Warning about trainers...

from Stardock Forums
One other thing,

Looking through the internal metaverse data I'm seeing some "cheater" notices.

I used to write trainers for other games so when I wrote the scoring in GalCiv, I made it look through the data in various ways to check to see if people were using trainers or had messed with their saved games. It flags stats that don't add up as "trainer user" when the metaverse info gets submitted.

So if you use a trainer or something, don't submit your metaverse score. We haven't decided on a final policy yet but at the very lieast we'll be deleting those scores and at worst we'll make scores from accounts that use trainers not count.
1,005 views 25 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
Brad, what will flag as a game that way? For instance, I noticed that The Terraformer and Tir-Quan training share the same ID, causing the Terraformer to not show up in the build list. So I edited the text file to allow me to build The Terraformer. I have done NO edits to any save games. Will this "flag" my score?

-Dave

~SDC~
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
David this sounds like rather important catch. What file and value should be changed and to what?

~SDC~
ObjectDock - Access shortcuts and frequently used applications from an animated dock.
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
Nevermind. I found it in wonders.imp. I changed the ID to 12.

~SDC~
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
as did I. Cari is aware of this problem, and let me know that their ID will also be 12 once the file is updated. It had been fixed, but was not updated in the final release version.

~SDC~
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
So those multi-million point scores that made the Metaverse today are legit, and I'm just really bad at the game huh? I think I already knew that :)
Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top
He was kidding.

Yea, we fixed the wonders.imp internally but haven't updated galciv yet because at the time bandwidth was so tiny we didn't want to ask people to have to do an update right away. ;)

Next week.
Reply #10 from Stardock Forums Top
Ummm.... No I wasn't. Ralph Crosswhite has a 2.3 *MILLION* point score listed. O.K., I exagerated, as there's only one, the second highest score is only just over a million. Still quite a bit higher than my score. (which since I got it on beginner, I'd expect it to be so).
Reply #11 from Stardock Forums Top
Brad, is Popup Target somehow seeing the old beta scores for the Metaverse? They were in the millions. Target, what URL are you seeing (please cut and paste).

-Dave

~SDC~
Reply #12 from Stardock Forums Top
O.K., maybe I got lost and wasn't looking at what I thought I was, because I just went back there, and the scores are gone *AND* the page looks like it's formatted differently.
Reply #14 from Stardock Forums Top
O.K., I can reproduce the bug now. Click on "Metaverse" at the top of any page to go to the Metaverse. Go to page 2, either by clicking on "2" or clicking on "Next". Then, click on the "Back" link (not the browser's back button, the link at the bottom of the list of scores).

Presto, you're now looking at a list that includes the current "real" scores (which is why I didn't suspect something had gone wrong) and some other, outrageously high scores.
Reply #15 from Stardock Forums Top
Hey, David, you're second on that list at 1.25M :)
Reply #16 from Stardock Forums Top
No amount of clearing caches has gotten rid of it, and I've never seen that page before anyway. And it has my score on it which was only posted today, so it couldn't have been a very old cache.

Anyway, the URL is http://www.galciv.com/metaverse/highscores.asp?page=1

Glad to know I've only got to improve by a factor of 10 (and then catch up with the improvements that the top players have made in the mean time) rather than a factor of 10000.
Reply #18 from Stardock Forums Top
Wierder, now I'm getting the same 885K score, but I confirmed the score before I typed it earlier. At any rate, once I started paying attention to the URL, it's pretty obvious what the problem is. The "Back" link is pointing to the old version of the Metaverse (note the .../highscores.asp?... rather than .../index.asp?...)
Reply #20 from Stardock Forums Top
David, so if you go to the second page, then hit the back link under the person in 50th place, you go back to the correct first page?
Reply #21 from Stardock Forums Top
Sorry, I was hitting the back button on my browser (very stupid of me). Yeah, I see the metaverse/highscores.asp now instead of metaverse/index.asp.

Good catch Popup.

-Dave

~SDC~
Reply #22 from Stardock Forums Top
Nah, not stupid. At least not any more stupid than things I do on a daily basis. BTW, what's that last icon under your name? I think the first is your empire or team, and I know the next two are rank and award for having won at least X games with a score over Y, but the last one is throwing me.
Reply #23 from Stardock Forums Top
Oops, wrong medal, that one is a "Top 25" medal.

At any rate, I'll shut up now, sorry for hijacking the thread.
Reply #24 from Stardock Forums Top
That last one is an SDCentral logo, that says that I am posting throught he Discussion are of StarDock Central.

-Dave

~SDC~
Reply #25 from Stardock Forums Top
How... that didn't take long at all :(

I can understand cheating, but not against other players (aka metaverse).

Guess it's too late to renew my call for "official" cheats (so as to discourage trainers).

Oh well.

~SDC~