A Technical Solution to Cheat Detection from an Engineer

"crzydroid;c-1938137" wrote:
So if I follow this correctly...you are having some random person's phone run battle simulations for other users every single time any user finishes a battle? .

yes. all of this is done in the background, users totally unaware.

"crzydroid;c-1938137" wrote:
That seems a million times less practical and efficient than running it server side, not to mention really sketchy.

it is much less efficient in terms of net computing power, but it distributes the cost to the clients. currently, the server is little more than a database extension: it just records results from the client, it doesn't really do much in terms of heavy calculations. running simulations on millions of battles however takes extensive processing power, I have to assume the only reason they're not already doing this is because they've already run cost estimates and they're higher than they're willing to absorb. in an ideal world, they would do the sims on the server, but the only reason i can think of not to do that is computing power. cloud resources are expensive, setting up and maintaining in-house servers to do the work would be even more expensive than that. so, decentralize and send it out.

As far as being "really sketchy" goes- it's not even close to as sketchy as some of the current implementations- they literally send usage feedback for every button press, scroll action, character view, etc that you do in the cantina, or at least i'm pretty sure they used to do that. Battle data can relatively easily be sanitized before being pushed to the queue, so unless they're just not using standard security practices with their code there's little to no added risk to the user. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they were able to determine with a high level of accuracy the risk of developing addiction to the game (or really addiction in general) that a given user has based on metrics on how they use the client.

"crzydroid;c-1938137" wrote:
Also, it's based on the assumption that running an active simulation is the way they detect cheating. I would think there are less computationally intense metrics they could compare the result to.

In terms of detecting long shots- sure there are possibly some metrics they could use, but for everything else the math and mechanics are so complex that any minor modifications to battles that would be close but could be won are easy to slip through. in other words, catching blatant cheaters probably isn't that hard, but somebody looking for that little extra edge in a normally 30% arena match is a bit harder to prove to the point where you're comfortable banning an account.

traditional methods like hashing the client won't work because they don't address the core flaw: there's almost nothing that can be done to completely prevent client side memory tampering, especially since a huge part of the user base is on various builds of Android.