If it’s so easy, a teenager can mod this game…

Skydad23

Why would it not be equally as easy for a company worth hundreds of millions to detect it? Honest question.

Comments

Eb0ny-O-M4w

Are teenagers the ones creating the mods?

klobberintyme

Why would it not be equally as easy for a company worth hundreds of millions to detect it? Honest question.

1) the path they choose developing a game 8 years ago that puts just enough important stuff in the local environment (your device) that can be tweaked means the good modders will never even be suspected and the lazy ones can just crank out more is what it is.
2) the millions mean nothing. Tell your boss you want to hire x people for a task that generates no revenue. Ask zazlav, Zuckerberg, iger why they're laying off as much when they're generating billions.
3) tell them you'll work for free. See if they take you up on it.

Colinwhitworth69

Your question makes zero sense. Maybe less.

DNA3000

Why would it not be equally as easy for a company worth hundreds of millions to detect it? Honest question.

Two things. First, when someone says "even a teenager can do it" that's not exactly true. It would take a fairly talented teenager to mod this game, but that teenager is not working in a vacuum. They are working with tools built by others to do it. A four year old can go to the moon, if they can crawl into the capsule and a multibillion dollar space program run by thousands of people gets them there. But that's not exactly an accomplishment. What most people are doing when they mod this game is akin to what we call "script kiddies" in the security world: so-called "hackers" who just download other people's work and use it.

Second, detecting mods would be trivially easy if not for the fact that the modders can access their own phone, but the developers cannot. So they can't just "check for changes." Instead they have to indirectly detect the effects of game mods on how the game behaves. They look for things the game client does that should not happen if it was unaltered. The specifics are something I don't discuss as a rule.

There are more sophisticated ways to detect mods that would work for some games but not MCOC for historical design reasons. Without explanation, MCOC does not, or rather did not have as much client-server telemetry as some other games did to make it more efficient when running on mobile devices. This reduced the work required to make the game function, but also cost opportunities to detect malfunctions and game mods. Some games like traditional MMOs can also attempt to use their lag prediction algorithms to also validate game function. Games that run on traditional PCs can resort to security software that works in the background, but those do not work on mobile devices.

There are also some very tricky modern technology that can help, and Kabam is pursuing some of those and not others in more recent times. I will not make a list of either.