Jeremy wrote:
] Peter Wayner, the author of _Disappearing Cryptography_,
] writes about online gaming in the New York Times.
]
] An arms race is underway ... Bots can do drudge work to earn
] extra cash for their owners; video cards can be reprogrammed
] to let players see and attack through walls; and much more.
]
] It's all here ... black markets, weapons inspections, test
] bans, treaty verification regimes ...
]
] There's probably some good academic work in this space. Can
] you design a provably fair massively multiplayer online game?

Um, mine? We've got massively multiplayer games that have been running for several years (one for over a decade), with relatively stable economies, game systems, and player-bases.

There's still a certain amount of black market trading that goes on in the background -- by my guesstimates, each of our major products has a black market (some call it grey market) of about $50,000/month in transactions, with about 20% of that being out and out fraud. We can't stop all of it, and we definitely don't actively encourage it, but we do track it. For example, in one of our games, DragonRealms, there's effectively an exchange rate of in-game currency (platinum kronars) to real world dollars. If we see that exchange rate making sudden changes, it gives us a good heads-up that there's some new bug or other problem that's throwing the game economy out of balance, and we can increase steps to find and plug the hole. Over the last few years though, things have been running pretty stable... The game's producer refers to it as "our platinum kronars are running at about the same exchange rate as the Canadian Dollar"!

RE: Do Cheaters Ever Prosper? Just Ask Them