This subject has been brought up before obviously but the community needs to demand an answer from this company on when they are going to put a stop to cheating. It's something that could be EASILY coded to flag any cheaters and put an end to those accounts... regardless of whether a player is obviously cheating or cheating "smart". I honestly think they look at cheaters as a proxy to drive revenue from legitimate players. It's the only explanation for why this has been allowed to run rampant for so long. It could be ended so easily but they refuse to do it. It should be priority number one.
Why isn't it?
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Other mobile games with smaller budgets seem more capable of accomplishing anti-cheating measures than CG. Are you suggesting a program to detect cheating is impossible for CG to accomplish? Given the bugs in the game atm you might have an argument, but incompetence isn't an excuse to continue to reward cheaters and punish honest players who never see compensation for the cheater stealing rewards from them.
I'm taking issue with the phrasing that it can be "easily coded" as gamers who say things like this have zero idea how these programs / games function at a very basic level. Or how the packages (APK) work for "mobile" apps.
What mobile games with smaller budgets are doing better anti-cheating measures
• units alive at battle start with their health, protection, TM & ability cooldown states
• RNG seed value for the battle (software RNG is actually a complex number sequence generator so using the same seed value with the same RNG implementation will result in the same number sequence)
• sequential list of actions: character, ability used, target(s)
2) develop a server-side battle simulator which can replay the logs and find flaws which would indicate a hacked client
It may be that the easiest way to clean it up would be to send communication back to the servers during battles. They know the rules of their game and what would be outside the bounds of possibility or suspicious. This may not catch smart cheaters though which is why securing their own client code might be more important in catching all cheats. They could have the server drive attacks if they wanted to. It might be more network overhead but is it worth it to clean cheating up in the game? With any server communication this obviously means airplane mode might take a hit... but why not give a message to the player at the end of battles to ask if they want to forfeit or confirm the end of the battle? Players have been using airplane mode for years to get around a constraint of the system that CG obviously deem fair play so why not just let the player confirm at the end of the battle?
The bottom line is that they can clean cheating up if they really had an interest.
Agree with your question but it raises another. What on earth is CG doing with their game to limit cheating? We've seen extreme examples by other community members and have asked for this to be addressed and it's just crickets from CG. The resulting sentiment is either they don't care or can't do anything about it. Is that fair? Not sure but until it's addressed, that's what we're left with and these posts will continue.
It's very reminiscent of early 90s computer wars.
"Macs don't get nailed with all the viruses that PCs do!"
"Because Macs are 1% of the market, and don't run on Enterprise."
I used to play WoW obsessively ages ago. Blizzard built their own anti-cheating software years ago if I'm remembering right. Was it the Glider cheat they went after? I'm spitballing here as I don't fully remember. This was on PC's though. That was earlier in WoW's lifecycle too. CG is on their way to raking in 2B USD with this game. If they can't carve out some of that for the integrity of the game, shame on them.
Cg. Integrity. Error 404.
You are quite right, HK-47. Terminate!
Lol no, ios also have emulators you know.
Companies like Blizzard and RIOT have anti-cheat software that is always running on your PC even when you are not playing games, and the programs are very invasive since they are checking your system level, kernal level files to see game modifications taking place outside the game programs (from what I've read)
A similar example would be CG releasing another app that acts like a spyware checking every single app you are running on your mobile device to catch if you are using any APK program to modify the game
And obviously, nobody wants that level of invasion for a mobile game
idk
I used to ask them every week what plans they have to curtail the cheating issue or if any other ways can be introduced to report cheaters
THIS. if they're not already somewhat doing it, it would be very easy to verify the battle log against expected values within some degree and determine if the values fall within an acceptable range.
I think their biggest problem currently is the assigned man hours manually flagging these accounts and updating their status (I'm guessing for legal purposes they can't do this completely artificially). I think that cheating is even way more rampant than we realize and they are only paying for so many man hours to handle this issue. That is the real bottleneck IMO. But again that's all speculation without real numbers.
That said, if you expect money for people to be the "tip of the spear", that money should mean something and the level which they seem to be taking it seriously (publicly not taking severe action against whales, etc.) doesn't reflect that trust.
The point is they care about it. If CG wants to turn a blind eye to cheating that's fine but they need to stop pretending that's it's going to be expensive. Those terms don't apply when the game has made going on 2B USD. There are routes they could take that would minimize server overhead.
Are there other mobile games with smaller budgets doing better? Sounds like someone is making up things to make a point hoping nobody fact checks them
Is it easy? Hell if I know, but I'm not going to say it is
Is it hard? I think it is, but that doesn't excuse them for not pursuing it, if its hard, then they need to increase the number of staff working on it and make the effort to do something about it even if it'll take them months
I don't think it is easy to fix cheating given the client side architecture, throwing around ideas is easy, saying things are easy to implement is easy, as long as you aren't the one doing it
But I think, even if it is difficult, CG should allocate resources on preventing cheaters, and improving their anti-cheat systems
I'm not making anything up and there is nothing to "fact check" here. Gaslighting and straw men come up a lot on these forums.
With a career in development and IT and having to protect systems from "outside interference" I have some insight. I don't blame the developers on this. I'm sure the lot of them want to do something about it and probably know exactly what needs done. I'm sure they are embarrassed about it even if they had nothing to do with writing the initial code framework. This type of thing comes up constantly with legacy systems and it's typically management that holds back any progress. "Just let the whales keep whaling".
With the amount of money they've made (and continue to make) on this game they could dedicate extra resources on this in order to stay on track with their new releases.
-Skullgirls
-Tap Titans 2 (since tap Titans 1 they dessigned an easy Way to catch cheaters)
-MMA manager
-Mario kart tour
-Iron Maiden Legacy of the Beast
These are the apps I easily remember that have better anticheat measures, even tap Titans 1 developed it before even starting to make Some money with the app.
I'm pretty sure there's a 90% of apps on PlayStore with better anticheat system and with a lot less profit than This app from CG.
You misspelled emulators, on specific bluestacks.
Send a text log of the fight. Only need the units, their stats, the RNG seed, move/target selection, damage values, and results. With that information, battles can be re-run on thir end. If the results don't match the log, busted.
And you'll do this for every user, every battle? Will it be logged in one file, constantly appended to? Or will each event generate a new file? How much storage do you expect that to take per day? How long will each day's data be kept?
what are the budgets of each of these games
what’s CG’s budget?
I would never want code to auto ban someone. It should always get looked at. The inference we take as players is no one seems to bet banned so they're not doing anything.
SWTOR, for example, does hammer people who take advantage of known exploits (code in the game they messed up themselves). If that can be detected, you would think the obvious stuff people refer to could easily checked as well. And, it's quite possible CG has that stuff in the game. It just doesn't seem like they look at it if it exists.
Is there even a place where they announce <player> has been banned for cheating? That would allay some concerns knowing they're doing something. It'd also send a message to cheaters that they are looking and taking action.
However it makes sense in their Web service infrastructure.
Not much. We're talking about a log of integers & alphanumeric GUIDs for a small percentage of battles not video footage for every battle fought.
Only as long as needed. If its clean when checked it can be discarded and the checked/clean stats updated. If it's suspect it needs to be kept around and flagged for human review.