I was reading broken toys as I do to keep up on my Lum stalking and came across his commentary on client side hacks in WoW about the Guild that was banned.
Hah. See, the whole “everything must be server side! the client is in the hands of the enemy!” gestalt is true. But the other side of that coin is that the more processing you can shuffle off onto the client, the less melting down into ash the servers get.
Now I don't have the on the job experience Lum does, so I'm completely talking about of my butt here (think Jim Carey), but shouldn't every single thing that the player could hack to give them an advantage be done by the server or at the very least monitored by the server? Yes, I agree completely this puts more of the processing load on the server and may require more bandwidth from the server to the clients, but so what? If you don't, you'll end up with people hacking the system, just like they did in this latest banning in WoW.
And here's the big problem. For every player you catch doing something that's a bannable offense, there are two to ten times as many doing it and not getting caught. Or that were doing it and now that Blizzard is watching out for that, they've moved on to the next hack/trick. Why? Who knows. For some people the hack exists so they have to use it (to keep up with the virtual Jonses). others so because it exists they feel that gives them the right to use, and for others, they use them to screw up other peoples days (because that's fun, apparently).
But no matter the motivation, it happens. If an exploit exists, sooner or later someone will find it, publish or share how to do it and others will be unable to resist using it. So you HAVE to put as much as you can server side. And if you can't put it server side, you have to monitor it server side. This is basic MMORPG rules.
So what's the debate? Everything needs to be either server side or monitored server side. Up to and including skins (this is a common practice in any multiplayer game, replace opposing skins with things like bright orange that stand out much better). If you're doing it any other way, you're setting up your economy, your world and your player base for ruin.
What Would Matt Do: Follow the lessons our MMORPG fore fathers learned. Thou shalt not allow the client to be anything but dumb.
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