Sometimes mods expose hidden UIs that unlock features or allow players to ‘buy’ game objects/value without spending money ( ie : bypassing in-app purchases). game m ods range in scope from small additions of functionality all the way up to complete overhauls of a game. And within that cheating category, there are many different forms of modding. As I said, mods are one of the many different methods of cheating.
What are Mods and Tweaks?Ī mod ( short for “modification”) is an alteration by players of a video game that changes one or more aspects of the game, such as how it functions or behaves, or in which they change the values of the game to their own advantage. Whatever the game players’ nefarious motive, one of the most popular ways to achieve their cheating goals is by using or creating ‘mods or tweaks’ of a game. Or maybe they just want to disable mobile game advertising (who wants to sit through those pesky ads anyway, right?). Other times, the cheater’s intent is to simply disable a ‘license-checker’ so that they can play the ‘premium’ version of the game for free.
There are also techniques that allow the game cheater to advance in the game without putting in the required time and effort (for example, by modifying the game’s internal concept of time). Sometimes they cheat using automated tools that give the player ‘superhuman’ advantages (for example, auto-clickers, click bots, or auto macros). Sometimes they cheat by acquiring game skills, assets, ammunition, gold coins, without paying for them (bypassing in-app purchases). For example, sometimes players cheat by making their own character better, faster, stronger relative to the game or to other players (for example using speed hacking or memory editing). There are as many ways to cheat in mobile games as there are mobile games. In all instances, cheating, by definition, goes against the mobile developer or publisher’s intended use of the app. In mobile games, cheating happens in many different ways, but in all situations, the cheater gives themselves an unfair advantage that they uniquely enjoy at the expense of other players or at the expense of the game’s intended design. And finally, I’ll explain how developers and publishers can prevent cheating using several different methods – all without making changes to the app’s source code. Then, I will describe some advanced methods used by experienced programmers to modify mobile games to c heat (eg: dynamic memory injection, function/method hooking), as well as to create mods and tweaks for other gamers to cheat. I’ll start off by describing the most common cheating tools and how they work. In this series, I cover some of the most common ways players cheat in mobile games. Mobile game cheating i s a huge issue that plagues every mobile game developer and publisher by undermining monetization models as well as game integrity and trust.
You can find the other posts from this series listed in the final paragraph below. This article is part of a multi-post blog series about mobile game cheating. Enterprise Authentication and Mobile SSO.