[Scott]

Thanks for your email and I'm sorry to hear of your frustrations with cheaters in our games. People think that because they see cheats in the game, that we must not care. The truth is that we have our best programmers, including the lead programmers for each project, spending months upon months dealing with these issues. That's quite a commitment, as we could instead be having these expensive resources working on the next game.

Our games are very important to us. It is very important to us that people love them and are satisfied with them. We work long and hard on the seemingly endless problems caused by a small group of hoodlums who devote their energies to hacking the game and trying to kill it.

Firstly let me assure you that NovaLogic does not permit cheaters to play on NovaWorld. However, cheating online is a pervasive problem which effects all online games world wide and trying to stop cheating is a lot like trying to stop piracy. You are basically patching holes in a dam. It has become such a common problem in online games that it is the subject of many panels at industry conferences world wide. It is an issue that all developers are faced with, and one that we are taking very seriously.

Currently, online multiplayer games are FREE for NovaLogic customers and as such, no monthly fee is charged. However, to effectively control and eliminate cheaters takes manpower, and we need resources and money in order to do this. You can see that this presents a difficult problem for the company, because short of charging players to play on NovaWorld, no money is freely available to do this. Even if we did decide to charge customers to play our games online, to pay for a team of programmers to monitor games 100% of the time, this would not eradicate cheaters. It is a problem that can not be solved.

However, I would like to assure you that NovaLogic has put the following in place to help control this issue. We provide FREE match making services. Customers can set up their own
password protected games and unless invited, cheaters do not have access to these games.

Another thing that customers may not be aware of is that we can only monitor games running on our own servers. Like many other game developers we have no control over servers set up by customers. We make a number of server side fixes to help with various cheat problems. For example, for Delta Force Land Warrior we are currently on version 31 server side and version 7 on the consumer side. These revisions force migrations and the majority deal with issues concerning the fairness of gameplay. To put it in perspective and to understand the scope of work involved in doing this, each revision can take between 2-6 weeks to go through the proper development cycle.

We are constantly looking into ways to deal with cheating and improve services on NovaWorld and to this end, all games that NovaLogic now develop have a software key code. This system was introduced in the most recent version of Delta Force, Delta Force Land Warrior, and helps us track customers who cheat. This makes it easier for us to track and ban them and we are looking to continue with this for all future releases.

As well as monitoring for cheaters on NovaWorld servers, we rely heavily on customer feedback. With the help of the customer key code, which was introduced in the third Delta Force game, Delta Force Land Warrior, if a cheater is reported to us, we can now jump into a game where they are playing and ban them for three days. If they are caught cheating again they are banned permanently, but the nature of online gaming means that these cheaters can easily create new accounts under different names and hence the cycle starts again. This is extremely frustrating for both you and us, and only really acts as a deterrent and not a permanent solution.

We are looking at a 'vote/police' banning system also.

To summarize we are doing our best in a \'no pay environment' to continue to support what is in affect an entertainment product. We are after all, a part of the entertainment industry. It is increasingly difficult for us to
justify major updates and support on legacy products that are in some cases more than 3 years old. NovaLogic can and do provide minor patches and support for older titles to keep them running online, but to extend the capability of an old game is unreasonable and is not seen in any other software product.

To put this in perspective, a film director does not edit a film every 6 months to include the latest special effects or to change the story line. In the same vein, Microsoft does not continue to spend time patching and updating old versions of Windows. They merely upgrade the software to the next version and in this case they are up to Windows 2000. This is the natural evolution of software, and something that we as an industry face.

Novalogic Technical Support, Mike
Novalogic Inc.