My opinion : people cheating with their game time are really a problem

[sabinou]

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...



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.

[pyaehtetaung]

Yes.It is impossible for no cheat.

[Kharnellius]

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.  ;)

[Eketek]

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).

[Alter Old]

Sure, I know some talented persons will find INCREDIBLY SMART ways to finish a level, true.

Thank you ; ).

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.

...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.

[Alter Old]

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...

[4xC]

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.

[Fisherck]

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 :)

[Ceraus]

I never played the campaign missions for speed, but most of the Alpha Sector, yes, and boy am I glad Alter Old stayed out...

[Martoon]

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.

[Kharnellius]

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.

[Captain Ford]

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.

[CobraKill]

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.

[Clean0nion]

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.

[burguertime]

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.