Fair enough. I wouldn’t mind paying to support either and have the money – actually just bought Galactrix from the same publisher I played long time ago – but they sit on a deal of showstopper issues. Starting with the one we discuss: broken server security. All the issues around mmr, scailing, rubberbanding. And reluctance to provide proper and fair interface features consistently: 1-click global purchase lock, filters for matchmaking.
They just keep along a plenty of elements that smell rip-off or just ruin the fun of playing and competition. Can I win games? Sure. Can I win tournaments? Well, depends. On what? Oh yeah, on how much I spend on tanking and on how I time my play to ensure most RB points and least scaling. Come on, is that what supposed to make or break?
And it’s sad that in isolation I have so many points in recent changes I agree with and even asked, but the global problems are kept and really going in the wrong direction. For my taste at least. The model seem to be really to rip off newcomers by lures then not care about anything else. Pure strip mining. Not deserving my support.
I’m not sure what your figure on the ton means. Development costs a lot. But within that, the industrial wisdom is “quality is cheap”. What consts the ton of money really is incompetency. Allowing to deploy bad design. For our scope, implementing a proper server protocol costs NOT more than what they have now at all. The difference is not measuable in the whole spending. If they are generally that clueless, then they waste ton of money on everything really. But usually every shop that provide visible output actually has at least some people who know better – only they may not be given their way.
In the corner case they could just hire an expert consultant for a full week – that is some money but far from a ton. But could get all the info for free if only just wanted to have it.
In our case all that is needed to ask all purchase transaction from the server and send in the full gameplay. The latter would not just be NOT spying but would make a great feature. One many games naturally have and was requested here. I so much like game replays in MTGO. Suppose you had simple access to your game history, see what you played and how others beat you. Both having a list and replay of the game. Care to guess how much effort that would be to implement? 2-4 man-weeks tops. No kidding. Now if we had that, not just view roster how much chance that leaves for cheats really? (the submitted hame is replayed on server as first thing, accepted only if plays out.
Someone still could make hacks that help to find better matches, list possibilities, make simulation, possibly even make some “undo” or predict the new tiles – but for this game none of that seem feasible. Simply from fact there’s no trading and nothing you have on account has no realizable value. Unlike many other games where you can gain real life $ from hacking or farming. And even those would eventually show up as patterns in replay – no need to preemptive spying or any excessive checking of the client until that point.
In general you’d be right, security is always a tradeoff and most of the time brings in some inconvenience. But MPQ is on the rare list where it hardly applies. The simplest model just works with the same 2 transactions per game,. no intermediate communication is required. Up front I mean. And the exchange of state is insignificant too, as the whole game can be represented in under 1000 bytes. It’s nothing to compare to a real time shooter or anything that needs communicating with server almost once per frame.
And all the other transactions are also happening already, the problem is only in the content. Say “open token” action is the same pair of packets: request and new state. Regardless if the resulting cover is generated on the client or on the server, right?
I’ve got a couple of questions I hope those of you who obviously know a lot more than I do about this stuff can answer for me.
Is the cheating just happening on the computer versions or are they cheating on IOS and Android too? I’d thought it would be just on computers since that’s where it seems it’s easy for those in the know to mess around with the game but maybe people can do that on phones too. I play on IOS and thought I was playing the cheater free version.
What does it mean when you all say they are being sandboxed?
If you can help, thanks. (In my highschool we had typing machines and keyboarding was called typing, so I need an explanation every now and then.)
I remember when I was a kid, I borrowed my cousin’s Gameshark and cheated my way through Legend of Legaia. I finished it so fast, I felt ZERO satisfaction. Same went for my Harvest Moon game. I also forever ruined my FF9 save game because I botched the codes.
So while I can definitely see where the temptation would come from, that lesson I learned as a gamesharking kid never left me. I guess it’s just one of those things people have to experience themselves to really understand.
A few notes about the shady side of that Game Dev Tycoon business
It’s a direct ripoff of Game Dev Story by Kairosoft - everything from the game concept to the entirety of the gameplay. So you basically have programmers complaining about people stealing their game, that they stole from another indie company…
Game Dev Story is a $2.50 game. Game Dev Tycoon released at $8, which for a time-management sim you can complete in one day especially if you just work from the Game Dev Story wiki, well…
Their “piracy demonstration” in-game is nothing like the realistic scenario they try to paint it to be in their article.
If you want to see examples of indie studios who actually handled it constructively (and ended up turning it to their advantage): Anodyne Miami Hotline
Demiurge isn’t doing too bad a job here either, to be honest.
I always knew there was a cheat for this =( it’s unfair, especially on PvE events. Anywhoozies I’ll let you know how I feel about cheating once I get the cheat
I’ve cheated in most of the mobile games P2P or P2W games I’ve played.
I always try them first without cheating, and if I get to a brick wall where I can’t go any farther without paying, but yet don’t like the game enough to pay, I’ll cheat. Every time I’ve done this I do get bored extremely quickly though!
With MPQ, I played quite awhile before I felt like I had to spend any cash, by the time I got there, I liked the game enough that I didn’t want to screw it up for myself, and now I just spend a few bucks when I need to.
The last mobile game I got into was Madden, I didn’t cheat in that game either, but did figure out how to manipulate the auction system by buying low at between 4-5AM, and selling high that evening during prime time. Eventually, it had the same effect as cheating though, and I ended up just deleting the game when I had every top player.
