Integrity in gaming

As an avid gamer integrity has come up as a frequent theme in discussing players in RPG campaigns: some gamers cheat with the dice or simply lie, as some gamers use cheat codes.  As the rulebook in Fate 2: Undiscovered Realms points out, you can cancel a quest to keep really amazing quest items for yourself instead of returning them.  Today was the first temptation in months…

At about level 150 I received a quest for an item.  Obtaining it, it basically triples the gold you receive, dramatically improves your magic, and multiplies all the damage you do by 2.5!  Talk about tempting….

But at the end of the day your ethics are your own – and with luck I’ll find one in the next 100 levels of playing!

Cheating, Hardcore Mode and the Leaderboard

There have been a lot of comments on WildTangent about the leaderboard and cheating.  I’ve been playing my friend’s game for a while and if I ended would be about #15 on the board.  Having found a number of the idiosyncrasies in the game,  I now believe say that the leaderboard was “hacked” – as opposed to cheating.  How did I get to that conclusion?  Easy: at 1.5 billion gold pieces my GP experienced “overflow”.

Overflow is when the number of bits used to represent information is less than is needed.  For integers , overflow makes really big numbers look negative.  Further, as the you add to these numbers, the negative numbers get smaller in magnitude – so they approach zero.

My gold piece total is negative, and as I sell items it gets closer to zero. Overflowing at a bit over a billion means Wild Tangent probably built the game using 32 bit integers.  Assuming that the experience counter was also built using a 32 bit integer, it also should have problems at above a billion.  However, may have taken the code apart to write a message to the leaderboard telling it that they scored the 2 billion high score.

FATE 2 Undiscovered Realms Solution

I recently “finished” FATE 2, going well beyond the quest to kill “Chaos” to having reached the highest level of “fame” in the game. I’ll start posting advice about the game if people are interested.