Why do we care that the PS3 has been hacked?

Seriously, what makes the PS3 being hacked special? People have been running unsigned code on other devices for ages. Hell, the original Xbox was in some demand for it’s media centre capabilities, and that was entirely unsigned code.

Yes, it’s news that the PS3 has been hacked, and it’s important. But on the IGN PS3 Lobby, some people are acting like it’s a giant calamity. “Geohot has destroyed online PS3 gaming”; really? Y’know, I hear that people play games on their computers, and they’ve been running unsigned code for years. Obviously cheating is bad, and obviously piracy is bad, but I don’t think this is the calamity a lot of PS3 fans are making this out to be. Once developers do what they should have been doing and bake some sort of anti-cheating mechanisms into their games (see: VAC, Bungie’s Banhammer, etc) it’ll all work out, and hacking will go from “destroying online PS3 gaming” to a sort of fun event where you see something silly, then the next game goes back to normal. Still, what are Sony’s options from here?

They need to understand that cheating will happen. Bad code will allow glitches and exploits (see Modern Warfare 2). Hacked consoles will allow for totally crazy stuff (seriously, that video is actually totally awesome, and they claim none of it was done online, so I’m all for it). As long as games exist, there will be cheaters; there always are. Our goal should be to minimize cheating, because removing it entirely is impossible.

The best way to stop cheating isn’t to assume that the console is impregnable, but to police the popular online games, and force penalties on the banners. Look at Bungie’s independent “banhammer”, and their stringent cheat auto-detection. Halo 2 was a hacker’s haven. It was brutal. Halo 3? Much less. Halo Reach? I haven’t even seen a single cheater yet. Yes, they exist, but Bungie bans the hell out of them quickly and automatically. Penalties result in anywhere from temporary bans to entire console bans. Valve does the same thing; hack in a VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) server, and BOOM, your Steam account is locked.

So for Killsnow 3, if it’s not too late to implement some sort of anti-cheat policing, it should be added to the online play. Game recording, automatic score analysis, and player tracking. Add kill-lines that let you see where you were standing when you killed someone. Not only is this fascinating to track as a player, but it’s a great anti-cheat measure. (Look at Bungie’s game tracking for an example). Cheat in Killzone, boom, your PSN account is gone, and there’s nothing hackers can do to prevent it because all the detection is done server-side. So that takes care of actually finding hackers, but what to do with them?

In other words, developers & publishers need to make hacking not worth the effort, and ideally with long-term penalties. On Xbox Live, banning an account (with all the financial penalties that come with it) or an Xbox (which again costs money) is a pretty solid deterrent. Some hackers get around it, but it becomes a much larger hassle; I see almost no people who cheat via softmods these days. It’s almost always game exploits, such as virtually every tactic in Modern Warfare 2.

Sony has it much more difficult. Apparently this Playstation hack prevents console bans, which is bad enough, but PSN accounts are also free to make. Sony can’t charge directly for them or else all hell breaks loose, because free online gaming is a big selling point for their console. The next best guess is to allow, say, five PSN accounts per PS3 serial number, or something like a new account every month, but you need to enter your PS3’s serial number to create them. Then Sony can ban PS3 serial numbers that make accounts used for hacking. So while Sony couldn’t ban the consoles directly, they can prevent people from creating new accounts, and once they ban the PSN accounts, they stop that cheater until they get another PS3 serial number. I also considered account creation by including a “free account” code with every single PS3 game (online or not), but that still seems to be a bit dodgy compared to the advertised “free online”.

At the same time, this is not a calamity. Other gaming devices have survived hacking and cheaters. And there’s nothing Sony can do to completely shut down cheaters; the harder it is, the more they want to “break open” the console. But Sony can mitigate the damage, and soon enough, PS3 gaming will return to normal.

"New Xbox Experience"

Just minutes ago I updated my 360 to the sexy new firmware and it loaded up and it was simple. Minimalistic, with less channels than before; lovely. Then I signed into Xbox Live and it became filled with shops and ads.

In retrospect, I could have just stayed logged off of Xbox Live for the next little while; it was quite nice.

PS: Gotta love the options menu. In my System Settings, I have an entire area for Kinect. If I go into it, all of the options but one are greyed out, indicating I can't set them. Selecting the one that isn't greyed out pops up an error message warning me I don't have Kinect. Wouldn't it just be easier to grey out the Kinect menu?

Local Matchmaking

I'm genuinely surprised that this hasn't made a bigger splash yet; Bungie completely revamped Halo's matchmaking system for local players, making me happier than I could ever realize.

As I'm sure many people have noticed, it's becoming more and more difficult to play games locally anymore. You know what I mean; sitting physically with somebody (Oh the humanity!) playing the same game on the same television at the same time. Games that do feature local play (Scott Pilgrim, New Super Mario Bros Wii) are often mocked for having little or no online feature.

Bungie is one of the few companies that still respects local gaming, and they cemented that position with Halo: Reach.

Halo: Combat Evolved featured an extremely in-depth set of split-screen options. Play the entire campaign with a buddy, or of course competitive multiplayer. Halo 2 extended that feature, but also moved the whole shebang online, as did Halo 3. And thankfully, you did NOT need two, three, or four Xbox Live accounts to bring your buddies.

