Avoid player changing time to cheat in game?

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

Hi all
Like in lot of game, in mine i give 5 lifes to the player and so he has to wait 15 min to gain another one.
I stock the date and time in local db, so my game is 100% playable offline (what i want).
But i have the same pb as King’s game : if you suspend the game, change your time in your phone by adding a day (for example), then you can cheat and recover all your lifes in the instant.

Do you have an idea to make this time cheat impossible ?
I read that maybe i could use the GPS time instead of the standard os.time ?
Does it work ? But if i do that, i need to ask user the permission to use GPS, no ? If yes it’s not very friendly…

I know a game (Patchmania on iPhone) that you could play offline, you can turn off your gps and internet access, try it ! then If you loose a life and change your time in device, it does change anything and you can’t cheat !!!
I really don’t know how they can do that whereas King superstars firm doesn’t success to solve this pb (or doesn’t want to).

Any idea please to solve this pb ? —> avoid time cheat in 100% offline game.
Thanks a lot !

#2

detect negative time changes and take away lives.

So, if the user advances time, to get lives then changes back to normal time, they will lose those lives.

However, IMHO this is a waste of time.  Unless you feel like you’re going to lose money or this will severely unbalance the game, let users cheat.  It’s their experience.  Let them be in charge.

#3

Players will cheat… it’s a fact and you need to accept that.  Certain countries like India and Indonesia they assume it is their constitutional right to cheat (speaking from experience here).  Saying that, don’t worry about it as those players  WILL NEVER spend any money ever.

The only successful way to do this is to always call home and ask for the current time (assuming home is a server you control).  If the game time differs from server time then adapt accordingly.

Try instead to think about this as a positive… you may have leader boards and having a lot of high ranking players actually is motivational to real players, etc.

#4

You can run the controls to make sure that the last time you change is changed, so when the user resets the right time you have to wait for the time he has “stolen”…  As @Sphere Game Studios said, the “smart” user does not pay anyway Never … But to make it difficult things might be interrupting … or maybe you better pretend nothing and close one eye?

#5

detect negative time changes and take away lives.

So, if the user advances time, to get lives then changes back to normal time, they will lose those lives.

However, IMHO this is a waste of time.  Unless you feel like you’re going to lose money or this will severely unbalance the game, let users cheat.  It’s their experience.  Let them be in charge.

#6

Players will cheat… it’s a fact and you need to accept that.  Certain countries like India and Indonesia they assume it is their constitutional right to cheat (speaking from experience here).  Saying that, don’t worry about it as those players  WILL NEVER spend any money ever.

The only successful way to do this is to always call home and ask for the current time (assuming home is a server you control).  If the game time differs from server time then adapt accordingly.

Try instead to think about this as a positive… you may have leader boards and having a lot of high ranking players actually is motivational to real players, etc.

#7

You can run the controls to make sure that the last time you change is changed, so when the user resets the right time you have to wait for the time he has “stolen”…  As @Sphere Game Studios said, the “smart” user does not pay anyway Never … But to make it difficult things might be interrupting … or maybe you better pretend nothing and close one eye?