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Here's how we're dealing with trophy / achievement cheaters

x3sphere

x3sphere

Administrator
Staff member
Enforcer Team
Game Info Editor
Edit: Our current Rules / Cheating Policy can be found on this page: https://www.exophase.com/rules/

Things have gotten out of hand lately with the rampant number of trophy and achievement cheaters on our leaderboards. Rather than waiting around for Sony and Microsoft, we've decided to tackle the issue ourselves. There is going to be a zero tolerance policy for such activity going forward. Here's how we're responding:

Users using save hacks to instantly unlock achievements / trophies
Instant removal from leaderboard, as well as any stat pages.

Users altering timestamps
Instant removal from leaderboard, as well as any stat pages. There is no recourse for this. Since tracking these users wastes our server resources we'll also remove your profile from the site though you're free to continue using the Gamercards.

Don't worry if your profile has some missing or invalid timestamps (usually caused by earning trophies / achievements while not connected to PSN or Xbox Live), we won't remove you for that. Additionally, any unlocks triggered by in-game glitches are considered OK, so as long you aren't using a modified save data file to get them.

Now obviously, the detection methods we use won't pinpoint all cheaters provided assuming they are dedicated enough. Without additional help from Sony and Microsoft it is next to impossible. So later this week, we will also add a manual report option on all profile pages.

The system is a work-in-progress and still under testing, if you feel you've been wrongly removed from the leaderboards please let us know and we'll look into it. Any feedback is appreciated.
 
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I had no idea this was even possible, I thought ps3 locked saved games with trophies attached. Also what is the point of cheating the system to get a fake # by your name...
 
Seth said:
I had no idea this was even possible, I thought ps3 locked saved games with trophies attached. Also what is the point of cheating the system to get a fake # by your name...
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It does, but the PS3's security has been blown wide open over the past year. Hackers found a way to decrypt save data and then re-sign it so the PS3 sees it as valid. Newer CFWs can connect to PSN so they don't have to jump through any hoops to sync trophies either.

There's programs out there that basically let you unlock all trophies with a single click, really easy to detect by looking at timestamps though so why they even bother is beyond me.

It sucks, I really wish Sony did something about it, unlike MS they've not banned anyone for hacking trophies yet.
 
Would Sound Shapes or something with the cross save/trophies trigger a leaderboard removal due to the time stamps showing them all unlocking at once? Confused why I show up as not ranked yet when there isn't anything slightly questionable about my trophies. I know PSNProfiles had that happen with Sound Shapes on PS4 and they fixed it. So not sure if something like that triggered me to get removed or if I am just missing something about how you get ranked on the leaderboard.
 
Hayabusa85 said:
Would Sound Shapes or something with the cross save/trophies trigger a leaderboard removal due to the time stamps showing them all unlocking at once? Confused why I show up as not ranked yet when there isn't anything slightly questionable about my trophies. I know PSNProfiles had that happen with Sound Shapes on PS4 and they fixed it. So not sure if something like that triggered me to get removed or if I am just missing something about how you get ranked on the leaderboard.
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That would do it. Sorry I'll fix this right now.

Edit: Sound Shapes is now whitelisted.
 
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Its great to see anyone tackling the hackers and cheats as they just seem to get away with it most of the time, I predominantly play on the 360 and Microsoft are pathetic at dealing with these type of people so well done to anyone who takes them on. If you want the trophy or achievement, Earn it.
 
hi im new to this site & the reason behind my registration on this site is that im a trophy hunter & i work so hard on the platinums of games that i really like so what happened is that i was playing one of my favorite games ever by capcom called Dragon's Dogma so i earned couple of trophies for it somedays ago but i was offline plus after earning these trophies my super slim ps3 turned off by itself which happened for the 1st time ever & then when synced my trophies online i realized that these trophies don't have date or time :( please is there a way to help me fix this im sad cause this one trophy that i've earned took me about three hours & somethin' to get for killing the hardest dragon in the game called the Ur-Dragon (Undead Dragon) but no date & time on that trophy :( i can't sleep at night its breaking my heart to not have them time stamped after plus after killing that dragon i took in-game snapshot of it right after i killed it the other trophies are different endings that i've earned on the same day but no timestamp :( what went wrong & please can this be fixed or its gonna be like that forever...?
 
