I Have a Question about why people cheat and how.

Ban them...Im tired of this BS when im trying to get on the high score list and theres people with scores that are impossible to get. I know im not the only one that feels this way.

i agree...i mean...you basically have to FC any song to get into the high scores...and when you do you are only in like...hmmm...let me get a good number.....30th or so place(not sure how high it goes) becuase you have the hackers taking up like 20 spots and other people who play the game A LOT take up the other 9...so yeah...we need action...ACTION!!!!

Go vellhart and hund woohoo!

hey i started this thread and i just wanted to say i finally got on the high score list twice! #41 on seatles finest which is the worst song ever created and thats why. And Im # 44 on the mario song, and yeah i know its cheap to get on that one but i got on. I complety agree that anyone who has a score that is compeltely over the possible score should be banned by synth. Later

i have FC high scores on dendrite (second row somewhere) and ff7 (almost last) and i did pretty good...i got 0 average on dendrite...i thought i would be higher than that...but hey at least i get some fun for the time being...seeings they might have to reset scores again to see if the fix will work

Last time I checked, I was #24 on waltz.

Some points

I'm awfully curious, now, how you could assure that whatever data is sent back to the server isn't sent by a hacked client. Flash isn't very secure -- although I wouldn't cheat at this, I have had instances where it was useful to hack a flash app, and there are loads of disassembler programs that make it pretty easy. So unless you have some sort of way to authenticate the client sending data that itself can't be hacked (a simple checksum, etc. can be faked) I question the infallibility of your security.

On the stepbot side of things:

All a stepbot would have to do to be absolutely indistinguishable from a person would be to send arrow key presses to the client at the right times. The problem is the right times. I see two approaches to this.

One could try to literally "watch" the arrows, using low-level video, and press at the appropriate time. This sounds decent, but I haven't done any programming similar to this, and it might be much harder than I imagine.

Alternatively, one could simply program in the times for arrow presses, after a while of trial and error. I imagine a song would take half an hour to perfect with this technique -- I'd start by recording a playthrough of the song myself into timed presses, and then adjusting "good" steps back and forth until a sufficient number become "perfect"s. One solution to this that occurs to me would be to implement a small random gap at the start of the song each time; I'm not sure how a program would overcome that without a lot of kludging around.

In any case, I think a dedicated hacker wouldn't have a whole lot of trouble breaking the system. Luckily, it's more fun just to play =)

Synth, or anyone else in the know, let me know if I've made any bad assumptions here, or missed any points.