[meheleventyone]

Hi! I'm a game developer that has been making online games for a bit over fifteen years.

This is a touch overwrought. If you make an online game people cheating at it and dealing with them is the cost of doing business. The people that the developers need to worry about aren't some random person learning to reverse their code and messing about but the companies that exist to do this for profit. A casual search shows that Among Us already has a burgeoning sector for this.

Further these public investigations are a great way for developers to see how people can reverse their game and fix the issues.

[pfisch]

A lot of the cheaters I have dealt with just distribute hacked apks for free. They make them with programs like this.

It forces us to make changes to the games that make them less performant, or with a bunch of delays for server checks. That degrades the quality of the game for all the real users.

[meheleventyone]

Yup it’s a pain but dealing with cheaters is the cost of doing business. I’m well aware of the annoyance and additional complexity that removing cheating opportunities takes. Thanks for writing something less inflammatory than the comment you started off with.

[pfisch]

It is a pain, but ultimately the users suffer. Dev time goes to this nonsense, and it also forces the game to literally run slower, especially for server side validating things like inventory.

No one should be releasing tools for the express purpose of simplifying the process of making these hacks. It has no real upside, and hurts a lot of people for no reason.

[meheleventyone]

We'll have to agree to disagree on that one. Security through obscurity is a terrible long term plan. Yes in a perfect world it would be lovely to be able to trust clients more. Even more so outside of games where the stakes are often higher. Sadly we don't live there.