Tilt to Live 2: Redonkulous

[QuantumApocalypse]

(03-30-2013 08:33 AM)The Hunter Wrote:  i just hope i can play it. i already cant play ttl multiplayer cause im not rich and im not buying a new phone just to have ios 6.
OML please oh please make ttl 2 so players like myself can play the best game on earth. i use ios 5.1.1

It is quite likely that that will not be possible. Slating for a 2013 release means it could come out at latest by the end of the year (should they be "on schedule") and by then, Apple would have had another event. People are expecting new devices and the launch of iOS 7. As in traditional apple fashion, they drop devices by launching a new firmware which is as far as that device can go, with no future ones being compatible. If you are already stuck on iOS 5, then sadly your device has been "discontinued". The App Store iOS and hardware requirements will continue to be raised, and if developers want to use new software and APIs from Apple, they won't be able to choose lower versions. Even if they could, too much excess effort would be spent optimizing the game for these lower and less powerful devices.

[Phyresis]

I have to agree with Quantum on this one, developers almost have to use the newest IOS to ensure the most downloads. Its not often people are looking for apps on IOS 5 now.

[Necrocat219]

My personal wish for TTL 2 is that they introduce grazing as a form of scoring points (gaining a point when moving very close to a dot, one time only for each dot) that would really be awesome, and also an improved scoring system.

Also, using a 3rd part host and not gamecentre for the highscore! It's somewhat sad to find a game that would be great to grind against and practice to get a good placing in top places, but then find the top 100 places occupied with the same scores.

[Kamikaze28]

(05-10-2013 03:02 AM)Necrocat219 Wrote:  Also, using a 3rd part host and not gamecentre for the highscore! It's somewhat sad to find a game that would be great to grind against and practice to get a good placing in top places, but then find the top 100 places occupied with the same scores.

I have to agree with your disappointment at fake scores. Call me naive but from my point of view, a little bit of statistics and some kind of bayesian filter could improve scoreboards tremendously. Most hacked scores I've seen have been so outrageously exaggerated that it is pretty obvious that they are faked. Training a machine to identify and handle such kind of data is a well researched topic. It's actually a lot simpler with scores than with email since scores only have one data point.

Here's my thinking: every score distribution follows an exponential curve to some degree. There are a lot of small scores and as the score increases, their frequency decreases. See the following figure:

In the beginning of a game (when there are no scores) you accept any score for a while until this curve establishes itself and then you can apply a simple classifier to all existing and future scores to decide whether they fall within the established distribution (i. e. are valid scores) or if they are severe outliers (i. e. hacked).

I do know that these methods can also be subverted but it would be better than what we've got right now which - as far as I know - is humans looking at scores and cleaning up manually.

/discuss

[Phyresis]

my problem with that, is that some days on TTL 1, i find myself getiing nothing over 2,000, and the next day, im beating my highscore by 100,000 on every other game. There is really no way to know what is a legitimate score or a hacked score, unless there was code to detect the hack.There is also the possibility of other people playing on your account, who could be much better than you.

[Kamikaze28]

(05-13-2013 10:20 AM)Phyresis Wrote:  my problem with that, is that some days on TTL 1, i find myself getiing nothing over 2,000, and the next day, im beating my highscore by 100,000 on every other game. There is really no way to know what is a legitimate score or a hacked score, unless there was code to detect the hack.There is also the possibility of other people playing on your account, who could be much better than you.

You are certainly right about personal score distribution which is sparse, prone to outliers and pretty much useless.
But combine all scores together to one distribution and you get a pretty nice curve. My original point is this: Hackers exaggerate their fraudulent scores by an absurd amount - just to show that they can. But by doing so they are attaching a big red neon sign to their score that screams "I AM NOT LEGIT!". These are extreme outliers which can be detected by a machine and purged before they are ever a visible nuisance. The only course of action left in such a system is to fake scores which are just barely above the current high score and possibly flooding the scoreboard with loads of fake accounts to skew the distribution.

Okay, basically this is a hopeless pursuit.

[Phyresis]

Again, the hackers may just tone down their numbers a bit to get around this. I dont mean to be playing the devils advocate, but it seems like a lost cause tbh.

[Kamikaze28]

(05-14-2013 08:53 AM)Phyresis Wrote:  Again, the hackers may just tone down their numbers a bit to get around this. I dont mean to be playing the devils advocate, but it seems like a lost cause tbh.

Yeah, that's what I wanted to express with the last sentence of my post:

(05-14-2013 06:28 AM)Kamikaze28 Wrote:  Okay, basically this is a hopeless pursuit.

However, it could be the case that if they can't exaggerate their scores to show how badly they can mess with the scoreboard, they might just not bother.

On the other side of this idea is of course the case of a false positive. Say you have a nicely established score distribution and someone just knocks the ball out of the park and legitimately achieves a score which is 10% above the previous #1 score - the system might flag that score as being fraudulent and drama would ensue. The question then becomes: what would you rather deal with as a scoreboard service provider?

Just to continue my current train of thought and maybe to give others here something to think about: from a computer science standpoint, I would argue that this problem is inherently unsolvable. No matter what game we are talking about, the score is just a variable which is increased or decreased during the game until a certain point when it is submitted as a score.
The honest player adheres to the rules of the game and only uses the game to manipulate the score variable. The dishonest player can, with more or less effort, manipulate this variable from without the game and trick the game into thinking the score is still true.
You can equip the game with logic and redundancies to detect tampering - but then again these precautions can be subverted and the arms race begins anew.
Sparing you the details of cryptography and hardware and software architecture, I think there is no way in the current mobile game environment to ensure the validity of scores a game submits.

[Phyresis]

That is the fundamental problem of all things digital. To varying degrees of success, everything can be hacked in some way. Nothing is entirely safe. Even e big companies. Apple, Sony, Microsoft. They all have security loopholes just waiting to be found in their products. Wether this is hacking into someones bank account, or just boosting their score in a video game, it is all based around security loopholes and is hacking. There is really no way to prevent this as of right now though.

[Kamikaze28]

(05-16-2013 05:23 AM)Phyresis Wrote:  That is the fundamental problem of all things digital. To varying degrees of success, everything can be hacked in some way. Nothing is entirely safe. Even e big companies. Apple, Sony, Microsoft. They all have security loopholes just waiting to be found in their products. Wether this is hacking into someones bank account, or just boosting their score in a video game, it is all based around security loopholes and is hacking. There is really no way to prevent this as of right now though.

I agree with you somewhat - but there are cryptographic systems that can only be broken by brute-force attacks. Implemented correctly, these systems allow for secure storage and transmission of data.
Problem is, no matter what kind of stuff you put into an app, everything lands in the hands of the user to take apart and look inside at his leisure. Putting the secret to your AES encryption inside your app? Can be found and used to break your encryption. Same goes for any private key for asymmetric encryption or signing of scores. Once it is found and published, it becomes useless.