Anti cheat code

[UpperKEES]

I just read here about the existence of cheats for CW. Nothing new of course as they are available for a lot of games.

It made me think however about an anti cheat routine. Would it be possible to check (i.e. once per frame) if the energy collection is equal to the amount of collectors + reactors (just compare the difference with the previous frame)? The same goes for the amount of energy available compared to the number of storage buildings. It might be an easy way to prevent abuse.

[archn]

You do not need to have more energy than storage buildings in this game if you can only produce so many buildings at a time.  You could always leave your energy at 20.  Whether it's 20 or 200 I don't think it impacts the flow of energy greatly.  As far as saying I had X energy stored in frame A and Y energy stored in frame A+1, what is Y-X, and is it comparable to amount of energy being produced, it may work, but I think unless your system of checking is good, you don't want false positives.

As Virgil said in another post, he constantly tries to look for ways to prevent memory editing, but the more he tries to prevent it, the more people try to crack his system.

[UpperKEES]

the more he tries to prevent it, the more people try to crack his system.

You're probably right about that. Fortunately he doesn't have to report here what he does or tries to do.... ;)

[archn]

Some people hack the scores by running the game through a memory debugger and goofing with memory.  There is really nothing I can do to prevent this, I can only make it more difficult, which only makes it more appealing for people to do.

The build any unit bug is being fixed in the update (along with some new features!), but that won't be the end of score hacking.  Honestly, score hacking is just a fact of life for online games.  Most losers, er hackers, post their cheat score and then move on because they are juveniles that have the attention span of a hungry rhesus monkey.  Some revisit and post their hacked scores over a week or two as they ramble through their boredom filled lives and occasionally revisit CW.  But at the end of the day posting a hacked score wins you exactly nothing.  There is really no upside to it or value to the cheater.

Now the scores make the most sense when you enter a group name anyway.  You can compete with your buddies, family, school mates, or co-workers for bragging rights in your little clan.

As for clearing the scores, I have thought about moving to a 2 week, 3 day system anyway.  As in the first table in high scores is for the last two weeks and the second table is for the last 3 days.  (Numbers might vary).  Right now the tables are 'all time' and 1 week.

If both tables become expiring tables then cheater scores don't become permanent fixtures unless the cheater makes a career out of it (when there are plenty of better things to do).  But even in that case I'll start to notice and start banning IPs, names, score values, etc. to try to keep it mostly clean.