A Technical Solution to Cheat Detection from an Engineer

"crzydroid;c-1938313" wrote:
But for every battle that happens in the game, which is a lot, you have to find some other user to send the data to, maybe multiple users so you don't land on another cheater, and intrusively run this thing in the background no matter what that person may be running or what battle they're in or whatever. I know with older devices or devices with RAM issues task switching can cause the game to crash and lose battles, etc. So I can't imagine what this would do. It just seems incredibly impractical. the processing volume involved is a lot for a single player (like EA) to handle without occurring significant expense, but overall it's nothing compared to what goes on in the average user's client on a daily basis. barely a blip, even if you're validating 5x, 10x as many battles as you play in a given day.

Again, it also assumes running battle simulations is the best method for flagging potential cheaters, which I also think is impractical. It's going to be probability based, so investigation will be required regardless. Surely there are other metrics that can be used, whether they are more face value or technical.

The amount of work scales with the total number of users, and a lot of users are active in the client when they're not really doing much. Most of the processing power needed for the game has to do with the graphics- battle simulations are fairly straightforward algebra that can easily be accomplished by any phone capable of running the game in down time.

Even if you run into a shortage of validators, you can always reduce the queue. not every battle needs to be validated necessarily either - roll it out on arena, tw, ga, expand to raids and special events. Worst-case scenario they could offer a small amount of crystals per 100 battles validated or something like that, this is what bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies do to award users for donating processing power to validate transactions. This decentralized, scalable, peer to peer form of validation isn't something new- the idea comes from tried and true technology. We're over a decade into the bitcoin thing at this point and despite massive incentive to hack it the protocol has held up incredibly well (though a lot of exchanges and other supporting systems haven't been so lucky)