Cheaters have been around since the dawn of gaming, and — controversial opinion here — sometimes developers are partly to blame for their existence. Say a dev unintentionally introduces a bug that can be exploited. A player stumbles upon it, gets hooked on the rush of “breaking the system,” and voilà — a cheater is born. We’re not talking about hardcore hackers running elaborate software, I mean the ones who exploit bugs. If they’re handed the opportunity, many can’t resist.
At Rockbite Games, we’ve been dealing with cheaters since DeepTown. We’ve spent hours talking to them, studying their behavior, and understanding their motivations. Turns out, exploiting bugs and loopholes triggers a rush of adrenaline and dopamine. Some players get so caught up in it, they can’t go back to playing normally.
We’ve tried all sorts of approaches to deal with cheaters, including creating separate “hell servers” where chronic offenders can battle it out among themselves. They’re always welcome to create a clean account and start fresh with everyone else, but many cheaters just can’t bring themselves to return. It’s a vicious cycle.
Of course, we could have built all our games with airtight backends, servers, and cheat-proof systems from the get-go. But let’s be real: that’s a massive resource sink, especially when you don’t even know if the game will succeed. Plus, prototypes evolve constantly, and balancing client and backend logic during development slows everything down — a luxury most mobile devs can’t afford.
We tried going full backend-first with Sandship, and while it worked, the effort and resources involved were overwhelming. That’s why we still lead with the client-side build and handle cheaters later.
If there’s a game, there’s bound to be someone trying to exploit it. But we’re making progress in keeping those numbers down. Ignoring cheaters isn’t an option, especially when leaderboards are involved. A single cheater can ruin the experience for everyone else, killing the motivation to compete and eroding the sense of challenge.
The hunt begins
When cheaters first started showing up in our games, we took a proactive approach: infiltrating their forums and chats, pretending to be regular players. These spaces are absolute goldmines of QA intel. Cheaters openly share bugs, exploits, and loopholes. All we had to do was grab the intel, act fast, and roll out fixes.
Take the time we introduced a leaderboard reward system that gave players gems whenever the top spot changed hands. Sounds great, right? Except two players realized they could keep swapping places to farm currency endlessly.
Or the time players figured out how to start multiple battles in the arena simultaneously by pressing the start button repeatedly during animation sequences.
Even if we had monitoring systems for abnormal activity, it would’ve taken longer to catch these exploits than simply lurking in cheater forums.
Surprisingly, communication with cheaters can be productive. We’ve offered some of them rewards — like free gems — for reporting bugs instead of exploiting them. These players go on a whitelist to ensure they’re not accidentally banned. As long as they test a bug just once to confirm it exists and then report it, we’re more than happy to reward their honesty.
But for those who go beyond bug exploitation — using third-party programs or modifying code to gain an unfair advantage — they get sent to the infamous “hell server.” There, they can cheat to their heart’s content… against other cheaters. The funny thing is, a lot of them seem to enjoy it.
How LiveOps turned the tables
Our LiveOps management system brought a new level of visibility to player behavior — and cheaters weren’t exempt, even though we didn’t mention them when we discussed the system in detail. For instance, it shows real-time player achievements to everyone on a server. If someone’s making suspiciously fast progress, it’s hard not to notice.
When players see someone cheating their way to the top, it undermines trust in the game and saps motivation to compete.
On one hand, this has made us much more vigilant when it comes to spotting cheaters. On the other, it’s paving the way for automating the entire process. Right now, it’s a semi-manual system — the platform flags suspicious activity, and we step in to decide what action to take. Eventually, once we’re confident in its accuracy, we’ll let the system handle bans automatically.
Currently, we’ve implemented scripts that focus on two key indicators: players who accumulate an unusually high number of gems without spending any, and discrepancies between client-side and server-side data — like when the client logs ten purchases, but the server only sees two. We’ve also encrypted these numbers to prevent tampering, allowing us to track inconsistencies and flag accounts for review.
This approach has already significantly reduced the number of reports we receive. Next stop: full automation.
Making peace with the king of cheaters
We even had our own infamous anti-hero with a not-so-family-friendly username who basically became a local celebrity in the cheating community.
Naturally, our entire dev team infiltrated their chat. What started as a general community space quickly turned into a hub for cheaters openly sharing bugs, exploits, and advice. The best part? They had no idea developers were lurking among them.
The “king” was the go-to guy for advice. He had amassed an absurd number of gems, collected nearly every known hacking method, and built a reputation that spread by word of mouth.
To counter him, we rewrote significant portions of the game, rendering his tools useless. We even printed T-shirts with the phrase: “I am %CHEATERNAME% now” in advance.
The plan was simple: once the update went live and his cheating methods failed, we’d drop the T-shirt image into the chat as an Easter egg. Anticipating that moment made working on the update ridiculously fun.
When the update rolled out, we posted the photo. He was the first to see it and responded with a resigned, “Well, that’s it.” Needless to say, we were thrilled.
What’s even cooler is what happened next: he stopped cheating altogether. He told us he was done with it, didn’t want to be relegated to a hell server, and actually kept his word. We verified that he’d removed all his hacking tools and was playing clean.
We would’ve sent him the T-shirt, but he probably wouldn’t have shared his address.
In the end, even something as frustrating as cheaters turned into a valuable learning experience for us. It pushed us to improve our systems and made working on updates a lot more enjoyable.
As a bonus, we’ve also started building our own official channels. Thanks to our LiveOps management system, we can track who’s active there and even reward players for participating. It turns out it’s much more appealing for players to hang out in our official spaces than in cheating-focused communities.
