Cheating with Bet games

[Stratego (dev)]

If anyone has idea if someone can cheat with Bet games - to get gems illegally - please tell me.
i shall put protections against such "attacks".

thanks!

[COOLguy]

All I can think of:

It is possible to have two phones and transfer gems using bets (by winning easy maps with new profiles and betting your real profile). Idk if it is stoppable, but it takes a lot of effort to transfer gems this way.

[Stratego (dev)]

this is ok, this way they can not generate many gems from nowhere, on the other phone he have 20 gems only by default to transfer.

[balint]

acrually, it is an unlimited gem generator.
he dowmloads for both, makes vet game for himself with the highest avaiable bet szie, then withdraw with one phone, then reinstall app on the gemless phone and repeat it.

[ejm29]

To be honest, if people want to cheat to get gems, they will find a way no matter how much you try to stop them. I say let them, as long as they are not stealing from other players, the games balancing means that upgrades are only usful when used ccorrectly, so all they are really going to accomplish is missing out on great campaigns.

[patroid]

I found a way ...
Rooted phone + Game Killer = Endless Gems.

A friend tryed it.
I dont root.

But where we are by gems.
When i buy consumables in aos (all other upgradrs
I already have...) it dont save my gems number
When i start the app later, but i can use the consumables...

--> endless source of gems...

Patroid

[Stratego (dev)]

hacking is hacking - i dont care.

but this:

But where we are by gems.
When i buy consumables in aos (all other upgradrs
I already have...) it dont save my gems number
When i start the app later, but i can use the consumables...

--> endless source of gems...

i dont understand: what should i do to reproduce this?

[ejm29]

I THINK what patroid is saying is that, if you save you account (with some gems on it) and then buy consumables, use them, (on a game power up) you can then restore your account, the gems you spent will be restord, and you would have gotten to use the consumables. so in short. Save account, buy consumables, use consumables, restore account. Thus you can continue in this fashion and give yourself consumables without loosing any gems.

[Stratego (dev)]

oh! i see!
seems not so much advantage (having free cheat-spells that nearly anybody uses ) - but ok! thanks!

[enrich]

Yeeeeeeaaaaaaaaah*sweats*.........................the way it is now, you can "restart" your turn by deleting the game then instantly go to your saved games and redownload the game. This resets your units to how they were right after the last players turn. This pretty much makes you able to convert any units that arent immune to it, scout the units inside the TCS, scout in fog of war, and make your cats/trebuchets never miss. Having 100% conversion rate ongames without spells in the beggining is overkill.
So...there should be a limit to how many times you can redowload a game in any given turn (like once, maybe MAYBE twice) and skips you if you go over. And also (this might be harder to implement cause of backlash from some players) to limit the number of devises you can be actively playing a game on. Since you can have a game downloaded in two (or more) devised, do different strategies and only upload the one you like better.another way also, to auto save your turn progress onto the server whenever possible.

[Alex486]

The only way I can see how someone can cheat is to make a 3 person or more bet game where it is a free for all game. The cheater uses 2 accounts to attack the other players as an unofficial team. Once the cheaters team wins, he has one of the accounts forfeit. Unless the game can pick up on this type of cheating via some type of automated tracking and alerting, it is going to happen. Maybe making the bet games less profitable by limiting the number of gems that can be bet would help. 20 gem bet fee is a big score for someone. Maybe limit the betting to 3 or 5 gems to make it not worth it for a cheater, but interesting enough to keep someone from quitting a game.

[Stratego (dev)]

there is "fixers" already banned.
and also xdeathwarx is banned, and he opened a new account and tried to ask for gems in facebook (although i had emailed him before banning and he refused answering how did he cheat)...., i am angry here...

[patroid]

Hi,
Why u bannd them??
Unfair teaming in bets...or.hacking gems.

Well if 2. Thing u hav to ban me.too

I hav a few gems.

Patroid

[Stratego (dev)]

hacking gems is irrelevant.
ruining games is the one i dont like: you pay 20-30 turns and he suddenly cheats to win immediately - ruining the game.

[TheBluePhoenix]

Yeeeeeeaaaaaaaaah*sweats*.........................the way it is now, you can "restart" your turn by deleting the game then instantly go to your saved games and redownload the game. This resets your units to how they were right after the last players turn. This pretty much makes you able to convert any units that arent immune to it, scout the units inside the TCS, scout in fog of war, and make your cats/trebuchets never miss. Having 100% conversion rate ongames without spells in the beggining is overkill.
So...there should be a limit to how many times you can redowload a game in any given turn (like once, maybe MAYBE twice) and skips you if you go over. And also (this might be harder to implement cause of backlash from some players) to limit the number of devises you can be actively playing a game on. Since you can have a game downloaded in two (or more) devised, do different strategies and only upload the one you like better.another way also, to auto save your turn progress onto the server whenever possible.

No need for so much to replay your turn. Just press the homescreen button before ending your turn and then force close your app immediately (before the game saves automatically) then restart the app. No need to delete the game this way

[TheBluePhoenix]

I have played with xdeathwarx and even won. he didnt seem to cheat .... why do you feel he cheats? I mean how did you get to know?

