Re: Ultimate General: Civil War Early Access Cheat Engine
Josephine Heathershaw
Basically, we have to reverse games to know where the game stores different information, like your players health, position, and weapon. Reverse engineering involves taking an executable you get when you buy the game, and seeing where the code stores information.
I've only read some stuff on the DMCA, but I am unsure if this qualifies for it. Most games have an "anti-cheat" which try to detect people who use cheats and ban them from the game. As a cheat developer, you have to bypass these counter measures, and sometimes these counter measures are present in the executable in the form of packing / obfuscation which just makes it harder to analyze.
The relevant legal concepts are copyright, contract law and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. You are liable to be sued by the people affected for damages and/or be prosecuted by the government for the felony under either or both laws.
Let's start here: "I bought a game". No, you didn't; you bought a licence to use the software in accordance with the terms of service (licence) that you freely agreed to. All modern ToS will not allow you to reverse engineer the software.
If you breach those terms of service then you have broken a contract - that is what allows them to sue you. They will no doubt argue that the prevalence of cheat routines developed by people like you reduce the number of people willing to play the game - say 100,000 users x $10/month * 12 months = $12,000,000. They will also ask the court to impose punitive damages to discourage this sort of thing.
Which brings us to the copyright violation. You are allowed to copy their software provided you comply with the ToS. But you didn't. Therefore you are in breach of the Copyright Act and subject to additional civil and criminal sanctions.
Finally, your "cheats" access their servers in a way that the ToS doesn't authorize. This puts you in breach of the CFFA - breaking this carries serious jail time penalties. Not to mention that in the US, a criminal conviction will preclude you from many jobs, including, naturally, any with access to company computer systems.
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
Since you don't have permission to create a derivative work (and don't seem to qualify for an exception like fair use), you're infringing the owner's exclusive right to do this. You are therefore officially infringing.
You say you're selling it, so almost certainly it's for private financial gain, and I can't describe your infringement as anything but willful. So you appear to qualify for criminal charges, if the federal government felt like prosecuting you.
So, on a first offense, it's up to 5 years in federal prison assuming you're doing at least 10 copies and $2500 worth of infringing software per 180 days, and up to 1 year in federal prison if you're doing less business than that.
When you talk about creating a "cheat" or a "hack" for a video game you could be talking about a myriad of different things, which is what I assume has confused the other posters into giving incorrect and misguided information in response to your question (especially surrounding the negative stigma of the word hack in the legal field).
Let's discuss this under US law and make a few assumptions, which is what I assume you mean by a game cheat. By making these assumptions we can avoid a lengthy discussion on topics such as wire fraud, money laundering, racketeering, etc.
To be clear - they are selling a software. They are not 'reselling' a modified version of the game. Which is why anti-cheat measures are in place. They are selling their own product which is capable of modifying a game while playing it. Selling a cheat isn't illegal. You are not breaking the ToS if your not the one using it. The EULA is by definition END USER license agreement. The consumer purchases the cheat they are breaking their own EULA. If I am to take a game and resell it for my own personal financial gain than yes thats copyright. But if I am selling my own software that just so happens to be able to incorporate itself into their software. Thats a simple ToS breach by the END USER.
I don't think much of people who cheat in multiplayer games, nor do I have a high opinion of people who sell these hacks... But making the hacks is not a breach of contract due to a loophole created by the DMCA.
It is illegal to reverse engineer software if that is against the onerous terms of service you sign when you install it. And all software (excepting FOSS) have language against reverse engineering their software (spoil sports).
So if you are reverse engineering a piece of software for the purpose of transferring information to/from another piece of software (say a cheat engine). Then that reverse engineering is being performed for the express purpose of interoperability, as such it is legal according to the DMCA. (Note, this legal loophole is something that I am aware of because reverse engineering ancient software so that I can write a communication interface between it and something else, is something that I have done. And the lawyers said it was legal).
