I was wondering. I observed most of any MMO that are hack-prone area. Hacks used one-hit kills, stealing accounts, instant level up, aimbots (mostly MMOFPS), and questionable wallers (also in MMOFPS). These hackers might affect the fairness and excitement of the gamers which lead to doubts, abuse kickers (mostly in MMOFPS*, and misunderstandings. Even in MMORPG referred to hacks for instant money for purchase items. I saw these examples via Wikipedia.
This leads me to my question:
Which kind of MMO game platform or model would be best for making MMO games whilst reducing the possibility of hacking?
For example I could make an MMO game for the web browser (by website or via Facebook) or making an MMO game using installers/clients that fetches for patches and graphics that could run only through program via computer. What will help with preventing hacking and how?
In the case of making an installer/client based MMO games, are there anti-hack programs or techniques you can recommend in MMO context?
Answer
Whichever you do, it doesn't matter. If you rely on clientside calculation of anything you will get hacked. All the "anti-hacker" tooling has AFAIK been thoroughly penetrated, new versions often themselves being hacked in a matter of hours after release.
Given that, browser games are a major PITA IMO (poor usability) though they do offer ease of installation.
So push as much as you can to the server, validate and counter validate everything sent by the clients to the server, and aggressively detect and ban any violators.
Of course you do have to account for lag which can cause weird results being sent (or received), which is another reason you don't want to rely on clientside anything.
So the client tells the server he's moving in direction alpha, let the server decide the next position, not the client. Client tells the server he's pulling the trigger, let the server decide whether there's bullets left, where they're going, and whether anything is hit (and what damage they do).
Done like that, the client becomes little more than a tool for rendering the world and allowing the user to request things (data, movement, etc.) from the server with the server deciding whether those requests should be honoured based on what it knows about the real abilities of the client (this also makes it impossible to render walls invisible for example, unless the client avatar is known to the server to have X-ray vision, a decision made based on gameplay and resources the server assigned to the avatar, not the client software).
Of course this places a major burden on the servers, your server hardware is going to have to be rather more serious than that of old fashioned gaming servers which were little more than portals to transmit data between clients, but that's what it takes to deflect hacking/cheating attempts.
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