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Winning at Candy Crush

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Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#141

Post by jsmeaton »

invalidOrTaken wrote: post #129
jsmeaton wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If everyone did write their own exploit, I'd still have hated it. Cheating in those kind of games really does ruin the game for everyone else. Enabling those people to do what they did was nearly as bad IMO.

Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#143

Post by kronholm »

amitt wrote: post #106
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?

For FarmVille we sent the actions back to the server and then validated against game state there. It's the only real way to protect against cheating. However, if I were building the game again today, I'd just do what King does and have the client manage the state. It turns out that the set of people that would do this and the set of users that would convert into paying users has very little overlap. The overhead of m…

Very, very informative, thank you. I too have been wondering about this exact thing - if it's worth the trouble in the end, to do server checks and whatnot. Seems it's not, in these cases :)

Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#144

Post by abus »

just2n wrote: post #135
Aco- wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

were you part of any communities? mpc, ogc, game-deception?

I was. Unfortunately it seems like they're all dead or generally inactive these days. I do wonder where the new communities are, because surely there are kids going through the same things we all went through in learning by breaking things.

Kids today grow up with iPhones and iPads instead so there's not much opportunity to do anything outside the box.

Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#145

Post by abus »

tlarkworthy wrote: post #53
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…

http://www.sikuli.org Is my GOTO GUI scripting language for game scripting. Graphic templates are fuzzy matched. Actual scripts are python. Inbuilt OCR. I can do that kinda thing very fast. Its really awesome and put of MIT

Hopefully this gets some attention so people start to work on all the issues it has.

Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#146

Post by chris_wot »

chazandchaz wrote: post #137
chris_wot wrote: post #113

I once lost a license key for a major enterprise system. It had to get a demo up and running ASAP. Luckily, it was an ASP.Net app. I was able to use .NET Reflector, find a code rewriting plugin, and I blanked out the function that did the cert check (always made it return true) and I was able to login.

This is one of my favorite exercises. I started out in a similar situation where it was necessary to get an .net app to act differently. The feeling of accomplishment was completely different than regular development. Now reverse engineering is a hobby I am very passionate about. It's also incredibly insightful as a developer to see how crappy code can exist in very expensive software.

Oh man... when I opened the business rules dll in .NET, I got quite a shock!!! Worst code I've ever seen.

Re: Winning at Candy Crush

#148

Post by moocowduckquack »

jbrooksuk wrote: post #147
moocowduckquack wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Militarised Volcano Police?

Just doing my bit.

You just keep nuking that lava into jail where it belongs. People said it would never work, that you just couldn't police volcano eruptions with the threat of massive nuclear retaliation, but they don't say that anymore, do they? Not since they all died in the giant radioactive caldera, anyway.
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