Ran into another starman cheater last night. Ocelot. Don't think anyone else has reported him here, just thought I would mention him.
Since this is pretty much crime by wire(less, in this case) by destroying functionality of the leaderboard, can't ActionReplay get sued for providing hacking tools, much akin to some other script kiddie precedents? Class. Action. Lawsuit. Say it with me.
Guns don't kill people; people kill people. Likewise, patching devices don't cheat; people cheat. It depends on the WFC TOS.
I agree wholeheartedly with the analogy, but I do recall instances where providers of tools that do malicious harm so far as PCs go are as liable as the script kiddies who use them. I don't see why it wouldn't be the case, since the DS fits the definition of a PC these days.
If a DS is like a PC, then an Action Replay is nothing more than a debugger. And if you ban debuggers, you end up with the dystopia of "The Right to Read" by Richard Stallman.
While I do think they are well within their rights to produce a product that allows this sort of stuff, it certainly would have been nice if they'd made an attempt to disable the AR's use online. (Perhaps this is easier said than done.) However, it would be even nicer if Nintendo would employ even the most basic security for WFC games. Everything I've read and seen suggests that there's none in place whatsoever.
True that. Best thing NOA Grey said could be done is to have someone's name removed from the leaderboard with enough evidence.
what action replay does is it allows for save game transfers and it searches for and changes hex values. thats pretty much all it does.
The old Action Replay for the DS was just a save game manager. The new one, which came out a couple weeks ago, is a full-fledged memory patching device, i.e. a "real" AR.
I figured you were talking about savegame editing. If you were talking about memory patching, there's no need to say "that's all it does" -- that's all it needs to do.
well since thats all sorted out, it is possible he isn't using action replay at all. he could be grabbing his packets and changing the hex in real time, but i really think that would be more effective to change the amount of garbage sent not change the piece
Theoretically this is possible, but that leads me to .. Very possible as well, but much harder to do. The only tetris game that won't be hackable will have all decision making taking place on the server side with both clients sending their keystrokes to the server. This makes for a very laggy game. Imagine hitting hard drop and having to wait 200ms before it actually drops on your screen. MMORPGS, while they don't read your keystrokes directly, work similarly since preventing players from telling the server that they are all of a sudden 1,000,000 gold richer is kind of a problem. As long as you are letting the end user decide what is going on in the game, there will be the possibility of cheats. Still, developing a homebrew enthusiast version of tetris for DS would be great The fact that you can play forever in standard marathon was a let down for me.
i think making a homebrew version would stop most of the hackers. or we could have the people register to download it and filter it. altho that would be hard and probably make the population very very low
That, or all the keystrokes are sent during ARE and then the state of the field is sent back. This could happen after every tetromino or just after line clears, which have a longer delay anyway in many games.