How can I hack online games?
darshit karkar, Gaming since 1990
Rule number one: You don't.
But as a theoretical exercise:
Online games work on a server-client principle: There is a remote server and then there are local clients, like the "game" you are running when playing. They communicate using a clearly defined PROTOCOL, which defines what data is sent by the server to the client, and what data is sent from the client to the server. If you can intercept this communication and replace/modify it in such a way that
(a) the modified communication follows the protocol, and
(b) neither the client nor the server can realize the communication has been tampered with,
then you have "hacked" the game.
There are ways in which they can make hacking either impossible or cost-prohibitive (it would cost more to achieve the result with hacking than via normal play). Furthermore, it is possible and indeed common that the company behind the game is doing follow-up reviews/analyses of the communication/data, and when they discover suspicious patterns, they can act on those discoveries.
Example: Imagine an MMO which was designed in such a way that every dungeon has a treasure chest at the end which, when opened, spawns a random amount of precious gold, ranging from 10 to 10.000. Let's say that the "random roll of the dice" is done by the client. In that case, you might hack the communication of your client telling the server how much you got, and force it to always say "I got 10.000 gold". It would work perfectly each time - but a month from now, the company will run a review of all treasure drops of each player, and discover that you got 20 dungeon treasures, each at 10.000 gold. Now since chances of such result are only 1:100000000......0, they will realize that you hacked the game, and ban your account.
But as a theoretical exercise:
Online games work on a server-client principle: There is a remote server and then there are local clients, like the "game" you are running when playing. They communicate using a clearly defined PROTOCOL, which defines what data is sent by the server to the client, and what data is sent from the client to the server. If you can intercept this communication and replace/modify it in such a way that
(a) the modified communication follows the protocol, and
(b) neither the client nor the server can realize the communication has been tampered with,
then you have "hacked" the game.
There are ways in which they can make hacking either impossible or cost-prohibitive (it would cost more to achieve the result with hacking than via normal play). Furthermore, it is possible and indeed common that the company behind the game is doing follow-up reviews/analyses of the communication/data, and when they discover suspicious patterns, they can act on those discoveries.
Example: Imagine an MMO which was designed in such a way that every dungeon has a treasure chest at the end which, when opened, spawns a random amount of precious gold, ranging from 10 to 10.000. Let's say that the "random roll of the dice" is done by the client. In that case, you might hack the communication of your client telling the server how much you got, and force it to always say "I got 10.000 gold". It would work perfectly each time - but a month from now, the company will run a review of all treasure drops of each player, and discover that you got 20 dungeon treasures, each at 10.000 gold. Now since chances of such result are only 1:100000000......0, they will realize that you hacked the game, and ban your account.
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