Abdul Aziz Al-Belushi said:
hi im new to this site & the reason behind my registration on this site is that im a trophy hunter & i work so hard on the platinums of games that i really like so what happened is that i was playing one of my favorite games ever by capcom called Dragon's Dogma so i earned couple of trophies for it somedays ago but i was offline plus after earning these trophies my super slim ps3 turned off by itself which happened for the 1st time ever & then when synced my trophies online i realized that these trophies don't have date or time :( please is there a way to help me fix this im sad cause this one trophy that i've earned took me about three hours & somethin' to get for killing the hardest dragon in the game called the Ur-Dragon (Undead Dragon) but no date & time on that trophy :( i can't sleep at night its breaking my heart to not have them time stamped after plus after killing that dragon i took in-game snapshot of it right after i killed it the other trophies are different endings that i've earned on the same day but no timestamp :( what went wrong & please can this be fixed or its gonna be like that forever...?
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Welcome!

What you experienced is known to happen and plenty of the top trophy hunters also have trophies with missing timestamps. Unfortunately there is no fix for it. One possible cause is earning trophies on a PS3 you haven't logged into PSN from at least once. Your PS3 shutting off by itself like that could have caused it too if the internal clock went out of sync.
 
Smokey245 said:
Is there a way to report cheaters and help you find people that altered games?
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We'll have a report option soon, a big site revamp is coming in a few weeks.
 
I sure hope you guys have been working hard on this- I looked at the top 10 on Steam and 6 of them are rather blatant SAM users. I won't name anyone, but you can easily look at their timestamps and tell. I actually reported Skaery, who was formerly #1 on steam. I would like to help take down any more cheaters. I report when I can, please tell me what I can do to help otherwise.

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stingygamer said:
I sure hope you guys have been working hard on this- I looked at the top 10 on Steam and 6 of them are rather blatant SAM users. I won't name anyone, but you can easily look at their timestamps and tell. I actually reported Skaery, who was formerly #1 on steam. I would like to help take down any more cheaters. I report when I can, please tell me what I can do to help otherwise.
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Noticed some of your reports the other day, thanks for sending them in :) BTW, sent you a PM.
 
While PC is my #1 platform, I do use the PS3 a bit. From what I understand, there are very many trophy cheaters on PS3, and apparently there are programs which can randomize the timestamps of trophies earned? I guess I'm posting to ask whether these things are true.
 
Unfortunately yeah, I believe there are ways to randomize the timestamps on PS3. From what I've seen not many bother to do it though, a ton of cheaters banned on here have the same platinum timestamps across several games.
 
Taking out the blatant cheaters is easy enough; they just unlock a few hundred at once. But for others, the investigator needs knowledge of the game. For example, in Fallen Earth, it's possible to unlock 20 achievements at once legitimately. Sometimes, the investigator needs to analyze the pattern in which the player unlocked his trophies/achs. Suppose he's smart and tells SAM to unlock them every 20 minutes or something like that. Then he sets up a program to give himself a believable number of gameplay hours. Then, he may look legit unless you dig deep. If you know a game very well, you can tell if the order the achievements were unlocked makes sense (do they follow the course of the game?). Does the time between achievements make sense? If we know an achievement takes 1.5 hours to unlock, and he unlocks it 1 minute after a different one, there should be suspicion.

That being said, we wouldn't want to ban an innocent player who may have used some shortcuts to an achievement in-game, or accidentally gained achievements because of a fault/bug in the game's programming, or played offline and then saw them unlock all at once when he logged in.
 
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Oh, is it possible to view which users achieved 100% in any particular game? Certain games take 1000s of hours to 100%, and if the list of players who pefected those games were viewable, I could investigate them for cheating more easily.
 
Hi, Seem this is the thread about cheaters. Have a look at Let's Golf 2 for WP7. 44 people currently have 100% on this game, the fact it's not even possible to have all the achievements on this game due to an unobtainable achievement tells me they are all cheaters.
 
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