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Winning at Candy Crush

stavros.io

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Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#31

Post by Guillaume86 »

shawn-furyan wrote: post #28
bmohlenhoff wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step 4: Get DMCA'd for "circumventing" a "copyright protection system"

I'm struggling to come up with a way in which the lives system could possibly be defended as a copyright protection mechanism (it's a mechanism to funnel users into it's in app purchases, not to prevent use of unauthorized copies... and in fact copies of the software are given away freely). This is basically Gamesharking your game, which has been upheld in courts IIRC.

I guess if you buy the game and then don't have to pay to play, it's ok, but in this case you can buy playtime so it's a bit different.

Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#32

Post by philwebster »

edwhitesell wrote: post #18

Step 1: ATT adds the 'infinite lives' interception/response to the proxy servers for the Starbucks hotspots/WiFi. Step 2: Starbucks Marketing advertises 'Unlimited Candy Crush lives at Starbucks!' Step 3: Profit! Well, assuming all of the squatters actually buy stuff.

I like it. Almost all the Candy Crush players I know set their clocks forward to instantly get more lives though.

Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#33

Post by rickdale »

Back in the day I would log onto yahoo chess and beat everyone by simultaneously playing expert mode in windows chess and just mimicking the expert modes moves on yahoo as mine. Good times, never lost.

Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#35

Post by AznHisoka »

philwebster wrote: post #32
edwhitesell wrote: post #18

Step 1: ATT adds the 'infinite lives' interception/response to the proxy servers for the Starbucks hotspots/WiFi. Step 2: Starbucks Marketing advertises 'Unlimited Candy Crush lives at Starbucks!' Step 3: Profit! Well, assuming all of the squatters actually buy stuff.

I like it. Almost all the Candy Crush players I know set their clocks forward to instantly get more lives though.

Ha, I used to be lazy and set the date forward by 1 month, instead of the hour or day. Then one day I realized the iPhone has a max date set in 2055 or something - you can't set your time past that. I wonder if iPhone dates will stop working when we reach 2055??

Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#36

Post by sehugg »

bmohlenhoff wrote: post #25
edwhitesell wrote: post #18

Step 1: ATT adds the 'infinite lives' interception/response to the proxy servers for the Starbucks hotspots/WiFi. Step 2: Starbucks Marketing advertises 'Unlimited Candy Crush lives at Starbucks!' Step 3: Profit! Well, assuming all of the squatters actually buy stuff.

Step 4: Get DMCA'd for "circumventing" a "copyright protection system"

More like CFAA (unauthorized access). One might avoid certain penalties by staying under $5000 equivalent IAP. Of course this sounds ridiculous, but we live in ridiculous times.

Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#37

Post by togilvie »

StavrosK wrote: post #26
togilvie wrote: post #19

Awesome breakdown. I wrote a blog post in late September - based on some industry rumors - that speculated on whether Candy Crush was "cheating" by varying the random seed to generate monetization or retention events: http://blog.thinkgaming.com/is-candy-crush-cheating-will-it-... Based on the "seed" going back and forth at the start/end of games, I'd have to assume that they are doing something with it. Anyway to se…

They're probably generating the level with the seed. I don't think it's very useful, other than testing on their end (so they can check afterwards what the level was). By the way, if you liked this, there are more posts in that series: http://www.stavros.io/series/winning/

Cool - will check out the series.

You could be right, but I think the seed is a lot more interesting. If you simply wanted to generate the level, you could use a random number generator on the device and wouldn't care about logging it.

As you showed by varying colors, the candy distribution determines how likely the player is to win, whether they fall just short of clearing the level, etc. This will have a significant impact on whether they pay to continue, buy boosts, etc.

Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#38

Post by ry0ohki »

Yhippa wrote: post #16

What's the best solution for this, managing game state server-side? Did they do it this way to offload storage and processing for scalability reasons?

I'd think you'd want to make a signed hash of each request, so the server can verify it came untampered from the client.

Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#39

Post by benmanns »

pilif wrote: post #24
benmanns wrote: post #21

It looks like the author is decompiling the Flash SWF for the Facebook game. Would there be an equivalent way to do this for games on an iPad/iPhone without rooting the device?

Yes. Unpack the .ipa file (it's just a ZIP archive) and then use any ARM disassembler on the actual binary. It'll be harder, but not impossible to do (as we've seen by the twitter app API secret leaking some time ago).

How does one get to the .ipa file?
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