progress verification: Using soulbound tokens airdropped or unlocked during gameplay, developers can develop a fingerprint of a wallet that progresses only at a āhumanā pace.
For example, tokens granted at different points in game progression that are time stamped can determine if a hacker was able to do something faster than a person would be able to.
The immutable nature of the on-chain items would also prevent, for example, the cheater from being able to use code insertion or another code-level hack to trick progression or actions to happen faster or at a higher level than they would otherwise occur.
Web3 offers opportunities for experimentation and innovation in how gaming tackles cheating. But the stakes are high: games that players deem unfair often find it hard to recover (a cool marketing push isn't "NOW WITH LESS HAX!). Likewise, digital ownership can get away from devs very quickly into realms they don't control. Iām bullish on developers using the blockchain in creative ways to secure not only their own games, but work collaboratively to ensure a broader peer review system of players that are only in it for the fun.