Analysis of state exposure control to prevent cheating in online games

Cheating has become a serious threat to the online game industry. One common type of cheating is accessing game states that are not supposed to be exposed to the players. In this paper, we evaluate a few information dissemination strategies that limit the state exposure to the client, measuring the delay introduced to the players and the system resource requirements at the game server. Our measurement is based on OpenGladiator, a multi-user, real-time strategy game that is similar to Warcraft but in open-source. We found that by performing careful on-demand preloading, we can significantly reduce the unnecessary states exposed to a client without introducing any additional delay to the players. Our measurement results show that the on-demand strategy comes with a increment to the server's CPU load. However, it also significantly reduces the server's network bandwidth consumption, which is a major cost of running a game server in the current Internet.