I think I was fourteen, playing an online space-sim with my older brother. Because he decided to join a clan with mostly US-based members we had trouble being present at the moment that clan-wars where fought. Lucky for us these would mostly be decided days before actually going to war. I found that some guy made a simple helper javascript that used an XMLHTTPRequest to automate one or two actions.
Flash forward a few weeks... I built a sidebar that would be active in the browser, quickly showing stats and allowing you to automate entire battles. Ah, fun times :)
(I've learned quite a lot of javascript those days, and still wish I would've used that knowledge to build something awesome. I've had multiple prototypes of AJAX-chat clients but never finished any one of them...)
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A few years later we reverse-engineered (just about) the entire economy of another on-line 'learn economy' game. You would compete with other players in a city, buying shops, selling goods, etc. A new game would start every month or so... it took two months to figure it out. First try was with excel (why on earth did we do that?). The second one was a script that would scrape the data of a few thousand people every day, then compare how their actions had resulted in a lower/higher score, etc :) We went on to more shady tactics to gain points, altering input values to buy goods cheaper than possible from the dropdown-boxes, selling them at a better margin, etc.
Flash forward a few weeks... I built a sidebar that would be active in the browser, quickly showing stats and allowing you to automate entire battles. Ah, fun times :)
(I've learned quite a lot of javascript those days, and still wish I would've used that knowledge to build something awesome. I've had multiple prototypes of AJAX-chat clients but never finished any one of them...)
---
A few years later we reverse-engineered (just about) the entire economy of another on-line 'learn economy' game. You would compete with other players in a city, buying shops, selling goods, etc. A new game would start every month or so... it took two months to figure it out. First try was with excel (why on earth did we do that?). The second one was a script that would scrape the data of a few thousand people every day, then compare how their actions had resulted in a lower/higher score, etc :) We went on to more shady tactics to gain points, altering input values to buy goods cheaper than possible from the dropdown-boxes, selling them at a better margin, etc.