In my old post, Cheating in Online Games, I outlined the many ways one can well… cheat. Note that my piece is not a guide on cheating but rather what groups and companies are doing to combat it.

And speaking of trying to fight the thousands of dickheads who attempt to cheat, online game developers are now turning to more sophisticated methods and technology.

In this article at propeller.com, to fight back, game developers have taken a page from banks and credit card companies. They’re using fraud-detection software to analyze the rushing stream of events that occur in an ordinary MMO day, in search of something fishy.”If players cheat, the software can recognize a deviation from the norm and flag it,” says David Whatley, the CEO of Simutronics, which makes the MMO game platform HeroEngine.

More after the jump

More from that post:

The software works by creating a model of how players normally behave during a game.For instance, the software might raise a red flag if it notices a player suddenly reaching 20,000 kills in a game where the average number of kills is in the low hundreds — the same way your credit card company might give you a call you if it notices a spike in your purchases from outfits in Nigeria.Online games are growing fast, attracting more than 20 million gamers, according to unofficial estimates. And as the gaming community grows, so does the number of cheaters. Some cheats just try to enhance their character or status, but there’s also real-world money to be made selling in-world objects like armor, real estate or currency.

Simutronics is using software created by StreamBase, a firm that usually works on financial applications. John Partridge, a co-founder of StreamBase, says the software can analyze more than 500,000 game messages per second in popular games. In less intensive games, it can examine as many as a million messages per second. The software performs the analysis in real-time so MMOs can catch cheaters red-handed.”You could argue that financial services is a big MMO,” says Partridge. “It’s massively multiplayer and it’s online. Maybe it’s not a game, but the information that traders are working off of is like an event in one of these virtual world role-playing games.”The MMO developer BioWare has recently adopted StreamBase’s technology, as has Second Life’s Linden Lab and Avatar Reality, which is creating the MMO Blue Mars for launch in late 2008.In the fight against MMO cheats, the numbers are not in the developers’ favor. “There are more of them than there are of us,” says Tim Keating, the director of development for the online game company Heatwave Interactive.What’s worse, game developers don’t have access to all the code that’s running on their networks. MMOs, by definition, are populated by people strewn across the planet, each using local software to access the game.

I guess it won’t be long. But the real challenge is how to be “one step ahead” of all the cheaters and hackers. Sigh.

Let the war rage on.

Strength and Honor,

GM T