on cheating...

[bmike]

I wanted to write a short piece on cheating and see if others have input or thoughts on it.

I haven't had a game where my opponent is blatantly cheating, but to me, the league play and a sense of fairness is the only reason why I spend time on this game. The developers are very smart and will clearly have some fixes coming to right this ship and plug the leaks. Knowing how long iOS development takes, I would expect it to take a good month or two get the code in place - so it might be three months before it gets approved and in our hands, but as long as they keep using the news to communicate what they are working on now and what will wait for the next release - that will be good enough for me to keep a positive attitude.

Here is the good news, no matter how clever cheaters are - whether they want to hack the game, play from a computer, manipulate the game files - to play us they have to send their cheating data through two things:

1) The servers - which can and will track / flag / count turns once the developers gain a portfolio of how and when people are exploiting the game's technology.
2) The game we downloaded and haven't modified. The coders can let the game itself alert us / handle things if it gets fed bad moves from the server.

Here is the bad news, we're only going to catch the dumb cheaters. The smart cheaters will just lift the fog of war and eat everyone's lunch. This will be a hard nut to crack and the team will have to either encrypt/randomize the game file or have the server handle each and every move. This added complexity will mean a much longer delay to code, test.

I surely hope the team gets out their first bug fix to nail down some of the launch day issues and then work on laying the groundwork to ensure that the game save is capturing all the information needed for an hourly, daily screening of moves submitted to cull out the cheats on the server side. Item 2 gives me the most hope. Since we can't see the whole game and can't count wits until we give up or lose - the game software is so much better at catching a cheat and could be programmed to handle all cheat detection and simply call the match. In this case, I would imagine a dialog popping up that you have won the game (as if the opponent resigned) and then the developers can programmatically suspend that cheater (or at least prevent them from starting more games) until they can review the instance.

In the mean time, I would encourage everyone to assume the best - even if you're sure someone cheated - don't out them publicly, don't confront them as you're just teaching them to be more subtle. Worse, since we all know the game has bugs - would you really want to accuse someone of cheating if somehow they didn't and it was a legitimate problem. (even the ridiculous cases where a healed shell shows up on turn 2 more than 3 spaces from a spawn as some have reported) The honest people will report that and the dishonest ones will surely do it again - so just send the game file to the developers as asked and move on.

In the mean time, you could imagine that the developers might implement a parallel cheater's league where all the cheaters can play themselves as much as they want and we can have fun games respecting the rules with only a short period of time where we need to be the investigators as the developers figure out how best to handle the detection and disposition of the people that don't think they'll get caught.