So from that perspective. This is not in violation... That being said a lot of games have TOS against cheating, and technically this is creating a program whose sole purpose is to help an individual break the TOS. It is a dark grey area.
Can't stop being amazed by what such i small team of dedicated people (with very limited ressources) can achieve compared to the massive multi-team giant that is creative assembly now. The depth of gameplay and authenticity of each of their title is a delight for History-nerds & strategy fans alike. The best part being the scope of each title which are more and more ambitious than the previous ones !
Of course, it's been going downhill for a long time, and needs another RTS to step up and take it's place, or at the very least push Creative Assembly to put more effort and "creativity" into their work.
Too me the last great total war was Shogun 2. It's expansions were massive and fun to play, even though Rise of the Samurai is probably the weakest part of that game. It also suffered from lack of unit variety in rosters, but that was the sengoku jidai, a bunch of ashigaru and samurai killing one another with daimyo trying to seize power. Shogun 2 had an overall fun campaign, nice rock paper scissors combat, and a diplomacy that made a little sense, even if the AI aggravated me. I also liked that the endgame essentially was you're too powerful, kill everyone and take control of japan.
Recent total wars just seem more focused on "Bigger is Better" which in some way can be true, but i don't feel like i care for the armies anymore. Playing rome2 or the warhammer games tends to leave me bored, since the ai is still predictable and generally will work with factions they hate to come after you. I think while Paradox games themselves have glaring flaws in their news game(CK3 and Vicky3) the AI isn't left up to chance with certain factors, Paradox instead chose to give them "historical rivals" which helps them work towards beating that person first and foremost.
Same for me. Shogun 2 was the last CA game that I enjoyed. I had such high hopes for Rome 2 but after what I consider a complete fisaco of a game, I pretty much wrote them off. Imperator: Rome was the final straw for me with Paradox. Funny how Rome titles ended my hope for the two big strategy companies for me! UG: American Revolution looks like Game-Labs is going the extra mile to add realistic; thoughtful, and enjoyable mechanics. I check every day for word on early access on Steam!
i think my only real issues with UG:CW were
1. The AI cheats, yeah i get that you need a challenge here and there, but the Union campaign was far easier than the confederate one. You'd have an Enemy who no matter how hard you stomped him into the ground would be back full strength to fight. Which at first was ok, because you get the recruits to replace your losses, but it soon turns into the AI outnumbers you and has level 3 units galore
2. i wished for more micro in army management, like for regiment level organization and the such. i think brigade level worked for some battles but for others it was too big, like with gettysburg where it wasn't so much brigade on brigade combat, it was regiments fighting off regiments or even brigades in the 1stMN's case. i'm glad to see that UG:1775 has company level, since it makes more since due to the scale of the game.
Who knows what they actually have planned, though. The screenshots they've released look really promising. For me, the lack of dynamic campaign beyond army sizes really limited the replayability of Ultimate General: Civil War. But if they can pull this game off, and I think they absolutely can, it bodes well for any future games in the gunpowder era (Napoleonics, Civil War 2, Crimean War, Wars of the 18th Century, etc)
The market for cheating in video games has grown year after year, incentivizing game developers to implement stronger anti-cheat solutions. A significant amount of game companies have taken a rather questionable route, implementing more and more invasive anti-cheat solutions in a desperate attempt to combat cheaters, still ending up with a game that has a large cheating community. This choice is understandable. A significant amount of cheaters have now moved into the kernel realm, challenging anti-cheat developers to now design mitigations that combat an attacker who shares the same privilege level. However, not all game companies have followed this invasive path, some opting to use anti-cheats that reside in the user-mode realm.
I've seen a significant amount of cheaters approach user-mode anti-cheats the same way they would approach a kernel anti-cheat, often unknowingly making the assumption that the anti-cheat knows everything, and thus approaching them in an ineffective manner. In this article, we'll look at how to leverage our escalated privileges, as a cheater, to attack the insecure design these unprivileged solutions are built on.
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