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ONE MILLION DOLLARS - MLB 2K10's Perfect? Game Promotion

ceo@secureplay.com (SecurePlay) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 05:36:00 -0800

A Perfect Game.. its a rare thing in professional baseball. Its been done 18 times since 1880... in the pros.

2K Sports has decided to turn a Perfect Game into a big promotion for its professional baseball game, MLB 2K10.

Get the first perfect game, win $1,000,000.

An exciting promotion - $1 Million is sure to sell some boxes, but it leads to some interesting questions:

1. As Bill Harris of Dubious Quality notes, there are around 2500 games a year, 25,000 games a decade... not too many games...and, to grossly simplify, in the last (2010 -1880 = 130 years) there has been at least 1 perfect game per decade amongst real professional baseball games. How long will it take to get 25,000 MLB 2K10 games played?

If the game is rigged, there is a problem with fraud, if not, 2K Games had better have that truck o'loot handy.

2. Is this a game of skill or illegal lottery? What about jurisdiction? Contests and promotions have widely varying laws between different states (It looks like the game is banned where skill games for money are totally banned).

3. Oh and then there's CHEATING. Not that anyone would consider CHEATING the game to win $1 Million. At least it is on the Xbox 360 and the PS3, but there are some exploits that might be of interest on both platforms... especially combined with problems other games have had (see the recent stories about Modern Warfare 2, among others).

This should certainly sell some more games and give MLB 2K10 more visibility. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

It would seem to make more sense to have players enter a tournament (or achieve some milestone) to be entered into a tournament where a $1 Million prize can be won as there would be more extended publicity and interest (state by state contests, etc.).

(Thanks for the lead BD)

D. Terdiman (2010), "$1 million for first perfecto in MLB 2K10", http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10443496-52.html

B. Harris (2010), "Gaming Notes", http://dubiousquality.blogspot.com/2010/01/gaming-notes_28.html

"2K Sports to Award One Million Dollars to First Person to Throw a Perfect Game in Major League Baseball® 2K10", http://2ksports.com/news/mlb2k10/377

Yet Another Attack on Modern Warfare 2.. and this one is FUN!

ceo@secureplay.com (SecurePlay) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 05:28:00 -0800

Virtually since its launch, Activision's Modern Warfare 2 has been plagued by configuration hacks. They've been entertaining or annoying, but not destructive... until now.

The configuration hack affects everybody. But, First Person Shooter games are about shooting the other guy. So, what this one did is make the score for killing another player a huge, huge negative number. So, instead of earning 100 points, the player loses 5 million points.

... and it reduces the player to a rank 1 Private in the game's ladder system.

Oops.

This would happen for any player, but.... you do play these games to shoot people. So, the knowledgeable cheater simply doesn't shoot, gets shot, and griefs his foes.

What is interesting is that these configuration cheats have been so persistent. My only guess is that Infinity Ward is fixing these bugs by hardwiring the game configuration parameters one by one instead of fixing the underlying problem (which I believe is the way configurations are synchronized) or going in and hardwiring all of the configurations.

The fun continues.

G. McElroy (2010), "Rumor: Modern Warfare 2 hack attacks your XP", http://www.joystiq.com/2010/01/19/rumor-modern-warfare-2-hack-attacks-your-xp/

"Viral Attacks in Modern Warfare 2 - Synch Security Failures", http://playnoevil.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/2814-Viral-Attacks-in-Modern-Warfare-2-Synch-Security-Failures.html

Taking down Isildur1 for $5.6 Million in Online Poker without Collusion, Ghosting, or Multi-Accounting

ceo@secureplay.com (SecurePlay) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 09:41:16 -0800

The online poker community has been abuzz since September about Isildur1 - a player who came from nowhere and was making millions of dollars... and then losing them. The top tier players are tracked and treated like celebrities. This is totally fascinating as someone who only dips into the world of online poker when a cheating scandal comes along (and is very different from how things work in most other online games).

Isildur1 has apparently been broken by cooperative strategic analysis by Cole South, Brian Hastings and Brian Townsend. They looked at all of the hands that Isildur1 and, apparently, found a strategic weakness or wagering tell.

Taken together, the three have won $5.6 Million from Isildur1.

$5.6 Million.

Ouch.

Fascinating.

Double Ouch.

