Game Design Challenge: Your Cheatin' Heart
This is my entry to the Cheating Design Challenge.
Competitive FPS have been poisoned by cheats since the beginning of their life and developers have gone through huge efforts to fight this.
Why not embrace the players behavior just like the architect that watch the path that people walk though the green before laying down the tiles.
The base game is a FPS Battle Royal.
After each kill a player gets a "cheat point".
"cheat points" can be used to activate god mode where the following will be active for some seconds or until interrupted by the player:
- see other players through walls
- speed boost
- auto-aim
- auto-fire
When a player dies he stays attached to the killer character and when that killer dies he starts following the killer of the killer ... and so on.
While watching your killer play you can report him as a cheater every time you catch him using "cheats".
If that players was actually using cheats at that time then you earn a "pardon point" and the "cheater" gets a "negative pardon point" but if that player was not using "cheats" on that occasion than you are the one that get a negative "pardon point".
By the end of the game the players that the sum of "pardon points" is negative are shamed and get their score zeroed while the ones with a positive sum of "pardon point" keep their score and show in the glorious board.
I’m happy with this concept but probably not a winner, more groundbraking ideas might take the prize. There are a couple of thing that I really like about it.
One is that the match is not over for anyone until it’s over for everyone. You don’t have to endure that the last guy gets shot to be able to keep playing you are still part of the game until the last moment.
The other thing I like is that it makes real cheats less interesting since everyone will have in game cheats to use if that’s the play style you enjoy.