Reply to thread

Back on topic:

First, to judge what's being done about it, we have to consider what can be done about it. And the answer is: not much, sadly.

There is on huge difference between mobile AC and most other mobile and Facebook games: It is an offline game with bit of optional online elements. Once can never get it as cheatproof as eg. World of Warcraft, which happens on a secure server with clients merely displaying the results. With AC, you can take your phone into the wilderness for 6 days, do all your flights offline and then return to civilization on Sunday, upload a week worth of scores and then "suddenly" win the ranking. This means that it's almost as vulnerable to cheating as offline games, when we used hex editors as kids to change a byte to 0xFF to get 255 of gold.

There are buildings and planes, there is warehouse of passenger and fuel bonuses, one can buy those with greens, one can buy "pay to win" flights with greens, there are green-producing buildings - the point is there are so many legit ways of achieving 10Mpax/week that it's nearly impossible to say "beyond all doubts, this score must be result of cheating". And banning people without proof is even less acceptable than letting cheaters go unpunished.

It would be imaginable to drop the offline feature, cut of many of players who play on long flights. It would be imaginable to create a server which could retrace all possible action the way Deep Blue could and sometimes come with conclusive proof of cheating. But it's not a job for one programmer to add one "if". It's hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of work. It's quite possible that it would be cheaper to simply declare the game a total loss and shut it down rather than to make it considerably more cheatproof.

Is GI doing something to eliminate cheaters? Yes, a bit. You can report, they'll look after it and most often they come with false negative. Sometimes they ban people, but false positives also happen (like Cow.reborn).

Are they doing everything possible? No, but it's not reasonable to expect that. It's simply not economically viable.