Used to get a lot of grief on Medal of Honor Spearhead servers for 'hacking'.... hehe when you've played that game for as long as I have you get to know the maps and choke points etc. It's understandable when you kill the same guy in the same spot for the tenth time that he calls Haxor!!!
However, my clan at the time used to play in several leagues and tournaments and for a bunch of guys who were mostly over 30 it was quite a serious business. The servers we used to run were mostly free from hackers due to the almost constant presence of the admin with the almighty banhammer at his fingertips
Plus the type of games we used to host - objective maps for the most part - didn't tend to attract kiddies looking for easy scores.
It's a pity that Spearhead, as a gaming community, does not have the numbers it used to, so the servers are limited to freeze tag and heavily modded weapon damage gameplay.
I've slowly gone over to Call of Duty 2, which had a horrifying reputation for cheaters when it first came out. There's some good realism servers out there and for the most part cheaters are easy to spot. It's a good game and the objective modes bring back some of the team spirit that made MOH SH such a joy to play.
I blame EA and Medal of Honor Airborne for the death of the MOH franchise - that game had such potential; it looked great and had some beautiful maps, but they gave it a couple of rubbishy patches and a clunky control interface and refused to support the game any further after it had been released for a couple of months. Online gameplay was where that title could have excelled, but they released it stillborn: No developer kit or SDK mapping tools. Essentially I can sum it up as a console game ported over to the pc in order to make money. It was the last EA game I will ever buy.
In that event it never lived long enough for anyone to hack it
I have to laugh looking back on some of the cheaters arguing on our SH servers though, swearing that they didn't just wallhack or use an aimbot, or start 'land-sharking' when half a dozen guys who have played the game for 6+ years are watching them do it in spectator mode. Most of them were logged by the servers and their id's given over to the cheat police, to be distributed to many of the clan and league servers operating back then.
I guess there's only a handful of COD2 servers that I play (badly) on:
<82ndAB> WRM(B3)
|Brothers|-RealismWRM(B3)
=(E|S|R)=long range sniper only
and occasionally {UN}Europe United Noobs!! (our clan used to get booted and banned from their Americas Army server for playing as a team and kicking them about the map - petty really) still a few cheaters on their COD2 servers though and it's a bit of a fragg-fest in all honesty, but fun when there's not too many players on.
Perhaps it's because I'm a bit older, or more likely, because most of my clan mates have quit playing regularly. I just don't enjoy it as much as I used to - freelancing on most games like that doesn't have the same bite to it. Kind of like here at subsim; it feels all homey and familiar and you can always have a laugh or a chat with people you know.
Lol all of these one night stands with random WW2 FPS game servers just don't cut it like a meaningful relationship with a game that gives as much as it takes
hahaha!
I've always thought that online gaming communities and forums would be a good resource for anyone wishing to study group dynamics and social grouping, you can observe a microcosm of life on a more controlled scale, cheaters and all
