Hacks, cracks, cheats, exploits

A hacker is someone who makes a smart and skillful invention or tool; in computing, this is a set of code or script. The object is the hack.

A cracker is someone who breaks into a building or safe; in computing, this is a computer's hardware or software. The object is the crack.

A hacker or cracker may be employed and authorised to do this work, the latter to find weaknesses in a first-, other-, or third-party target. When not authorised, a breach may be prosecuted if it brings lost assets or productivity or if it threatens property, real or intellectual.

A cheater is someone who takes property after the breach; in gaming, this is to subvert or divert the standard rules of play—the cheat. For MMO games, cheaters are found and banned usually on the first offense. But for Kabam's MMOs, especially Edgeworld, many cheaters are reported to be suspended and to offend manifold times, and some are not banned.

One early cheat in this game used the HxD "hex editor" (slang for memory analyzer—however, terms for this tool other than the slang are usually unknown.) to modify the worth of memory registers, e. g. of the health, attack, speed, or range of offense and defense; store items; XP; crystal, gas, energy, and uranium; or warp count on the player's base file when loaded in RAM. Another cheat uses a "web debugger" (packet analyzer) to trap, read, write, and send JavaScript commands, e. g. build any-level building, attack shielded players, warp anywhere on Map, or warp anywhere on a base.

Battle damage and XP are watched by Edgeworld's server end; when these overreach a formula of the player's deployed troops against the base's defenses, the battle is forfeit, the player sees the trap's error message, and the player is automatically suspended indefinitely. Kabam's developers do not test their games on many configurations—for sundry CPUs, GPUs, monitors, and their settings—nor do they find and weed out the many significand and floating-point errors and process-priority conflicts in their malnumerate code, so either trap has wrongfully suspended thousands of players in Edgeworld who did better in a battle after lag on the client's end or after damage to buildings in a former warp. The longest thread on Edgeworld forum is devoted to players who were so suspended. Another trap suspends players who take a far Map node not adjacent to their territory, which can happen if another alliance take a near node on a chain within the 60-second refresh.

When suspended, the player may contact Support and must reply to their automated message or be forgotten. The moderation team with no names then look at the gameplay to deem whether it was foul. If the game was at fault or if the team find there was a small cheat—"violation of the Terms of Service" of Kabam, Facebook, or Google+ in their words even if the Terms had nothing to say of the trap—the suspension may be lifted in 3 to 17 days, or sooner if a Kabam employee raises your priority. The longer suspensions bear nothing on the size of the offense but on the neglect of the staff. Sometimes suspended accounts are seen by the team summarily without ticket and banned for either kind of cheat if great.

A third cheat needs no tools beyond the web browser, where the game misreckens a rule. At times the development team leave shoddy work on turrets. Late 2011, X-1 Cannons shot at Marines but couldn't scathe them. Then they shortly shot up other buildings in their splash, but this could be intentional. Long into 2012, troops could stand within the range of Concussion Turrets without being fired upon. In July, Heavyweight Turrets did not fire upon Specters in range. Early 2012, when a build that took Cerulean Cores or Incendiary Cores was cancelled early, the cores were gifted but not spent. Exploiters who did this often were found and banned. It seems whoever made use of a hole in gameplay who could help it and could leave behind records in the battle reports against their player files and in their player files against their transactions could be found and banned, whereas others stole by. Two cheats under Kabam's radar is that you can refresh midbattle and not lose any troops or send a battle report to another player (but still get a 6-minute warp penalty) and that you can play in two or three tabs at the same time, one for each base or the Defense Simulator, or one for each page of the Engineering Lab. Also, for the Defense Simulator, in a campaign with two or three waves if the earlier waves die shortly the other waves don't drop at all and the campaign is over with three stars; e.g. in Rise of the Terraknor 9100 the Pulse Tanks can die by a Neutron Mine and there'll be no Chimeras, or the Terraknors can die by a Neutron Mine and there'll be no Pulse Tanks.

Lastly is the use of scripts, called bots, to play the game perfectly or at length or to stay idle online without input from the user. Kabam do not tell us whether these users are suspended or banned, or how to tell whether someone is a user.