However, one of the more irritating things about that was the gulf between ranked and unranked matches. I of courseunderstand the gulf in one sense; how does one track the rank of "guests"? What ended up happening was that there were two broad categories of game playlists; ranked, and unranked. Of course, you could bring guests into unranked, but not into ranked games. If you did have two Xbox Live accounts, you can bring 'em both into ranked playlists, except for playlists like Lone Wolf, which are free-for-all. Lots of good times were had in Team Doubles. Still a bothersome situation; some of the ranked playlists (Team Slayer, Team Doubles) were fantastic, and I don't always want to play Multi-Team or Team Actionsack (Correction: I never want to play Team Actionsack). The social playlists tended to be more "fun", but sometimes you want genuine competition. Of course, you not only need two active Xbox Live Gold Accounts, but they must both be on the same Xbox; if my friend All In Vain's account is on his Xbox at home, we have to "recover" it at my house, then he must re-recover it when he gets home. It's just an unnecessary hassle and cost, not to mention awkward to understand (For people who aren't knowledgable with Xbox Live and how it works, it genuinely is confusing; they can play with four friends in this playlist, why not this playlist?). This also creates stupid playlists like "Team Slayer" (ranked) and "Social Slayer" (unranked). This shouldn't be needed.

Enter Halo: Reach.

In a brilliant move, Reach's playlists no longer have independent rankings. Each playlist simply has a "Local Players" count, which is quite easy to see. Thus, in a team gametype I can play with my three non-Xbox Live friends, but in a one-man score attack it clearly indicates that no local players can enter. Thus my buddy doesn't need to recover his Xbox Live account for the two of us to play Arena Doubles. Of course he needs to recover his account if he wants the credits and ranking, but he might not care. Besides, there's nothing Bungie can do about that; the atrocious account recovery system is all Microsoft. It makes the entire system much more transparent, easy to navigate, and it allows my friends and I to choose between Team Slayer of Multi-Team without having to fight it.

The other advantage is that you simply have a rank, rather than a rank for each playlist and an overall rank. You also have an Arena Rating, but that's something much more hardcore and essentially unrelated to this post. Bungie posted anextremely interesting look at their Arena Rating system on their website; if the phrases betrayal penalty and arc tangent in the same article make your heart all a-flutter, check it out. This removes that unusual situation where you see somebody with an extremely basic rank, but then you look them up and find that they're a General who gets more kills in a day than you've achieved across your entire life. As amusing as that could be, it really wasn't when they destroyed you.

Of course, it also completely disregards the Xbox Live standard of "Player" and "Ranked" matches. The whole Xbox Live "Trueskill" is in there in the background . . . somewhere. I have no idea what Microsoft thinks about their entire system being bofrangled by Bungie, especially since Trueskill was in part derived from Halo 2's Optimatch matchmaking system.

In general, I'm quite happy that me and my buddies, sitting on the same couch, are allowed to play Halo: Reach online with minimal hassle. The same can't be said for most games these days.

Connectivity

One of the biggest new elements of game design that we’re seeing is integration of social connectivity with the game. Of course, games have for a long time been an inherently social activity, but connecting them directly to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is rather new. Fine, maybe not LinkedIn, but who knows? “Looking for level 80 Warlock with 375 skill in accounting”?

Still, so much of this social networking integration is just cheap bullet points rather than useful integration.



Some flat out don’t work well (Uncharted 2’s bothersome “chapter complete” tweets had to be disabled), and that’s because in most part some connectivity features are half-baked, mostly pointless, or full of hassle. The best ones are the ones that make the game better or (most importantly) easier to play with your friends. They should identify needs and work with them.

My favourite example of just piss-poor social networking is Xbox Live’s Twitter feature.On the 360, to tweet, you’re required to boot back to the Xbox Dashboard, find “My Community”, find Twitter, load it, then press X to tweet. Oh, and then you have to fight your way through the molasses-slow typing to actually type your tweet. This is just a core misunderstanding both of what Twitter is, as well as what people want from integrated functionality. Twitter is designed for rapid-fire dissemination of thoughts, ideas, jokes, news, whatever. The functionality should be integrated into the Guide so that you don’t have to quit your game to Tweet, and it should be faster than whipping out your smartphone and tweeting from that. Ideally it could even integrate elements such as screenshots in your game. People might want to share that crazy scoreboard at the end of a game, for example. The current functionality is a bullet point; it’s an example of how the designers didn’t try to make it useful, it’s just shoehorned into the Xbox.

Moderately interesting is Sony’s Facebook integration. The best part is how it’s ideally automatic; just sync your trophies and *bam*, your Facebook has them. The two issues are how trophies don’t sync automatically, and how it really just is trophy posting. It’s ironic that this sort of information is best suited for Twitter, rather than spamming Facebook with inane posts about how DarkJad earned 15 trophies last night. Still, it is mostly automatic and helps to serve a need; if your Facebook friends are also gamers, it can keep them up to date with what games you’re playing and even goad them into playing to try and exceed your trophy count.

My favourite social integration was Starcraft 2’s Friend Finder. Ironically, it doesn’t actually post anything to your Facebook or integrate anything like that; all it does is scan your Facebook and automagically add your real life friends to your Starcraft 2 friends list. This functionality is informative (“Oh, I had no idea that guy plays Starcraft!”) and exceedingly useful; rather than having to enter thirty email addresses, you can enter your Facebook info and your Starcraft 2’s friend list is populated with friends in just a couple clicks. It’s intelligently designed as well; nothing at all forces you to add people, so if you have people on Facebook you don’t want to play with, you don’t have to send them that request.

Funny, isn’t it? The only actual social network integration that actually helps you play and communicate directly with your friends doesn’t actually do anything other add them to another friends list.