Urgent. Host Cheating: Problem and Solution.

[Jasper]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
So find a third-party host. If you can think of a method to secure a host locally, I can think of a suspicion.

Sure, security is never perfect. However, finding a _host_ who can't figure out how to copy and _host_ a game is worlds harder than find someone either not able|willing to decompile C.

Honestly, this isn't that hard! The real problem is getting it to work without making hosting a pain in the ***... That, and I'm not sure the demand really warrants it, considering there is only one developer for Dominions.

After some reflection, I see a better way than what I described earlier, based upon notifying players of hosting rather than asking for permision to host. You could have a central server for arranging games and verifying hosting, while still leaving game processing to players' machines. Plus, there's alot of synergy with generating turn info/history XML for sharing or making web pages, collecting game mechanic and AI statistics, bug reporting, etc. Damn, this would really kick ***!

But I digress, and this is probably not the forum for such discussion...

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Jasper:
Sure, security is never perfect. However, finding a _host_ who can't figure out how to copy and _host_ a game is worlds harder than find someone either not able|willing to decompile C.

Okay, maybe I'm somewhat biased on this point, since I have no difficulty finding someone who's able and willing to decompile C, namely, me.