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Legends run anti merc idea

GraydroxGraydrox Posts: 413 ★★★
in General Discussion
Maybe make it to where you have to submit for a legends run prior to starting it. And the game will block your entry if the device you are using has not been the sole device running the account for the last umpteen days.

Not sure if these games can detect the unique device you are using to operate it. Just an idea.

Ilacskills came up with a different idea a week or so ago, which inspired me to think about other ways mercs can be thwarted. Anybody else have any ideas to stop the cheating?

Comments

  • DNA3000DNA3000 Posts: 18,657 Guardian
    Graydrox said:

    Maybe make it to where you have to submit for a legends run prior to starting it. And the game will block your entry if the device you are using has not been the sole device running the account for the last umpteen days.

    Not sure if these games can detect the unique device you are using to operate it. Just an idea.

    Ilacskills came up with a different idea a week or so ago, which inspired me to think about other ways mercs can be thwarted. Anybody else have any ideas to stop the cheating?

    If I recall correctly, ilac proposed using biometric login to deter mercs. That won't work for the simple reason that the biometric authentication happens at the device, in other words Kabam doesn't get that information. Kabam only is told that the device authenticated the user (at least I'm certain this is true for Apple devices). If you were to give your account information to a merc, the merc could still just biometrically authenticate on their device. And that has to work, because that's the same process a normal player would have to be able to accomplish if they bought a new phone. Kabam won't know a merc was biometrically authenticating to your account, only that the device passed biometrics correctly with someone.

    I'm more familiar with how Apple does this than Google, but Apple generates a vendor ID that it gives to the app vendors which cannot be tracked back to the physical device, but does uniquely identify the device. So if you log in with your phone and then later with your iPad, Kabam will know. Theoretically, Kabam could tell if a completely different device was being used for a legends run than what you normally use. There's no direct way to tell the difference between a user getting a new phone and a merc logging into your account, however.

    You can't block entry if the device is not the "sole" device the player uses, because many players use multiple devices. But you could theoretically enforce a waiting period where if a user gets a new device they can't use it for legends runs for some period of time, say two weeks. But that wouldn't stop mercs from working around that limitation by simply logging into a player's account first, waiting out the window, and then doing the run.

    I won't explain why, but another thing that doesn't work is you can't limit a device to only one player for the purposes of legends runs. There's a technical gotcha that would make this not work against any technically knowledgeable merc.

    One thing that would significantly inconvenience mercs would be this rule: the device used to perform the run must also be the device the rewards are collected on, and no more than one player ID can collect legends rewards on a single device. This can still be worked around, but it requires technical knowledge of precisely what this rule does, and technical skill in bypassing its effects (which I also won't discuss).
  • GraydroxGraydrox Posts: 413 ★★★


    "You can't block entry if the device is not the "sole" device the player uses, because many players use multiple devices. "

    I'm just saying, if it was a rule that people would have to abide by that maybe it could work in theory. They could use their multiple devices whenever they want but whenever they want to do a legends run they have to stick to their one device for a few days prior and during.

    "I won't explain why, but another thing that doesn't work is you can't limit a device to only one player for the purposes of legends runs"

    I'm not saying you have to limit the device to only one player. I'm saying that the device the account has been using is the one and only device that can do the legends run. You can use that device for other accounts sure.


    Thanks for the feedback though. You know your stuff.
  • DNA3000DNA3000 Posts: 18,657 Guardian
    Graydrox said:

    I'm just saying, if it was a rule that people would have to abide by that maybe it could work in theory. They could use their multiple devices whenever they want but whenever they want to do a legends run they have to stick to their one device for a few days prior and during.

    If I am paying a merc to do a legends run, it is a small price to pay to just stop logging in for a few days, so that the merc is the only person logging into my account and thus only one device is the device in use for the few days prior to the run. For this type of restriction to work it has to be much longer than a few days, but the longer the restriction is the more arbitrary the penalty becomes on players legitimately using multiple devices.

    Another thing that can happen is suppose someone decides to do a legends run and legitimately performs the run, spending a lot of time and money on it, and then their phone breaks. By switching phones they invalidate their run. But if they don't switch phones they lose calendar rewards and potentially participation in alliance events.

    This isn't going to happen to someone using a merc, because they are going to arrange things to ensure they don't need to do anything during the window, and furthermore the merc can ensure they don't lose any login rewards during the window also.
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