Hello everyone :)
I'm trying to think about Creeper World 3's future success with new players, and, the more I think about it, the more I think the people cheating with their game score are a real problem.
Sure, I know some talented persons will find INCREDIBLY SMART ways to finish a level, true.
But, come on...
(http://i.imgur.com/Fqz6G0Q.jpg)
This kind of shenanigans is likely to annoy and dishearten players. When do the legit times begin ? Could it be that everybody else is cheating ? :(
(of course not, not everybody is, but you see the idea : all in all, it plays a huge part in reducing the game's future sucess.)
Virgil, couldn't you perhaps screen the game times, at least on the official maps, against actually impossible times, in order to keep the scores boards cleaner, and not digustingly disheartening ?
Or take moderators to do that job ?
An old suggestion of mine that I tried to push in the past, that the game somehow records the course of the play, could be, maybe, associated with this suggestion. Even if this doesn't go public, it would only take a few kilobytes to store in a file the list of the player's units' movements, for instance. With that, it would be a piece of cake to determine if a time is legit or not (case not : nothing decisive happening in the last seconds of the play.)
Or save a screenshot of the level as the creeper is finished, does it look like it's been really played, or not at all.
Or, even better, find a more secure way to register the scores ;)
Seriously, I think this would be extremely important. This is really sickening to see the cheat scores and not to know exactly where to draw the line between awesomely admirable, and pathetically lame :-/
Strong language should be colorful, not offensive -G.
Yes.It is impossible for no cheat.
Quote from: sabinou on November 18, 2013, 07:58:49 PM
snip
Unfortunately, everything you mentioned is still easy for people to spoof and get around. The fact that there are only two bad scores on that list is actually pretty good and I think most people will realize they were cheating.
And his name is Virgil. ;)
It seems to me, that the best solution is to grab some mean-looking pitchforks, then demand a completely deterministic engine which is able to record and play-back and which is operant both client-side and server-side (presumably, for the purpose of verifying those pesky record-breaking scores which we don't know how they do).
Quote from: sabinou on November 18, 2013, 07:58:49 PM
Sure, I know some talented persons will find INCREDIBLY SMART ways to finish a level, true.
Thank you ;
).
Quote from: sabinou
When do the legit times begin?
My time always legal (and I often battle for superiority with legal time of
ea3401,
Gastronok,
Fisherck and
JC), but
RyanCaims practically anywhere didn't show good result. Moreover, in this map you or lack energy, or lose tactically. To my mind 2:48 is possible to consult... with power level about +10.
Quote from: sabinou
...awesomely admirable...
And again thank you ;
))). It was one of the most difficult map from a position of air balancing act, and without CW1 experience I wouldn't solve this puzzle.
PS. As usual, forgive for my English.
I acclaim any record of game process provided that it won't be available to everyone because then the desire to struggle with the solution of a riddle - after all an answer nearby and who will be charged vanishes, what I in it didn't glance? Passion will be gone, sports interest will disappear, game will turn into ordinary RTS...
What I wish is that the scores specifically said whether or not the players cheated and that there was no way for players to hide that report before posting times.
Quote from: Alter Old on November 19, 2013, 05:54:26 AM
My time always legal (and I often battle for superiority with legal time of ea3401, Gastronok, Fisherck and JC), but RyanCaims practically anywhere didn't show good result. Moreover, in this map you or lack energy, or lose tactically. To my mind 2:48 is possible to consult... with power level about +10.
PS. As usual, forgive for my English.
You have an amazing ability to find the best strategy to beat each map. On multiple maps now, I have beaten a map using what I thought was the fastest strategy, only to find out that my time wasn't even close to yours. I've had to completely revise my strategy multiple times, and even then, you are usually still at least a little faster than me ;) Unfortunately college has significantly slowed my progress in working my way through the maps, but I'm not looking forward to trying to match your time on Farbor :)
I never played the campaign missions for speed, but most of the Alpha Sector, yes, and boy am I glad Alter Old stayed out...
