Multiplayer video games have become increasingly popular over the past decade, while cracking and cheating are currently significant problems causing tremendous income loss to both gamers and gaming companies.
To tackle rampant cheating behaviors, the concept of how the cheating systems function in various game genres, such as first person shooter (FPS) and massively multiplayer online role playing games(MMORPG), must first be understood.
Cheating always comes with cracking. The recent cracking could be divided into three approaches: real-time crack, static crack, and protocol-breaking crack, which leads to further cheating behaviors. This article introduces the three most popular types of cracking methods and how cheating can be detected and prevented in multiplayer video games.
Real-time Crack
Real-time Crack is mainly based on modifiers and accelerators, two external auxiliary tools to manipulate game saves and memory data during runtime.
It’s of most high-frequency to unearth cheaters modifying and accelerating runtime game data in both FPS and MMORPG games.
This type of crack involves increasing assets in players’ accounts, causing more significant damage to opponents and accelerating assigned tasks at a speed normally impossible, to gain a distinct advantage over legitimate players.
A scalable real-time inspection is proposed at the beginning, given that cheaters must run some sort of code different than an honest player, either in the form of cheating tool processes running in the underlying system or unauthorized modifications to the game program itself. By rechecking former sequences of bytes, game developers can identify abnormal cheating behaviors, hunt down players who use modifiers and accelerators, and forcibly terminate the game process to prevent cheating.
The culprit is usually a single player who does not think game cheating is misbehavior. Game developers also punish or ban lists of cheating players with precise reasons on a regular basis to maintain game balance.
Static Crack
Hackers and cheaters modify the files and scripts of games and then repackage them before playing. We call this “static crack” and where the cracked game comes from. Such a cracked version is usually sold online or even utilized by professional cheating studios.
Cracked games offer players novel but strange game functions that can hardly exist in the original. Most new game functions are available for paying by the month and are sold at much higher prices than the original game’s APRU. Such a situation not only disrupts player experience but also destroys game companies’ reputation and reduces revenue.
To stop games from being cracked happening again, game developers need to pay great attention to encryption and verification during the anti-cheat process.
Deploying “file verification” an in-game protection module, can significantly prevent cracking by encrypting scripts and resource files, such as asset bundles, and protecting digital signatures. Meanwhile, through the protection of the verification system within the function, games can not successfully run when the files are modified. In this vein, game developers can successfully avoid risks of repacking and modifying, and can strengthen the security of the original games.
Game developers can also introduce technologies like anti-debugger and drive technology to protect game security comprehensively.
Protocol-breaking Crack
Protocol-breaking crack is also called semi-offline plug-in. With this form of cheating, cheaters are inclined towards tampering protocols that allow for the distribution of game state among the nodes participating in a game. Knowledgeable cheaters reverse engineer games to gain access to parts of protocols, aiming to modify game packages and thus manipulate gamers’ behaviors.
Such cheating creates its own client-server, dependent on authentic games, to attain unfair disadvantages over opponents. For example, cheaters will be invincible by augmenting their attack lethality and extending their characters’ lifespan to infinite in FPS games.
Meanwhile, digital signatures should be applied to game file packages to generate a password for validation and security. If hackers fail to analyze the signature algorithm, the protocol cannot be simulated, nor can the data be tampered with.
Above all, such cheating behaviors emerge owing to a game system exists design inadequacy. GuardEase recommends protections against bugs and cheating risks, including anti-modifier, anti-accelerator, anti-injection, anti-debugger, and anti-memory dump to safeguard games fully.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of cheats toward games, even customized cheats for games in vogue. Cheating players utilize above crack approaches or loopholes in the game design to gain unfair advantages over honest players. Online game cheating is a realm that requires professional attention since cheating, tampering, and piracy have been the chronic risk that slashes the financial return of game business.