How I Defeated an MMO Game Hack Author

Back in the days there was an explosion of MMO web games on Facebook and Google Plus. There was a sci-fi themed game that I played with several colleagues now and then. You would build bases, buy upgrades, weapons, join teams and then do PvP against other players.

One day a colleague of mine found he could use Cheat Engine to scan the memory of the Flash application and change some values in order to get an upper hand and win PvP matches. Turns out the devs neither did nor verified the PvP battles server-side. It was all done client-side and after the battle the client was sending the server info about who won. A fix would require a complete rewrite of the game logic.

We had several weeks of "fun" beating the shit of everyone in our game world. The devs attempted to make some fixes - make it harder to load the flash file, obfuscated (Base64-encoded) the JSON data sent to the client - this was a funny one, since it was irrelevant. In the end, as the author here says, it was no longer fun, so eventually we stopped playing.

Many years ago I played a silly game "Clash of Clans"-type game (it was a knockoff). The game itself wasn't super fun (build things, wait for them to finish or pay to speed up, PvP, clans, etc) but I played it for a few months on and off. Randomly one day I decided to hook up a network proxy to the game and look at what data the game sent/received.

It turned out that when you queried the map it returned a ton more data than it displayed (data you would normally need to scout for). Also a ton of endpoints, like the one to load your own town's info, would also work if you used an enemy's town id (but with your auth key still). There was little to no verification/authentication blocks that I ran into.

I spent the next 2-3 weeks writing little CLI tools to talk to the API cultivating in a small suite of web-based tools that used assets I ripped from the game to display info (using the currency icons, using the building sprites, etc) until I got bored of the game and the reverse engineering and just walked away. It was fun for a little bit operating with perfect knowledge and using some of that info to put my thumb on the scales for myself and my clan but in the end it become more work than fun and so I stopped.

I appreciate your story, I am curious how you feel about exploiting in games today? I don't want to dramatize it too much since it's pretty contentious online, but obviously, your fun was at the expense of others. So I am curious if that is something you considered at the time or grew out of doing?

The engineering aspect of exploits has always been fascinating to me, and I sometimes mess with singleplayer games. But given how competitive and serious games get these days the idea of exploiting online feels a bit more than just silly fun.

I can see how this might read as a veiled dig but it's not. As one tinkerer to another, it's a rare opportunity to ask.

1. When you're looking at a screen, sometimes it's difficult to image that on the other side of the screen there is another real person.

2. There are some cultures where cheating and bullying aren't considered bad things per se, but rather as demonstration of cleverness and power.

3. Some people develop proper sense of empathy later in their lives, later than when learn how to interact with the world, which is one of the reasons why teenagers in general are such pain in the ass. Some people never actually feel empathy, and simply don't care about other people.

BTW in real, physical sports, there's little room for "sportsmanship". It's all about winning, it doesn't matter how, and people with most medals are people who understand this the best. You can especially see this in sports where raw muscle power is more important than skill and technique, for example cycling. What makes you think that gaming would be any different?

I barely play games theses day, so no. I imagine I could have fun exploiting some non-AAA games for fun and learning, do so some rev engineering on ws protocols and such, but presently it’s not on my list at all.

About this particular story - I didn’t care too much back then, honestly. Neither the devs I assume, because they knew there was cheating going on. I think they kept our accounts because we were spending handsome money buying ingame upgrades, boosts etc.