[Stratego (dev)]

I have played with xdeathwarx and even won. he didnt seem to cheat .... why do you feel he cheats? I mean how did you get to know?

earlier he was a normal and responsive player.
but in november
a) i have been informed about 2 games where he did things,
b) and i have been playing with him MYSELF when he did a cheating (suddenly winning right before he was losing, he had only a few TC-s left and we would have won in approx 3-4 turns.)

Also he never answered my email where i asked about this matter.

[TheBluePhoenix]

Hmmm... interesting but how did he suddenly change the course of the game?? Maybe we can figure out how to stop it..

[Stratego (dev)]

Yes. I would also love kmow... I offered 10000gems for the info.

[TheBluePhoenix]

Also i have found that after i end my turn and the next player(human) turn starts , i can see everything- what he has kept in the castles , what he is transporting in wagons , what he is producing etc until the game closes automatically. I did not inform earlier cause i thought i will check it in another bet game but ran out of time. So i am informing it now

[TheBluePhoenix]

No i mean did the game abruptly end to his favour or did he spawn way too many units suddenly or many of your units dissappeared or whaat not??

[Stratego (dev)]

No i had all my units alive. He simply elected himself as winner.

[TheBluePhoenix]

Hmm ok. What about the see it all issue i mentioned above?? Isnt it a bug?
Also sometimes i find that the terrain is extremely supportive towards 1 player. For instance in 1 game my oponent had immediate access to 7 tcs which were very far or the terrain made me take a long route and i had access only to 1. Also ge was protected by rivers , hills etc while i was quite out in the open. I have noticed such kinds of imbalances many times.. NEVERTHELESS I ALWAYS WIN (generally )

[Stratego (dev)]

yes, they re bugs, please open topic for them in issues sections. but this topic is about how to cheat.

actually i have found a skipping "bug", but the "bug" also needs a player to intentionally do the "cheat". i am fixing it right now.

[Stratego (dev)]

ok! i have got the info how to hack the game! i have a fix on that in the DEV version.
please feedback me if u can not do that!

the trick:
- you slow down your net very or simply turn off the internet (not the Wifi on phone, because that is immediately detected by phone, also not the Wifi router only the intenet that goes into the Wifi router)
- so this case when the game tries to send the game shows you the "sending game to server" message with "try again later", but u simply press BACK button, closing that dialog
- and there you are, on the next multiplayer's turn,
- you can do anything with his units
- and if u are quick enough you can press "next turn" button it will let you "skip" him.

so now i have disabled the BACK button, so will not be able to exit the dialog until u press the "try later" or until it closes by itself.

Thanks for the detailed info to xdeathwarx !

up on server in 10 minutes!

please get the latest version of AOS/AOF and try hacing as much as u can (but only in forumers game, not in real mutiplayer games - that is forbidden! and will get punished! )!
Now you must not have the chance to do that. (i could not try it i had no multiplayer game where i can do it)

[COOLguy]

Great! I'm glad you got it fixed!

[Alexander82]

Now that you mention it it happenned to me a time or two. I played a turn just after my previous one. At the time i thought it was a bug on server, also some of my units were like they had already acted. I never tried to exploit that kind of stuff (i neither thought it was possible) but i assume it was that. Who could think that we might ain a benefit from a slow connection.

At this point it might happen that those whom are doing this thing just don't know they are exploiting that and think that is a bug too (at least for one time or two).

[COOLguy]

No this guy knew it. He was very clever - he used this to win games by basically making the other player forfeit, I think.

[benedictarnold]

Yeeeeeeaaaaaaaaah*sweats*.........................the way it is now, you can "restart" your turn by deleting the game then instantly go to your saved games and redownload the game. This resets your units to how they were right after the last players turn. This pretty much makes you able to convert any units that arent immune to it, scout the units inside the TCS, scout in fog of war, and make your cats/trebuchets never miss. Having 100% conversion rate ongames without spells in the beggining is overkill.
So...there should be a limit to how many times you can redowload a game in any given turn (like once, maybe MAYBE twice) and skips you if you go over. And also (this might be harder to implement cause of backlash from some players) to limit the number of devises you can be actively playing a game on. Since you can have a game downloaded in two (or more) devised, do different strategies and only upload the one you like better.another way also, to auto save your turn progress onto the server whenever possible.

No need for so much to replay your turn. Just press the homescreen button before ending your turn and then force close your app immediately (before the game saves automatically) then restart the app. No need to delete the game this way

Came here to post this.

This is at root a problem with the distributed nature of this game. Since operations are not atomic, you might need to implement a distributed version control for turns in the game. Just like git does for code.

Also, I don't know how you save the game, but if it's just an unencrypted text file that is saved to the file system on the device, someone could easily cheat by modifying that file and then sending it to the server. Better to encrypt files using asymmetric key encryption (i.e., encrypt with your public key before persisting, then when they get to your server you can check the signature). But maybe you're already doing that, I haven't looked, just thinking 'out loud.'

Just a couple thoughts. Keep on rockin!

[FiredClay]

Please help me umderstand the limits of this game.

If I saved my account before I start the betting multiplayer game, does that mean I can load the last saved gem amount? If so I maybe able to apply this to ways to obtain almost unlimited gems

Also, does different combinations of teams and multiplayers change how many gems the winner wins? If so, how?