Hey all,

Tonight I decided to look into why sometimes some games don't save. It happens very rarely (if at all) on some maps, but on some other maps it happens very often (usually the maps with thousands of creeps in them).

I started watching the replays from this tournament where most of the players complained of scores not saving.

The first thing I noticed is most if not all of the scores in the 4 million point range played the map in a weird manner. At some point on the last level they sold towers to make themselves die. They could have easily left the towers where they were and got a much higher score... but they sold their towers so they lost all their lives.

What am I missing? I have to assume that these people know something I don't. If you didn't kill yourself at that point on the last level would your score not save?

Please tell me so I can fix this bug :)

Indeed Sparticus. There is a somewhere at 4+ million points you dont want to cross - if you do, your game won't save any more.

The best map where you can see this happening is the one where you have entrances covering the entire top field and exits at the bottom - where you only have one line middle where you can place towers. Sorry but I forgot the name and the author.

In this map it's a challenge to beat level 12 (you need to have a ready-to-burst vulcano at that point in time) from then on it's just waiting for the last level that contains too many creeps. sell your towers later than everybody else but before your score does not save - that's what we all did. 5 million points is too much (I gather too much creeps have passed) and 4.2 is not enough. I didn't go through a long number of tries to pinpoint exactly which is the top score, but if you find that map and the winner you'd have a nice place to start your search.

Good luck and thanks for caring,

MainstreaM

Hi,
This is one of my maps. Iknow, that the last wave has too much creep, but i've balanced it now from 99999 down to 20000 and made tham harder, so you will die.
And know, that a lot of scores weren't saved. On my first run my score wenen't saved too.

Sparticus said in an other thread something abut 64'000 actions per game, an then your score will not save, or something like that.

Ya, I am just trying to figure out what is causing the issue. The issue must have something to do with the size of the numbers of strings that are being sent in these types of games... if i can figure out exactly what the issue is, I should be able to solve it. databases can hold numbers MUCH bigger than 4 million.

Hmm, I might have found the issue.

I made a custom map where each creep gave 50,000 points each. I killed about 20,000 creeps. When my game ended my score saved properly. My score was over 1 billion.....lol

So that proves there is no bug regarding the size of your score.

For my next test I made a map with 100,000 creeps. I killed them all. When my game ended my score did NOT save.

I checked the logs and found an error. I looked up the error and found this article :

Click here to read

Basically my webserver doesn't allow for your score submission to be over 200K (killing that many creeps made the score submission huge).

So, to fix the problem I gotta allow uploads of a few megs to be safe. It'll require the site to go down for a few minutes so I'll do it late at night when there are few on :)

After I make the change I'll let you know. Let me know if it continues to happen :)

wow - thats a lot of data moving about - so this really isn't about score - its about the amount of data you need to send to the cheat checking app ?

Ya, exactly. The score obviously is only a few bytes of data.

In order for me to verify someone isn't cheating, I record every little detail about their game. What they clicked on, what they built, what creeps died and when, etc, etc, etc. Tons of info.

All this info is sent to the server and the server immediately calculates based on that data if your score is legit.

99% of fake score in other tower defence games are due to users editing their memory or editing the packets of info as they leave their computer. Doing that on BTGTD won't ever work and will flag you as a cheater 100% of the time. It also catches every other cheat possible.

As you know, the cheat detector is very complicated and not 100% bug free. It will very occasionally flag someone as a cheater when they are not. I try my best to check each flagged score and remove the flag if I think there was an error.

Hi,
when you have made the change with the Data upload I will start my old map with the 99999 creeps, to test, if everything work.

And a question about the cheaters: how can your detector decide if I cheatet or not, and can I see if I was flagged as cheater? Is it possible to remove this flag by my own?

In every tournament results page there is a "cheaters" tab. Click on that to see who cheated. You cannot change the flag only me :)

If you didn't cheat and it still flagged you as a cheater, let me know and I'll have a closer look at the logs for your game.

sorry to shift the topic to cheating...
i once started a 10sec lasting click map. i found out that many have a script that clicked for them on a maximum speed that is about once per frame. is it possible to detect those pattern of clicks and implement such a search for extremely fast rhythms clicked on power-up-to-points?
those scripts could be used on standard maps as well and make a unfair change in the end result.

best regards, crumb

I could detect people using programs to click fast for them, however it's hard to determine who is using a program and who can just click super fast. Also someone using the program could easily tell the program to only click 60 times a second instead of 1000 times a second to trick the cheat detector into thinking they are human.

i don't know about rounding numbers of clicks compared with framerate. but if 50 clicks appear with the Exact same small number of frames in between (like every 2nd frame) the case would be clear. the rest is difficult, i know...
those using the script had about 3 times (don't remember the exact numbers) higher score than my "nearly unbeatable" shaking arm. hmmmm. forget about that problem. not That important ;)

You could just have the up-points power-up have a refresh time like the nukes - once clicked it has to recharge before you can click it again.

I'm not saying I love the idea, but it would nip in the bud both clickfests and click scripts.

How about we just ban click maps - sorted

we dont rule a problem by fleeing it