50
votes
Accepted
How to detect and prevent abuse (botting) of online game API?
If people want to bot, I don't think you can really stop them.
You can of course implement many measures that make botting more or less of a pain. But you can only do so much before your codebase ...
- 1,483
24
votes
How to detect and prevent abuse (botting) of online game API?
The best and only effective defense against bots is to design your game in a way that players don't feel the need to automatize in the first place. When your players automatize simple tasks which do ...
- 111k
23
votes
How to detect and prevent abuse (botting) of online game API?
Don't make your game so vulnerable to johnny-on-the-spot effort
First, make sure that players who only play your game for twenty minutes or an hour a day in a single sitting aren't at a huge ...
- 677
21
votes
How can I let new players effectively compete with long-time players?
The only similar system I know is OGame. In OGame, players are protected from other players until the have a certain amount of points (I think it is 50.000). It makes more sense to protect players ...
- 928
13
votes
Accepted
Does Steam provide persistent data storage to developers?
You could save all the data both locally on your player's computer, and sync it automatically to Steam Cloud, which indeed allows you to store stats/user preferences/progress/etc.. online.
Steam ...
13
votes
How to detect and prevent abuse (botting) of online game API?
You can't stop them. But you can make their lifes miserable, as they have to spend lots of time writing their bots, and updating them. You have to use whatever you have to verify if user is valid.
...
- 344
10
votes
How can I let new players effectively compete with long-time players?
Reduce progression in your game mechanics. Avoid making players stronger in a game-mechanical sense based on how far they progressed in the game. That way an experienced player has no unfair advantage ...
- 111k
10
votes
Why does editing the client's memory in some MMOs allow them to cheat?
One of the reasons why there are protections is that reading the game state could allow bots to know the state of the game and act accordingly.
For instance, grinding in a MMO: if the "bot" knows ...
- 15.4k
8
votes
How to detect and prevent abuse (botting) of online game API?
Embrace the botter. You've built a restful API, perfect for a coder to experiment with automation of your game. Design your gameplay so that the bot doesn't gain an advantage over a human player due ...
- 191
8
votes
How to detect and prevent abuse (botting) of online game API?
In general, distinguishing between bots and humans fully automatically is hard, some form of human-assisted decision process works best.
What I would do: define some heuristics that hint the user is ...
- 309
7
votes
How can I get a list of servers hosted by my players?
In order to get a server list, you will need a central matchmaking server to which all game-servers connect and announce that they are online and to which all game-clients connect to obtain the list ...
- 111k
6
votes
Why does editing the client's memory in some MMOs allow them to cheat?
Many MMO's are designed with client-side hit prediction. So if there is a hit on the client, it sends that result to the server that there was a hit. In this case the server is not truly authoritative,...
- 362
5
votes
Is host advantage real?
The essence of the "host advantage" is having a low ping (round trip time to the server). If you are the server, you'd have no ping time, but even being really close to the server would result in a ...
- 6,686
5
votes
Does Steam provide persistent data storage to developers?
For statistics you can use ISteamUserStats, which is a part of the Steamworks offering.
This interface allows you to define (from the Steamworks developer site) a set of tracked statistics with ...
- 151
4
votes
How can I let new players effectively compete with long-time players?
The main problem you want to solve is strong, powerful players pick on weak, new players after their protection ends. There are quite a few social solutions to this:
Punish players for attacking ...
- 11.2k
4
votes
How to detect and prevent abuse (botting) of online game API?
I don't neccessarily disagree with the soft-science answers but there are technical things you can do to detect botters and some things that just make life harder for them.
Grade accounts by how much ...
- 141
4
votes
Unity Online Multiplayer
According to the main Unity website, yes; you can implement free online multiplayer functionality in the personal edition, with up to 20 concurrent players.
- 141
3
votes
How to detect and prevent abuse (botting) of online game API?
Have you considered making bots an integral part of the game? It's hard for bots to ruin the game for everyone else if everyone is encouraged to create them. Add support for scripting and all of a ...
- 131
3
votes
How to detect and prevent abuse (botting) of online game API?
Create a separate bot only server. Create a leaderboard and celebrate the winners. Look at the data this generates. Ban users from normal severs whose behaviour profile looks like that of a bot.
- 131
3
votes
Accepted
online game, NPC monster death and hit detection to gain experience points
When you want a cheating-proof client/server game, then you need to handle all game mechanics which are worth cheating on the server.
Don't send "Player X hits enemy Y for Z damage". Just send "...
- 111k
3
votes
Accepted
How does one organize AI interactions with Local and Remote Players?
The monster shouldn't know or care whether the thing it is grabbing is a local or remote player, or what perspective that player is playing from. That's likely to lead to coding headaches and ...
- 681
3
votes
Why does today's "Metaverse" look equally or even worse than the 1990s 3D chat worlds?
I believe this is a based on multiple factors:
First of, the concept of a Metaverse mainly makes sense in VR, of which the portable headsets have very strict polygon and material budgets. Secondly, in ...
- 281
2
votes
How to detect and prevent abuse (botting) of online game API?
Whatever you do, remember to NOT make it more annoying for the real player! A lot of the responses I've seen (slower page results, not allowing multiple pages open to facilitate faster input, etc) ...
- 21
2
votes
How can I let new players effectively compete with long-time players?
Different browser games I've played used different strategies for this. All came down to resetting all players on a set time.
One game dropped all new players in a new world with 400 at the same time,...
- 291
2
votes
Accepted
Connecting players in an Online TCG
Every network application requires some system to act as a server. There are two ways to implement a multiplayer game:
peer-to-peer - in every match, the machine of one player acts as a server, the ...
- 111k
2
votes
Network jitter, client input to server
A simple solution i found, is to keep track of how many server ticks have gone without processing input from the client. This amount is then decremented for each subsequently processed input.
This ...
- 141
2
votes
Accepted
In a multiplayer game, should everything that is not user input be done server-side to prevent cheating?
This is a very valid question, and the answers will probably differ between developers, as many will choose different approaches to secure the integrity of their games. The choice which implementation ...
- 146
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible