Reverse engineering MCOC

Storminhu

Anyone watched the vid from Blizzard on how easy it is to modify this game?
@DNA3000 curious if you think it's legit

Comments

Storminhu

Courtesy of great man @RichTheMan

https://youtu.be/9hdJvaky79g

Wozzle007

Obviously modding is absolutely abhorrent and everyone doing it should be permanently banned. Watching the video, it’s doesn’t look exactly that difficult to do. I really hope this video is either massively oversimplifying how easy it is, or pushes Kabam to put even more resources into protecting the game.

Chatterofforums

Unfortunately this problem will likely never be resolved or even close to resolved until Kabam starts a zero tolerance on it with first offense permanent ban. Which very unfortunately from everything I can tell they have no intentions of do that, which is kind of ridiculous at this point.

Noob_Master69

Obviously modding is absolutely abhorrent and everyone doing it should be permanently banned. Watching the video, it’s doesn’t look exactly that difficult to do. I really hope this video is either massively oversimplifying how easy it is, or pushes Kabam to put even more resources into protecting the game.

I haven't watched the full video, but as someone currently in school for Computer Science and with an interest in game development and things like that. It IS that easy. Big "problem" comes from the fact that the game is made in the Unity Engine, Unity games are notoriously easy to reverse engineer and mod.

A good recent example can be the Pokemon games released last year: Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. Those games were made using Unity and because of that they were broken apart and modded within days(maybe even hours not quite sure on how fast it went).

I'm sure there is something that can be done to make it harder to reverse engineer but the point is, people will find a way. The best Kabam can do is increase ways to detect mods and punish people harder for it. Trying to stop people from modding altogether is a losing battle especially when there is cash to be made

Stellar

No wonder why there are so many cheater on MCOC if that easy to reverse engineer and modify the game.
There are probably cheaters around who found a way to modify the code without being detected by Kabam...

DNA3000

Anyone watched the vid from Blizzard on how easy it is to modify this game?
@DNA3000 curious if you think it's legit

I haven’t watched all of Blizzard25’s RE streams in full, but it looks pretty reasonable to me. As in reasonably likely to be accurately executed technique, not reasonable to perform.

I should point out that while it is much more straight forward to unpack games like MCOC that use frameworks like Unity without obfuscation, back in the day we people used to do this all the time with games that did not use standardized frameworks. The fact that MCOC doesn’t employ resource countermeasures wouldn’t have a significant impact on determined modders. In fact, most modding does not attempt to reverse engineer the games they target. That’s overkill. I haven’t been in the scene for over a decade now, but the state of the art back then was memory scanning not resource decompiling. Unless there was a nuclear war that wiped out all of civilization recently and destroyed those techniques and I just didn’t notice, hardening MCOC against resource decompiling wouldn’t stop modding.

If I was determined to hack the game, there's four specific techniques I would try to both succeed and evade detection. None of them involve specifically doing what Blizzard25 is apparently attempting to demonstrate. None of which I would describe publicly either. Conversely, if someone were to try to deconstruct the game's resources and replace them with altered versions, I can think of a couple ways to detect that and ban them into the next century. Kabam could attempt to harden their game code, or they could invest in better detection of this specific kind of alterations, which would probably be much easier.