91–100 of 148 posts
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.
Game piracy used to mean stealing the game. Now 'piracy' is getting extra lives.
My game cheat story starts way, way back, playing Wizardry on the Apple II. In this game, you go through a dungeon, killing monsters and collecting treasure and experience. Fun, but slow going. So I found out where in memory these values are stored and started manipulating them, giving myself tons of experience and new treasures. Everything went fine until I put in an invalid treasure value which apparently caused so…
I guess its a half full / half empty thing. You wrote: TL;DR: cheat at games and you will be punished And yet I would haver written it, "Cheat at games and you will learn all sorts of cool things." :-)
My game cheat story starts way, way back, playing Wizardry on the Apple II. In this game, you go through a dungeon, killing monsters and collecting treasure and experience. Fun, but slow going. So I found out where in memory these values are stored and started manipulating them, giving myself tons of experience and new treasures. Everything went fine until I put in an invalid treasure value which apparently caused so…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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??
But luckily in the EU the European court for human rights should stop such stupidity in its tracks.
One of the things that kept people from snooping around was encryption. All communication went to 1 vaguely named endpoint with 1 parameter, which was a an encrypted list of the parameters and the action to take. This will deter some, but not others.
At the start of a game, the client had to contact the server for a key. This changed each time you played. Any score submission required this key - if it was wrong I ignored it. Only 1 score submission per key.
Note that you have other useful information now: you know how long they were in game to get their score. I flagged scores that were abnormally high for the time it took to get them. I would then review them, and based upon their score history hellban them - they could still play, but no-one saw their high scores except themselves.
If Candy Crush did something similar, they would likely catch you. You wouldn't even know until you gloated and your friends said they can't see your score. Some people who got hellbanned would contact me, and I'd give them a free pass.
Of course you could cheat and get a normal score in a normal timeframe, but I didn't care as much about that.
Beyond trying to thwart cheating, I'm a big fan of cheating in games myself. It's part of why I enjoy eve online so much, because they encourage the usage of 3rd party tools more than any other game I've played.
The most extensive thing I've programmed for cheating is probably a custom MUD client to facilitate multiplay. The clients report to eachother information they know. All clients keep the state of the group and the things I'm fighting. They also keep track of which client can do what, so I can type into any client that I want to heal someone and the program will figure out which client is able to do that, and tell it to do so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess its a half full / half empty thing. You wrote: TL;DR: cheat at games and you will be punished And yet I would haver written it, "Cheat at games and you will learn all sorts of cool things." :-)
It is either scary or hilarious how many programmers were created by the desire to cheat in video games.