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?
Winning at Candy Crush
21–30 of 148 posts
Re: Winning at Candy Crush
#22Re: Winning at Candy Crush
#23I am sure they did this to offload the server.
I remember reading an article about some javascript games and how to find the balance for game state server-side check.
source : http://fugiman.com/blog/2013/08/17/on-click-fueled-javascrip...
Re: Winning at Candy Crush
#24It 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).
Re: Winning at Candy Crush
#25Step 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"
Re: Winning at Candy Crush
#26Awesome 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/
Re: Winning at Candy Crush
#27In 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 leaderboard.
Unlike later games, it was possible to keep leveling up and making money by farming only instead of inviting friends. Plow fields, plant crops, and then harvest them hours later -- repeat as fast and as frequently as you can. TONS of tedious clicking. Of course, I wanted to automate it, and I wasn't alone. Searching around, I found a Perl script that someone had written and I adapted it for my PC.
I just fired up Farmville, and here's what my farm looks like: http://i.imgur.com/nrtkitJ.jpg. It's almost all crops (maximize $) and it requires the farmer to be trapped within hay bales. Otherwise, he walks to where you're clicking and can sometimes get in the way of the click. It would mess up every now and then, but was fairly reliable -- just run the script and let it do its thing for a few minutes. The trick was to flip the game into full screen mode, zoom all the way out, start at a known (x, y) position on your screen's resolution, and then loop through all crop positions by incrementing/decrementing (x, y). Only slightly tricky because of the isometric view and avoiding clicking on some non-crop positions. Picking the right crop was important too, to maximize yield. I just wanted to do two runs a day: first thing in the morning and then in the evening when I got home from work.
I moved up fairly quickly and quit when I beat all of my friends. Got some jeers from those who thought I was actually playing Farmville so much, but had a few requests for said script ...
Re: Winning at Candy Crush
#28Step 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"
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.
Re: Winning at Candy Crush
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why spend unnecessary resources? People trying to cheat will find ways that are very hard to prevent. Which brings us to another question - besides hackers, who is interested in cheating these kinds of games? Probably people who want to impress their group of friends who also play the game. I smell a market opportunity here.
Surely there's a big market for cheats? You could sell Candy Crush powerups for half price to all those people who are buying them now...
Then you're either out in public, and they can retroactively fix the bug, or you're trying to sell them privately, in which case you're not gonna have much impact anyway.
It's the same as with hacking in mmo games. No one cares until you start publicizing your hacks, in which case they can just install your hack, see what bug it's abusing, and fix that.
Re: Winning at Candy Crush
#30it is crazy that a game that makes multi million dollars every day has no server side validation at all and just trust the client. crazy
In the app store they collect around $850,000 per day.