A deterministic system (to enable replay recording/playback) is tricky to implement, and pretty much impossible with floating point math (due to FP precision differences across different processors). Also, since it's done in Unity, I'm sure there's a lot Virgil wouldn't have control over. I'd love to have recording and playback, but I don't think that'll ever happen.
I do wonder, though, if it would be feasible to have the game take a screenshot every several seconds, and compress it as a very small, relatively low-quality JPEG (just enough make out the different units, etc.) and make the series of images available to download from the high score listings. This would be a pretty small upload/download, and the series of images with time stamps would make it considerably more difficult to get away with cheating.
Quote from: 4xC on November 19, 2013, 09:35:59 AM
What I wish is that the scores specifically said whether or not the players cheated and that there was no way for players to hide that report before posting times.
No offense, but if the game were able to detect the cheating, wouldn't the score just get blocked in the first place?
My point is, making a computer make the determination if someone is cheating or not is not easy and if it was this thread wouldn't even exist in the first place.
My two cents: Any set of rules can and will be exploited. Anti-hacking measures just move the goalposts, and also make it even harder to differentiate legit times from cheaters.
The only thing I'd be interested in seeing is a blacklist, so we can ignore scores from particular users. But the problem with this is that there's no security on a person's name. Maybe fisherck has never cheated, but someone else could cheat and post a score with his name.
Basically, what I'm saying is that the harder you fight to lock this system down, the worse the problem is going to get. Hackers like challenges. Trolls like it when their actions cause a fuss. The best way to win this battle is simply to not have it.
You don't have to just blacklist names. If I remember correctly, Virgil blacklisted IP addresses in CW2 from submitting scores to the server. You could also blacklist games to stop people from just changing their IP address. Not many trolls or hackers would go to the trouble to change their credentials to fool the servers. Although many probably wouldn't know how.
Quote from: CobraKill on November 21, 2013, 04:00:16 PM
You don't have to just blacklist names. If I remember correctly, Virgil blacklisted IP addresses in CW2 from submitting scores to the server. You could also blacklist games to stop people from just changing their IP address. Not many trolls or hackers would go to the trouble to change their credentials to fool the servers. Although many probably wouldn't know how.
I believe V mentioned he would block the offender by preventing games with their activation key from submitting scores. So if that player shared their key with others, they would be blocked too.
Quote from: Alter Old on November 19, 2013, 05:54:26 AM
And again thank you ; ))). It was one of the most difficult map from a position of air balancing act, and without CW1 experience I wouldn't solve this puzzle.
Hover Bridging was one of the most annoying things in CW1 to do. How did I loathe the maps that REQUIRED it to be beaten.
Ban obvious cheaters from uploading their scores, delete their times and also ban them from the forum (if they are there). I hate cheaters that ruins a game where we all try our best and honest try to get the best time.
While watching some vids, I saw a number of 000 times...does unity have any equivalent to the (usually blocked) flash cheating method of right-clicking and messing around with the back/forward options?
Here's a question. If every map has a unique identifier (hope it does). Then why not flag all scores (or maps atleast) with completion times of 45 seconds or less, and then see if its actually possible. Ie. Maybe there's a prebuilt nullifier or something. If there is, then 'unflag' the map, and if there isn't then all scores of 45 seconds or less are automatically rejected and the user asked to not submit cheat scores...?
Because then 46 seconds would just become the new time submitted by the cheaters.
Or 45.1 seconds, more likely
Quote from: MadMag on November 22, 2013, 04:11:06 PM
Ban obvious cheaters from uploading their scores, delete their times and also ban them from the forum (if they are there). I hate cheaters that ruins a game where we all try our best and honest try to get the best time.
I agree completely with MadMag. Cheating on times should be a completely intolerable offense, and dealt with the most serious consequences. Some people work hard to get to the top on game scores, and then others come and ruin that by cheating.
