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Having played the classic Neopets Flash arcade when I was younger, I am curious about their anticheat-- presumably since the Neopets arcade games were run within the browser, client-side, they would be susceptible to cheats. What I'm curious about is what features existed on the website to mitigate cheating.

I've seen references to scores being "too high" and thus being "investigated" by the team, but I suspect this is literally just a score cutoff with some measure of human intervention.

What, if any, anti-cheat is utilized by classic Neopets flash arcade games?

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  • Why do you want an anticheat system in your project? Are you just trying to have a faithful reproduction? Or do you foresee other people using your project to a degree to which you would want to worry about cheaters? Any (non-invasive) cheat prevention would have to be on the server side - one easy cheat would be to watch what API calls a game makes to report scores, and then just make those calls directly with the score you want. Personally, I'd just have an alert if any daily top score was suspiciously high and do a manual check of that person's scores over time and across games.
    – Rob Watts
    Apr 5 at 17:54
  • @RobWatts Yeah, I just want to match the anticheat capabilities of classic Neopets. Looking at it from a hypothetical business perspective, the high difficulty of proper anticheat means if Neopets didn't bother with it, then I don't need to bother either.
    – Onyz
    Apr 5 at 18:28
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    I'd say you really shouldn't bother. Either the anticheat capabilities are invisible to a non-cheater (in which case there's no need to implement them), or you're fixing a bug where a non-cheater could be told their score won't count because the system thinks they cheated.
    – Rob Watts
    Apr 5 at 19:07
  • @RobWatts Well, there's a third option too-- if there's no anticheat at all, it cheapens the highscore leaderboard and the economy, since income is partially from arcade game scores.
    – Onyz
    Apr 5 at 19:32
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    I suspect this is literally just a score cutoff with some measure of human intervention. As far as I'm aware, this is indeed how it works: each game has a defined "review score", above which your score is held from the leaderboards until it is reviewed by a human. The review score is stored on the score submission server, not in the flash game itself, so as to not betray itself. Human review presumably includes looking at playtime and for a pattern of reasonable or suspicious behaviour.
    – Schism
    Apr 7 at 4:57

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