Online Games Data Storing Methods, Vulnerabilities, and Solutions

Abstract

online games provide a competitive environment where most players compete and try to gain advantages by efficiently using game mechanics and resources provided by the gameplay loop. This competitive nature of online games sometimes goes above and beyond where some players resort to using unethical methods such as: Cheating, exploiting bugs and vulnerabilities which provide them with unfair advantages over most normal players. This results in normal players leaving the game as they lose the desire to continue playing in an unfair environment. Failure to combat such behaviour causes huge damage to the player base, game itself, company revenue and reputation. Persistent Massively Multiplayer Online Games can contain thousands of players sharing the same world view. the large number of updates performed each second has made storing the game state a big challenge, the game state should not be lost when a crash or failure to the server happen, commonly implemented solution fixes this problem by trading consistency with efficiency due to the database limited capability of handling large amount of data. This paper aims to shed a light on current popular user data storage methods, their vulnerabilities and propose a solution.. This paper aims to shed a light on current popular user data storage methods, their vulnerabilities and propose a solution