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Winning at Candy Crush

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Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#121

Post by anthonyb »

chaz wrote: post #27

In 2009, when Farmville was the New Hotness, I checked it out to see what all the fuss was. After all, it was rumored to be minting $1 million per day. Soon after, I saw that a lot of my friends were playing. Girlfriends were getting boyfriends to tend their crops for them while at work. They were very scrupulous with the design of their farm and tending their crops. But I wanted to just be at the top of the leaderbo…

I had exactly the same experience, using autohotkey, and blogged about it at the time http://teh.oarsum.com/posts/cheating_and_game_design.html.

(tl;dr: if it's easy to script your game and win, your game design is busted)

Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#122

Post by mrgoldenbrown »

damon_c wrote: post #115
dharbin wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if you played anybody who was also proxying Windows chess? Battle of the computer wits!

It would be interesting to have the various consumer chess programs play each other a few hundred times to see who wrote the best chess bot.

This is already a thing - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Computer_Chess_Championsh...

It's enough of a thing that there was drama and accusations of cheating/plagiarism a few years back http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rybka#WCCC_disqualification_and...

Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#123

Post by StavrosK »

alexkus wrote: post #108
Timothee wrote: post #69

I had a somewhat similar story a few years ago with Bejeweled 2 (except that I didn't seek a way to cheat, just came across it). I wrote it up here: http://timotheeboucher.com/on-writing-laconic-error-messages... but the gist of it was that their score submission endpoint required a checksum, but the error message if the checksum was wrong was: Yes, the `int_csm` value is the checksum the server expected instead of t…

Hmm, if that was me (as the server programmer) I'd return a purposely different checksum[1] in the error message and then (internally) flag anything that was then submitted with that 'incorrect' checksum. What you do with these flagged entries is up to you:- a) Delete the scores after an hour or so (giving the chance for the user to check things) b) Only display those scores to the user that logged in c) Flag the ent…

What you propose wouldn't work. The only way to find the salt is to look at the Flash file, and, at that point, you'd notice the fake salt anyway.

Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#124

Post by StavrosK »

bouk wrote: post #47

Remember Draw Something? That game that was sold for $180 million to Zynga? I wrote an API library for that in Python https://github.com/bouk/drawsomething-api that allowed me to just add coins (the currency they sell for real money) through simple API calls. Good times

I think Candy Crush also sells gold for real money, and you can just add that using my script too, although I am not sure.

Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#125

Post by StavrosK »

mathattack wrote: post #79

Great story. I think it's less about cheating and more about poking your way around public software. I appreciate the spirit of adventure in searching through the game.

That's true, I'm not interested in the game itself at all. I barely played it enough to write this, really.

Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#126

Post by stusmall »

Volpe wrote: post #102
smartician wrote: post #80

Maybe I'm overly cautious, but in today's world, where even simple URL manipulation can be regarded as hacking, I would be very reluctant to post exploits like this. It's crazy, but this can be construed as wire fraud or computer crime: 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(4) Whoever— (4) knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access, and by means of such condu…

When you say "today's world" I think you mean "today's U.S.A"... The rest of the world, doesn't seem to have as crazy anti-hacking laws, as the US.

Germany is pretty harsh too. If I remember correctly you can't even have "hacking tools."

Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#127

Post by jpalioto »

kens wrote: post #56

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…

Identify-9 ... yeah, you're welcome. :)

Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#128

Post by Renaud »

kens wrote: post #56

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…

> TL;DR: cheat at games and you will be punished

I would rather say that the moral of this story is: "cheat at games and learn more about computers and electronics than you ever thought possible".

Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#129

Post by invalidOrTaken »

jsmeaton wrote: post #120
just2n wrote: post #81

A long long time ago before I ever wrote a line of code, I'd just play all the games I could. I was fascinated by how they worked. I later found a book on BASIC that introduced programming by having the reader write simple word games. After learning the basics, I then would wonder how FF1 managed to change states from being in a tiled map and exploring the world into a battle screen and back again, which led me to mo…

Cool story, and I can see the appeal. But as a (long ago) competitive CS player, I hate(d) your kind.

If you think about it, I bet what you actually hate are the folks who just downloaded the cheat and used it, without knowing anything about it. But what if everyone wrote their own exploit? Eventually every game would devolve into Core Wars, but this would be kind of cool.

Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#130

Post by mbatanian »

mrgoldenbrown wrote: post #122
damon_c wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting to have the various consumer chess programs play each other a few hundred times to see who wrote the best chess bot.

This is already a thing - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Computer_Chess_Championsh... It's enough of a thing that there was drama and accusations of cheating/plagiarism a few years back http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rybka#WCCC_disqualification_and...

There's also a (fictional) movie about this that's pretty interesting; http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2007360/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
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