Re:Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)
by candiddevmike on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @07:02PM
(#44314022)
I wish more games let folks choose to grind for things or just have everything unlocked without grinding. I already have a job, I just want to play a game without another grind. I know some people love the grind, but I don't, I much prefer the L4D style "play what you want, how you want".
It's a nice idea, but it won't be applicable to all games...
I'm thinking of Ark:Survival Evolved here, where the grind on 'official' servers is insane - for example taming a Wyvern required you to be online more or less every two hours for three days. On the unofficial servers these were downtuned so you could do things a bit more easily.
But when we briefly ran our own server and realised that we could use god-powers to get the stuff we wanted without the grind... it turned out there wasn't really anything of a game left.
The prequel to this game (which had a bit of a cult following due to its insane hardware reqs, but frankly the multiplayer gameplay is good and sorely missed) explicitly did not have any global leaderboard or score system - instead, the "leveling up" was per-game-session and it took merely ~10-15 kills (~20 mins on a busy server) to earn enough points to acquire all the weapons you needed.
I remember trying to hack the levelling-up mechanism on Crysis 2 - it worked by sending your post-game stats (client-side) to a master server, so editing those stats in memory before that happens would work (there seems to be no tracking of stats on the game server side - even though they could've had the game server relay that to the master server).
Memory is fuzzy but I think I managed to level up to a stage where I got the weapons I wanted. For my defense this kind of "cheating" only "cooked the books" on the leaderboards and did not give me any actual advantage in-game.