Cheaters / There may have been a bug

[mikman]

I was just browsing the games played and came across this one. Hopefully they weren't cheating and it was just some glitch http://www.planetmule.com/hi-score-game/game?game_id=17257 looks like they started with 197,648 cash each and the final colony score was 819,305 huh?!?

[Peter]

Unfortunately they were cheating. We will remove the game and think about how we can add some cheat protection.

[Kelmi]

Here's another game that was strange:
http://www.planetmule.com/hi-score-game/game?game_id=17624

I don't know if there was any cheating involved. We decided to end the game after noticing things were not ok. According to the game stats, all players started with $500000. During the game it looked like only the host had that much. The store seemed to have 800 units of some resources.

[mountainwampus]

http://www.planetmule.com/hi-score-game/game?game_id=17641
I joined this game, "Mango12.com" and everyone started with 500,000 and the store had 800 units of everything. What's up with that?

[rommager]

Apparently the host might have been using a cheat engine.  I guess it can happen out there, but at least this game was abandoned.

The funny thing is a fire in the store can quickly fix the 800 stock problem.   

[data2008]

we begun thinking of some precaution security measures, but of course we can't catch all possible cheats like its harder to detect when a game gets messed up mid-game and in non-obvious amounts.
Best way is to report "x-factor" games so we can have a look at the cause.

[rommager]

While working on ideas about how to update rankings and stats, I thought about the problem of cheating.  My thought is perhaps we can build a log parser that verifies that game totals add up correctly in the log.  Only once the logs go through said parser, would the be "validated" for rankings.  It can also flag users who try to cheat so they can be warned/banned whatever punishment is acceptable.

Of course developing such a parser might take some time.  Peter, you think a system log that simply outputs check messages can be implemented into the current engine without a major overhaul?  There has been talk of an event/console log.  This could be a variation on such a log.

[rommager]

Oh, and mods, can we get this thread merged in to http://www.planetmule.com/forum?topic=677.0

Thanks!

[Peter]

While working on ideas about how to update rankings and stats, I thought about the problem of cheating.  My thought is perhaps we can build a log parser that verifies that game totals add up correctly in the log.  Only once the logs go through said parser, would the be "validated" for rankings.  It can also flag users who try to cheat so they can be warned/banned whatever punishment is acceptable.

Of course developing such a parser might take some time.  Peter, you think a system log that simply outputs check messages can be implemented into the current engine without a major overhaul?  There has been talk of an event/console log.  This could be a variation on such a log.

I merged the topics about the cheater games.

We're considering different options on how to prevent cheating and validate games. We might also flag users as known cheaters.