Suspicious Scores


Re: Timestamp - there's a timestamp? I see only the date, but it would appear to tally with the aborted game I played that evening. Didn't see a stupid score when I started the game, reset (F3) and quit C4a quickly when I had to do something else. Logged in the next day and...

hrm....   don't mind me...   been a while since I checked any scores and for some reason I thought they were timestamped, not just datestamped... 

@skeezix:  does the database contain the date+time or just the date? 

- Neelix
 
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GMT would be me, I'm guessing the game I played was somewhere around 7-8.30pm, roughly, late evening anyway.
 
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The DB is time-stamped and profile-id'd (of course); hence, it is easy to nuke someones scores if we want to wholesale remove them..

FWIW.. the pandora client currently assumes single-profile since few people do multiuser on pandora, and pandora appdata is single-instance; we could stuff it into homedir instead, and be multiuser safe, but I preferred at the time to avoid a clusterfuck of 'writing to nand' arguments :) I'm open to change it..

On other platforms, I expect to roll as the platform demands; on a desktop machine, it certainly woudl be account based (multiuser on a machine.)

Guess I should clean out the bogus score eh? :)

jeff

Bogus score removed; backup of the site taken :p
 
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One could even leave it single-profile only for Pandora...I WAS thinking in terms of other platforms later, for example, for a PC you'd probably want multi-user capability.

For portable devices, single-user makes as much sense.  But, like PC's SOME devices ARE more like multi-user devices, and, on such devices, the ability to have multi-users might be a good thing...just sayin'

Me, I like the single-user profile as is on Pandy...this was a thought I tossed out there more for alternate platforms.
 
Keep it simple. Keep it small.

Linux and recent windowses are great multi user system. So just put / read the profile-file to $HOME and everything is fine. ;) Should be the task of the operation system to manage different users - not of every program on it's own!

E.g. Windows has (as I know) the functionality "Start as..." in the Rightclick-menu. So even logged in as the "default account", which is used by every user, specific user accounts could be used on demand. ;)
 
Might I just add that 6797973 was my old phone number?

Just saying, like.

D.
 
Keep it simple. Keep it small.


Linux and recent windowses are great multi user system. So just put / read the profile-file to $HOME and everything is fine. ;) Should be the task of the operation system to manage different users - not of every program on it's own!


E.g. Windows has (as I know) the functionality "Start as..." in the Rightclick-menu. So even logged in as the "default account", which is used by every user, specific user accounts could be used on demand. ;)
Most of the time when a computer has many human users, all those users are using the same account… with automatic log-in, that way they don't "have to type the boring password" to get into the computer.
 
Ms. Pacman

ASM Asmo

6797973

ranked number 1 2013/09/07 

He did it again :)  
 
Aaargh.. and it's the same crazy number as before.

Same thing again, just checked the scores moments ago and saw that...

I did play a game at that time, but just like before I exited without completing a game. Thought I was doing the right thing by resetting first (F3) and then quitting, rather than just abandoning a game mid-stream, but there must be the potential for it to pick up a bizarro value somehow sometimes.

Again, NOT MY SCORE!
 
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Again...as Ms. Pacman scores only in multiples of ten...only an idiot would submit THAT as a fake score.  It's obviously some kind of glitch...and probably related to the way you reset your game.  Isn't there some other way to get out of the game without the F3 reset?

Personally, me...I use the Space Button and select "reset game"  Never knew you could do it with F3.

Anyway, the way I reset...has never caused a scoring problem.
 
The current hi-score in Super Hexagon - Hexagon (714739:03 by N3Cr0) seems a bit high. That's over 8 days.
 
Hi, I just found this topic and I want to blame myself (and the Super Hexagon developer).

If the C4A admin reads this: please delete my score.

How I have done this? I took a look into the game directory and noticed the score is saved unencrypted in an xml file. I made a little experiment with it, but unfortunately, I was connected to C4A.

Sorry for that!
 
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Its essentially an honour system - to lock things down requires end to end encryption, signing and general unpleasantry to dev and users both .. So c4a is fragile but easy to work with :0


For the game here .. Even if he encrypted the scoring, you could still trick c4a so why worry ..

I'll try to remember and fix it soon .. Xmas is too busy :)
 
all the game that use sc seems rather vulnerable to fake score, you don't even need to look at the game source to submit bogus score... as skeezix said it's a honour system
 
Its fairly simple really -- if you do not lock the whole system down end to end, it is easily cheated. So you weigh the risks versus rewards -- if you keep it an open and low-cost-of-entry system you get more titles in it and everyone is happy; if you make it fully locked down, it is more reliable, but you have few titles in it, and its a lot of work for everyone involved.

ie: signed an trusted 'official binaries'; does the end to end system only allow authorized versions? Then you need code signing systems, and official distribution points, and any app updates have to get sent to me (say) to authorize and update configs on servers; it raises the bar to developers who have to figure out the process, and add custom APIs, and end to end encryption, and so on.

To block cheating, you have a large surface area .. the game, and TCP trraffic recording so strong encryption and session handling, server defences etc.

Bleh. Instead, I went for fast and loose, throw it out there, see if the idea sticks; as is, its a prototype, and it was pretty popular for awhile; I don't knwo right now.. RL has been beating me to death for months so I've not been able to keep tabs on things or innovatge in the space much :( Hopefully its still chugging along nicely ;) It used to be in the c4a website, if you opened up the history, it'd all show one day, or maybe today and yesterday. As of this moment, if you hit it, it shows from today back to the 10th, with some days having no traffic. Obviously despite having a fairly large number of games (mostly arcade, mind), people come, enjoy it a bit, and move on. Theres not as much 'long term' hook as we need. (Down the road who knows, maybe with Pyra say if we build it in as a core feature of the firmware and every app supports it, it could work better. But as is for Pandora, what could make it work more? Ultimately, only some number of people like score keeping/challenging.) I think for c4a to grow, it needs more 'features'.. more styles of 'play'; play against yourself, 'social' website tie-ins (?), intra-c4a person to person challenging, maybe on the fly sub-league creation so groups of friends can challenge and compete, include productivity apps, etc .. we just need more population, so that if 5% of peopel care, that amounts to a bunch of people. 5% of people who run pandora every day is not many people?

I started a rewrite that tightened things down more and added a lot of features, but its a long ways off. Such is life :/

jeff
 
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The curse of Ms Pacman strikes again - started a game, wasn't feeling it after a false start or two, reset (F3) and quit. It logged a score of 0 for me!
 
What, you don't always get a zero? ;)

I should add a conf entry that is the default-value, and always skip that submission; it used to do that for MAME titles, but never did for indies .. and I think I took it out for MAME ones too.

Hmrf.
 
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