"HokieFiend;c-2360338" wrote:
Well having worked as a developer for a long time there are numerous ways they could go about it. Their priority should be securing the client side battles... they could also do some research on the tools that are being used to accomplish cheating in conjunction and see where they can tighten their own code up. They may possibly be able to decompile any of these tools though I would suspect they already know exactly how things are being manipulated and why.
It may be that the easiest way to clean it up would be to send communication back to the servers during battles. They know the rules of their game and what would be outside the bounds of possibility or suspicious. This may not catch smart cheaters though which is why securing their own client code might be more important in catching all cheats. They could have the server drive attacks if they wanted to. It might be more network overhead but is it worth it to clean cheating up in the game? With any server communication this obviously means airplane mode might take a hit... but why not give a message to the player at the end of battles to ask if they want to forfeit or confirm the end of the battle? Players have been using airplane mode for years to get around a constraint of the system that CG obviously deem fair play so why not just let the player confirm at the end of the battle?
The bottom line is that they can clean cheating up if they really had an interest.
Getting rid of the use of face book to link between different devices would help with this, however that removes the players ability move an account from iOS to android or android to iOS.
Google has built in some security over the years, for example if an APK doesn't have the proper signature it will fail when trying to use google login on a device, granted this can be worked around however it is not as simple as install an "APK" link and go, which is what is being done now and made easier because of the use of facebook linking.
Android being open source and allowing the side loading of apps, greatly reduces the security that can be used to ensure the app is a correct one. The back and forth between the game server and the game is nothing but RPC calls using protobuffs, so adding anything in there for security could be spoofed.
CG definitely has some auto monitoring tools for banning accounts as my alt is still banned from so testing i did for my bot, it was my fault as I sent the wrong info across the wire, but it picked it up and banned the account in about 10 minutes and I still haven't gotten it unbanned.