I think cheating is fine if you just want to play the game for a short while, but you’ll likely grow bored with it very quickly.
Sandboxing the cheaters is the best thing to do, but I’m still pretty skeptical if all of the 20 player alliance spots where purchased legit though. I know if I did have a cheat account already setup, I would have definitely taken advantage of buying roster spots.
I used to pirate games back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s - my college days when I couldn’t afford to do anything, but had to keep up with the rest of my dorm or be left out of the geeky social circles. It was the same for movies and music. You either did it, or you were left out of all the social activities. 15 years later, I have a much more capitalistic approach to life and wholly support developers whenever I can (especially if I ever get my own app completed).
My favorite response to cheaters and hackers was from this article (linked to #3 in the list). Humiliating cheaters is great, and it still astounds me that plant-based erotica is actually a thing.
(Let me just start this by saying I don’t cheat in MPQ)
However, I miss the old days of game cheating. Trainers/gamesharks/codebreakers, those days were fun. It also significantly extended the life of your games. You play through once, get the joy of victory and all that… and then you play through a second or third time going ALL-OUT BANANAS on things.
Who can tell me they didn’t once just feel the thrill of carrying the Archangel’s Staff of the Apocalypse? Let’s be honest here, we’re all friends.
Lol just finished watching a couple of those videos and they were pretty much all lets not waste our time and lets screw the devs of this one-sided game. Seriously? Imagine that you invented something out of this world brilliant. Would you want people to then be able to pirate that and not have to pay or work hard to get that said invention? (Yes I do think this game is a brilliant invention and have loved every moment I’ve spent on it) For those of you who condone cheating I can see your side. But I see only a small majority who don’t want to work for anything and think that everything in this life is going to be free. I appreciate what the devs have done by sandboxing them so that honest hard working people who actually spend time and money on this game can progress. Thank you devs for the game and all the hard work you’ve put into it
My reason for cheating i don’t have time to place well in pvp as I have a wife and 2 kids one of which is very ill or money to put in game. I have crohns disease so when I’m sitting in bathroom I casually play. I don’t win every tournament I don’t place high i enjoy pve not pvp
I’ll assume that was a facetious comment. I had to close down my store, Vinny J’s music shoppe, due to the rampant piracy of music thanks to ubiquitous high speed internet. “Vinny J’s - the hottest music - the coolest games - and kites” - that was the store tag line. Music sales - out the door due to piracy. Games - even more pirated than music. When you can pay some punk $20 to get 300+ game titles on one cartridge (NES) - well, there goes selling SM 3 for $30" Bye Bye any chance of making an honest living in the music retail business.
Rolling Stones, Beatles, Led Zep, Alanis Morrisette, Garth Brooks - yeah, they have great product, and all have lost serious revenue from piracy.
Sorry, just hit a personal note with me. I am now dismounting from the horse, hope I don’t hurt myself from the height.
Vinny, I feel for you. As a teen, browsing my locally owned cd stores was probably my favorite activity. I felt like it was the end of the golden age when they closed up.
I don’t know if it is a better world that we live in today, but it is a new one and it is reformed to meet people’s demands and expectations, and it was inevitable. So while a retailer like you was crushed, I’m not convinced that this new age has hurt the artists’ bottom lines. It’s all touring now, and website hits and other clever monetization schemes.
I miss the local music stores like yours immensely, but I guess you can never put the genie back in the bottle.
Game dev tycoon released first on pc, years before game dev story was released on mobile. When game dev tycoon released - the going rate for a casual game was $8.
Actually, game dev tycoon came out in 2012, game dev story came out 2010.
There were a number of games released at a similar time on Steam with considerably deeper gameplay that were going in the $3-5 range
First off, I’m sorry you lost your livelihood. Small store owners were the demographic most hurt by the evolution of music distribution, though a large part of that has to do more with the internet than piracy itself.
That being said, as someone who’s spent a considerable part of his life in the music industry and then the game industry, they are completely different beasts.
For games, digital distribution platforms have vastly increased not only overall spending, but how people get info about more variety of games and what they’re comfortable at spending on.
There’s been a fair bit of research that’s found that people downloading your games for free, enjoying it, and talking about it to people who then purchase it (or who go back to purchase it themselves, which happens surprisingly often especially in games that get updated/have multiplayer components) actually helps sales more than if that wasn’t the case.
Where it hurts companies is the AAA games, studios like Ubisoft who have literally hundreds of employees working on a single game with a budget of $24 million, a large portion of which is advertising to make sure they don’t have to rely on enthused word of mouth. They have a huge investment to recoup, and a considerable higher risk from pirates considering where time gets attributed in AAA games these days (typically not gameplay quality, though there are notable exceptions).
For the music industry, I’ve never seen anyone put it better than it’s been done here; even considering this article was written 7 years ago very little has changed.
I’m well glad I’m out.
This is very interesting. Like gamar, I’m might actually really prefer to be sandboxed. I don’t want to interfere with other people, I also don’t want to pretend that I beat them. I just want to play the game at my leisure and not worry about other players but still get the roster space and covers that I actually enjoy collecting. Were I to be sandboxed I would probably give myself infinite roster space and then just play like normal anyway with perhaps cheating to get a free booster every now and then if I felt like I it had been a while (or to replace any Bag-Mans that pop out). Actually sounds more enjoyable for me and is very tempting but its hard to take the leap without know exactly what the consequences are.