Not that I want to bring this thread up again, but I managed to legitimately beat a cheater by a good 30 seconds on Chanson. That's always satisfying :)
Fisherck
It's crazy solution... if I went on your way.
Quote from: Fisherck on November 28, 2013, 11:48:06 AM
Not that I want to bring this thread up again, but I managed to legitimately beat a cheater by a good 30 seconds on Chanson. That's always satisfying :)
Problem: now we don't know who's cheating and who's not.
Quote from: Fisherck on November 28, 2013, 11:48:06 AMNot that I want to bring this thread up again, but I managed to legitimately beat a cheater by a good 30 seconds on Chanson. That's always satisfying :)
Boo-yah!
I don't think low-res .jpgs are the way to go.
You could get more useful information by simply noting the position of every unit, snapshots every so often (but fairly frequently) during the game. Always save the information, only transmit it if they're in the top 10. Provide a system by which the saved information can be downloaded and replayed, if anything impossible is found in the replay you ban the key.
Sorry, but how can a cheater ruin a game where you play by yourself?
Highscores and fast play are gold, and its fun and feels good to have a top 3 score, but, really?
The game feels the same to me with or without the cheaters.
I play against my score and against the scores of estabilished members. Nevermind I suck though, and my OCD really can't let me go faster than making a symettrical base.
I think people are going too far. If this was multiplayer PVP, maybe they would be a bother, but right now they are just the annoying cicada crying out of my window.
They are going to be around like forever, but I can go on and have my fun anyway.
Quote from: burguertime on December 10, 2013, 04:36:11 PM
The game feels the same to me with or without the cheaters.
Honestly... I'd rather have cheaters than not.
Because I'm a terrible player (for time at least), if I see the highscores, I can think "All the people who beat me must be cheaters" and that at least encourages me somewhat to keep playing.
I think there should actually be 2 times, Actual game time and Paused game time. I very rarely pause a game to set stuff up so my times are usually longer, I also tend to spend time terraforming when i could be killing emitters ;D
Quote from: chwooly on December 27, 2013, 11:18:57 PM
I think there should actually be 2 times, Actual game time and Paused game time. I very rarely pause a game to set stuff up so my times are usually longer, I also tend to spend time terraforming when i could be killing emitters ;D
Next you'll be asking for a time that excludes time spent terraforming, or time that the game was in saved state as well? :P
Quote from: burguertime on December 10, 2013, 04:36:11 PM
I play against my score and against the scores of estabilished members.
I think this is an excellent attitude to have. Of course identifying these members can be difficult. In both CW1 and CW2 I assumed some players were cheating right up to the point that I would beat their scores. Now, unless a person "outs" themselves as a cheater, I believe their scores.
What I find more frustrating (in the best way possible ;)) is to post a personal high score and then be unable to match it again. It's doubly frustrating when that high score still puts you behind a bunch of better scores.
This happened to me in CW2 where I posted a very high score once, and could never match it. I'm currently banging my head against the wall trying to match/improve my time on Inceptus>Carcere and can't even match my posted score, although I've come very close.
This is another example of why I LOVE this game. I play to refine my solution to each world I play, to challenge myself and others. And CW3 allows me to do that until my forehead is bleeding.
LOVE IT!!!!
Slayer
QuoteWhat I find more frustrating (in the best way possible ) is to post a personal high score and then be unable to match it again. It's doubly frustrating when that high score still puts you behind a bunch of better scores.
On a similar note, I find it very frustrating when people beat me on maps that I have made. But I guess that makes me the hacker, because I put code into the map...?
FINALLY!!!
Sometimes you have to throw out your old approaches and start from scratch...onward!
