Dude people keep cheating

@arjay_mccandless

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SoundTikTok sound · original sound - arjay_mccandless

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Why it worked

The video addresses a common pain point for game developers (cheating) and offers a clear, technical solution using system design principles. The use of visual aids and a conversational tone makes complex concepts accessible.

Summary

The video discusses how to prevent cheating in a game by moving game state calculations from the client side to the server side. This ensures the server is the source of truth and allows for reverting to a correct state if the client is compromised.

Structure

1Problem: Players are cheating by changing the game time.
2Consequence: This prevents in-app purchases.
3Proposed Solution: Move game state calculations to the server.
4Addressing Concerns: Discussing potential slowdowns and latency.
5Refined Solution: Client-side calculations with server-side validation as the source of truth.

Product placement

The video discusses a system design for a game, showing an EC2 instance and illustrating client-side vs. server-side calculations. No specific product is named or directly promoted, but the concepts relate to game development and cloud infrastructure.

On-screen text

8:00 AM 10:00 PM EC2 instance store and calculate game state client side validate game state server side 10s

Original caption

How games prevent cheating. #coding #programming #systemdesign

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Transcript

Dude people keep cheating in our game just by changing the time. If they can do that, they're not gonna make any in-app purchases. How can we fix it? Exactly. I think we need to make everything run server side instead of on the device itself. Then we have total control. We don't have to trust the client for this kind of information. Okay, that'll work. But won't it make the game super slow, especially if people have bad internet connections? Okay, that's a good point. How about this? We'll calculate and store game state on the client side, like we're already doing. But we'll also do it on the server side, and we'll make sure that the server is the source of truth for this information. Then we can check in from the client to the server every 10 seconds or so. Looks good. Truth on the server. If anything's wrong on the client side, we'll just revert to the server state because we know this is always correct.