Let’s have a discussion about cheating or abusing exploits.
Unlike many other games, Eternium has an awesome feature, you can play the game offline. It also makes total sense, since we don’t have multiplayer. Unfortunately this feature has a big drawback - it allows some players to use third party apps and modify their profiles gaining an unfair advantage.
Not a big issue if the game would lack any competitive aspect, if you want to ruin your experience, sure, go for it. But that’s not the case since we do have competitive events and leaderboards, and cheaters are ruining the experience of other players.
One solution is to increase the game client security, use more sophisticated methods to encrypt sensible data, and add more cheating detection methods. This will just delay the hackers(1) a bit because in practice is impossible to perfectly secure code/data if the hacker has access to it. And Eternium hackers are pretty, pretty good. Hats off to them (black hats).
The correct solution would be to move all critical game logic server side and require users a permanent internet connection to play the game. The solution adopted by pretty much every other game. We don’t like this solution because it costs development time, time we prefer to invest in further developing the game. And we also love the ability to play the game offline. Maybe we’ll do this when we have multiplayer, it would make much more sense then.
What we can do instead is a adopting a simple policy: constantly ban cheaters & exploiters.
As you noticed during past competitive events, we do have means to detect and ban cheaters.
From now on we are going to do this outside competitive events, on a weekly/monthly basis.
Fair warning: exploiting a game bug to gain an unfair advantage will be considered cheating and will also attract a ban. Exploiters can point out that developers are to blame. True, we are to blame. Also true exploiters are ruining the experience of other players by abusing bugs.
What constitutes an exploit? As the saying goes: you’ll know it when you’ll use it.
Our due apologies for not adopting this policy earlier.
Footnotes:
(1) Hacker, not to be confused with cheater or cracker, is usually a skilled programmer able to reverse engineer the application code or encryption methods. They provide the third party tools used by cheaters.
Unlike many other games, Eternium has an awesome feature, you can play the game offline. It also makes total sense, since we don’t have multiplayer. Unfortunately this feature has a big drawback - it allows some players to use third party apps and modify their profiles gaining an unfair advantage.
Not a big issue if the game would lack any competitive aspect, if you want to ruin your experience, sure, go for it. But that’s not the case since we do have competitive events and leaderboards, and cheaters are ruining the experience of other players.
One solution is to increase the game client security, use more sophisticated methods to encrypt sensible data, and add more cheating detection methods. This will just delay the hackers(1) a bit because in practice is impossible to perfectly secure code/data if the hacker has access to it. And Eternium hackers are pretty, pretty good. Hats off to them (black hats).
The correct solution would be to move all critical game logic server side and require users a permanent internet connection to play the game. The solution adopted by pretty much every other game. We don’t like this solution because it costs development time, time we prefer to invest in further developing the game. And we also love the ability to play the game offline. Maybe we’ll do this when we have multiplayer, it would make much more sense then.
What we can do instead is a adopting a simple policy: constantly ban cheaters & exploiters.
As you noticed during past competitive events, we do have means to detect and ban cheaters.
From now on we are going to do this outside competitive events, on a weekly/monthly basis.
Fair warning: exploiting a game bug to gain an unfair advantage will be considered cheating and will also attract a ban. Exploiters can point out that developers are to blame. True, we are to blame. Also true exploiters are ruining the experience of other players by abusing bugs.
What constitutes an exploit? As the saying goes: you’ll know it when you’ll use it.
Our due apologies for not adopting this policy earlier.
Footnotes:
(1) Hacker, not to be confused with cheater or cracker, is usually a skilled programmer able to reverse engineer the application code or encryption methods. They provide the third party tools used by cheaters.
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