Slayer
Quote from: Grauniad on December 28, 2013, 12:28:08 AM
Quote from: chwooly on December 27, 2013, 11:18:57 PM
I think there should actually be 2 times, Actual game time and Paused game time. I very rarely pause a game to set stuff up so my times are usually longer, I also tend to spend time terraforming when i could be killing emitters ;D
Next you'll be asking for a time that excludes time spent terraforming, or time that the game was in saved state as well? :P
Terraforming is part of game play so that time should count and save state is not in game so it doesn't really matter. ;D
Quote from: burguertime on December 10, 2013, 04:36:11 PM
They are going to be around like forever, but I can go on and have my fun anyway.
I agree. There will always be cheaters and hackers. Always better not to feed the trolls.
But if you absolutely positively want obvious cheats off the posted scores, it seems as though scores under the absolute minimum amount of time it takes to build a Nullifier could be automatically blocked. But again, cheaters will just add .1 secs to that score & post it.
Ultimately, all we can do is use common sense (sometimes rare I know) and play against our own times or those we know to be excellent honest players. If you care enough about your score, you'll find your way to this forum & eventually learn the names of those who play fair.
I don't know how to set up a Group, but since it IS an option, it could be utilized to invite honest players in and then look at only those results.
(this post ended up ten times as rambly as i'd imagined at the start; maybe it still gives some interesting insight to someone, though)
The only robust way to get rid of absolutely fake highscores is to make generating a fake score as hard as playing the game and getting the score actually.
The idea i'm having right now is to send a log of all economy-related events together with the score. This would be a rather small log and could be somewhat easily automatically checked by the server:
- where you place your CNs
- where you place collectors and when they finish building
- what upgrades you get at the forge
- terraforming events
- ...
Since the server knows what the map looks like or at least can generate it on the fly or download it from the maps server, it could make sure, that the collectors, CN, buildings are placed in valid locations, that the collectors generate as much energy as is required to keep the economy going (i.E. if the cheater claims to have built a nullifier 10 seconds into the game, that would easily be detected) and things like that ...
It's a lot of work to make that work properly, especially when considering the power of the built-in script system (custom units, buildings like siphons that flood the economy with energy/packets/ore/...)
And on top of that, this approach completely ignores the creeper so far; adding support for *that* to the extra simulation would make it a whole lot harder to build and make robust :(
It may even be easier to make the simulation deterministic (easier than you think; just save the random number generator seed at the beginning and make sure you have a separate RNG for graphics effects and things like that ... well, you also have to make sure you get the same amount of data at the same times in the game, otherwise you'll get desynchronized ... actually it's *not* easier than you think. damn.)
...
Long story short: it may be best to only compare yourself to high scores of people who you know to be legit ... just being able to supply someone else's name on the high score list makes that a bit iffy, though :(
This subject has been fully covered, I know, but I just wanted to add a screen shot of another (I think) impossible score. If it is legit, I'd really like to learn how to nullify an inhibitor in 14 seconds.
Easiest to do is to send a short PM to Virgil with the name of the system. He can then run a check on the poster and the game key and clear things up.
I think it's been established that it's impossible to beat a non-scripted map in less than 45 seconds.
Most of the time cheat scores come from pirates....
Recently, I disallowed posting of scores except from legit key holders. So that cuts down some on fake scores. Not all, but some.
This particular score appears impossible and the player had posted a bunch of other scores on other missions most of which were measured in seconds of game time.
I have removed all of these scores. If they recur, just PM me.
Quote from: virgilw on January 28, 2014, 10:08:45 AM
Most of the time cheat scores come from pirates....
Recently, I disallowed posting of scores except from legit key holders. So that cuts down some on fake scores. Not all, but some.
This particular score appears impossible and the player had posted a bunch of other scores on other missions most of which were measured in seconds of game time.
I have removed all of these scores. If they recur, just PM me.
Wait... So, they steal the game, and then they also come in and jack up the high score tables for everybody who actually purchased the game? Sheesh... Some people...
I like to look at the scores before I play a map. Not sure why. Anyway, I will PM with any future finds.