Players are only supposed to be able to analyze their own games with other players. However, online poker players tend to widely share this information.

Townsend admits collecting 30,000 hands played against Isildur1 in addition to the 20,000 that he directly participated in.

For this, he was suspended from his top level "Red Pro" status at Full Tilt Poker for 30 days. The violation was a technical violation of the site's Terms of Service, it is fairly common and, arguably, trivial to do.

The big violations in online poker have to do with Identity Abuse and Collusion. Ghosting and Multi-Accounting are not really problems in other online games like MMOs.

Ghosting (using another player's account) is a technical violation of most game's ToS, and is mainly associated with power-leveling. In online poker, a more skillful player can use a weaker player's account to alter the quality of play of that person.

NOTE - I find this interesting - would it be illegal for me to "kibbitz" on the shoulder of another player in online poker? How would you detect it?

Multi-accounting (having multiple accounts in use at the same time) both hurts "legitimate" pattern analysis and can be used for "auto-collusion" - playing multiple seats at a poker table - a clear case of cheating. Brian Townsend was earlier suspended for playing with a second account.

To my mind, online poker really needs rule changes to eliminate the benefits of collusion (I've been fiddling with some game designs in this area) rather than trying to stop it. Online collusion can take place "out of channel" and is very difficult to prove.

I do discuss both Online Identity and Collusion in my book Protecting Games, of course, my focus is on games in general, not the details of online poker.

S. Lind (2009), "Full Tilt Suspends Brian Townsend", http://www.pokerlistings.com/full-tilt-suspends-brian-townsend-14503

S. Lind (2009), "Online high stakes: The Isildur1 factor", http://www.pokerlistings.com/online-high-stakes-the-isildur1-factor-45378

"Online Poker Stats - MarketPulse", http://www.pokerlistings.com/market-pulse

NOTED: Monopoly City Streets Online Game Shut Down Early

ceo@secureplay.com (SecurePlay) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:36:35 -0800

Hasbro's Monopoly City Streets Online Game was shut down over a month early (on December 9th 2009 instead of January 31st 2010)... probably in part due to persistent cheating, game security, and game design issues. As previously discussed, the game had serious cheating problems and had to be reset shortly after launch.

The game was operated as a promotion for the new board game, Monopoly City Streets, and certainly gave the new game a lot of publicity. There was a lot of ill-will as well because of the problems with the online game whose impact on sales will be hard to determine.

E. Findlay (2009), "Free Monopoly City Streets Online Game Ends", http://internet-games.suite101.com/article.cfm/free_monopoly_city_streets_online_game_ends

"Monopoly City Streets Blog", http://blog.monopolycitystreets.com/2009_12_01_archive.html

iPhone App Store Rating Scammers Busted... Again

ceo@secureplay.com (SecurePlay) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 08:31:05 -0800

Online ranking and reputation systems are notorious for their vulnerability to being abused. Apple has found this out again with the exposure and banning of Molinker, a company with almost 1900 applications on the App Store. Molinker joins Perfect Acumen which was banned last summer with 943 apps on the store.

Both companies are accused of abusing the rating system to boost their applications. They would give free applications to users who would give 5-star ratings to the company's games.

By the way, these companies alone are responsible for 5 percent of all of the App Store applications. The top 10 remaining companies:

1. Iceberg Reader (3,431 apps)
2. Brighthouse Labs (2,148)
3. Molinker Inc. (still on his latest list, 1,898)
4. FidesReef (1,250)
5. Your Mobile Apps Inc. (938)
6. IndiaNIC Infocom Limited (804)
7. xhumans (761)
8. Appsessions, LLC (701)
9. O'Reilly Media, Inc. (617)
10. SOFTBANK Creative Corp. (592)

via 148Apps.biz

Look like they account for between 10 and 15 percent of all applications.

Who needs the Long Tail when you can play App Roulette with most of the bullets?

The rating problem does raise some interesting challenges for Apple and the App Store.

B. Slattery (2009), "Ratings Scandal Kills More than 1000 iPhone Apps", http://www.pcworld.com/article/183987/ratings_scandal_kills_more_than_1000_iphone_apps.html

P. Elmer-DeWitt (2009), "Is Apple cleaning up the App Store?", http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/12/08/is-apple-cleaning-up-the-app-store/

"App Store Metrics", http://148apps.biz/app-store-metrics/