Cheating Players
by punishertrdOriginal Post
So, just thought I'd post this here from a game dev:
RedwoodGasty
1 point
·
3 minutes ago
Hello! I can provide some information about this. I'll go into some technical detail for those curious, but with a TL;DR at the bottom.
Rivals is a deterministic game. What this means is that we've done a ton of work to make sure if given the same set of inputs 100,000,000 times, it will play out exactly the same way every time.
This means the game does not need to be server authoritative the way most games are. There isn't a central authority on what actually happened. The server isn't saying "Unit X is at position Y and is doing Z damage". Instead, the server is simply like a mirror. It reflects commands to both players. So you tell your predator tank to move up three hexes, that command gets reflected to your opponent and their client plays out the simulation. Both clients, if using identical game tuning, results in the exact same scenario, and everything syncs up! The advantage to this is our network traffic is extremely tiny compared to server authoritative games, which is great for mobile! Less data used when not on wi-fi!
However, a side effect of this is that since the server isn't the authority on what happened, players could cheat. Someone could have their client say "I just spawned 50 predator tanks at once" and the server would just reflect that, without validating it, since it doesn't actually have any gameplay logic running. So what stops cheating? Well, when two clients give different results, they both lose "trust". If one player is cheating, his results will differ every game, whereas their opponents would only differ in that one game where they played the cheater. As a result, the cheater will always have a lower trust score. We take the actual game results of the higher trusted player. And viola! The cheater doesn't actually get anything for his cheating. It may say he won, but he correctly loses medals since he would've lost. This is what is happening to you.
So! You aren't cheating, so why are you experiencing this? Well, unfortunately, because of a bug. Our downloadable content system allows us to deliver unit tuning and other game configuration data without doing a full app store version update, which is nice since we can do it a lot more quickly (since we don't have to wait for Google or Apple certification). However, there is a bug that for a tiny amount of users, a small percentage of the time, they will basically fail to get the new data for some files, but their game thinks it did and as a result doesn't try to re-get it.
TLDR
A specific unit of yours may have different data than everyone else in the game and behave slightly differently. This might mean that it lives on your screen where it dies on theirs, meaning you had control of a missile on your game and "won" where on their screen they killed it, they controlled the missile, and they won. We call this a desync. Since your game is the one with the problem, you're reporting different results every match (unlike your opponent), and you're losing "trust" score with the game, causing the game to take your opponents results instead of yours. To fix it, you need to cause the game to redownload all of its files so it can do it correctly. Reinstalling should fix it. We also wipe out all config data and force re-download it when we do app store updates, so getting a new version from the app-store should also fix it.
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So this means punisherTRD lost trust with the server in our match because he was cheating 
(Okay, he probably wasn't, but since he won't back down on his allegations, I'll make my own developer backed ones! )
So now you know the truth. PunisherTRD's account has a low trust score with the official rivals server for a reason.
No, slandering someone is when after the game happened, accepting a private invite to a private discord, having people chat and try to figure out in a civil manner what could have gone wrong and possible solutions and trying to find your issue, then going and posting all this "Battalia is a cheater" AFTER the fact. That is slander.
I could also care less if he never comes back. Fact is, he called me out for cheating when the server has called him out multiple times for cheating. He probably just didn't have the download, sure, but it's still no excuse for his actions, even after our talk and me asking him very polity easy things, but he refused to be civil.
But hey, if you take issue to me trying to clean my own name, then perhaps you are the one that needs to step back and examine the situation from a less biased perspective hm? 
@infantyman9244 wrote:
Also with you being in another country might have been the one with a lower trust score. Did you ever think about that?
No, I never did think about that. Let me do so now:
Okay.
Hmmm.
Outcome: Nope. Still PunisherTRD with the lower trust score because he got the de-synch, and hes had MANY de-synchs, so it was his fault. My trust score is fine as I've never been the victim of a de-synch. Glad we had this moment however! 
