I've been enjoying multiplayer Hearts of Iron and Stellaris for quite some time now.
But one thing has always been bothering me - the ease of checking multiplayer saves between sessions by unfair players.
All such a player has to do is save the game on his end and load it up in singleplayer, then he can check other players strategies, buildups etc. This is pretty game breaking when someone does that just before the war, and it's impossible to detect if someone did that, other than guessing, but guessing can lead to false accusations too, which isnt good either.
But the issue comes mostly from how easy it is to do that. It's obvious that PDX won't be able to prevent hackers from accessing even the best securities on a file that is stored locally, but that's not what is expected. In fact, very little effort on PDX side could lead to huge improvement. If people had to manually edit the save game to unlock it for singleplayer, it would already prevent probably more than half of such players from checking saves. (this is just an example. there is no perfect way to protect the saves, but any way is better than no way at all, as long as its optional)
Very little effort from programmers but with very big impact. And this is what this post is about:
I'm hoping Stellaris and Hearts of Iron devs can implement rudimentary save game protection.
I'm aware there are other issues with those games, and people not interested in multiplayer may not want resources taken away from fixing the game, but it is so little effort required, that i think nothing else would suffer if such a feature was to be added. It would help us, multiplayer lovers, a lot!
Also, often people say something like "you should play with people you can trust". But this doesn't really apply here. Most hardcore cheats affect the game in obvious ways, and people using them are obvious cheaters. Save checking is by comparison much simpler and much more hard to detect, and even people who are typically trustworthy could give in to the temptation of checking a save game, so i don't think its a practical solution, especially since its impossible to verify who actually did that.
All the players I play with online acknowledge this issue and express their hope for PDX to address it, but I have not seen too many posts on the forums regarding it.
Now, the thing that made me write this is that normally i play MP Hoi and Stellaris. Up until recently I have played Europa Universalis 4 only in single player. Yesterday that changed, and i was surprised to see this option in the multiplayer lobby of that game:
So, seeing that they already have it in one game, maybe it would be possible to make it standard option for all currently developed and future paradox games? It's a small but super useful feature.
Thank you.
But one thing has always been bothering me - the ease of checking multiplayer saves between sessions by unfair players.
All such a player has to do is save the game on his end and load it up in singleplayer, then he can check other players strategies, buildups etc. This is pretty game breaking when someone does that just before the war, and it's impossible to detect if someone did that, other than guessing, but guessing can lead to false accusations too, which isnt good either.
But the issue comes mostly from how easy it is to do that. It's obvious that PDX won't be able to prevent hackers from accessing even the best securities on a file that is stored locally, but that's not what is expected. In fact, very little effort on PDX side could lead to huge improvement. If people had to manually edit the save game to unlock it for singleplayer, it would already prevent probably more than half of such players from checking saves. (this is just an example. there is no perfect way to protect the saves, but any way is better than no way at all, as long as its optional)
Very little effort from programmers but with very big impact. And this is what this post is about:
I'm hoping Stellaris and Hearts of Iron devs can implement rudimentary save game protection.
I'm aware there are other issues with those games, and people not interested in multiplayer may not want resources taken away from fixing the game, but it is so little effort required, that i think nothing else would suffer if such a feature was to be added. It would help us, multiplayer lovers, a lot!
Also, often people say something like "you should play with people you can trust". But this doesn't really apply here. Most hardcore cheats affect the game in obvious ways, and people using them are obvious cheaters. Save checking is by comparison much simpler and much more hard to detect, and even people who are typically trustworthy could give in to the temptation of checking a save game, so i don't think its a practical solution, especially since its impossible to verify who actually did that.
All the players I play with online acknowledge this issue and express their hope for PDX to address it, but I have not seen too many posts on the forums regarding it.
Now, the thing that made me write this is that normally i play MP Hoi and Stellaris. Up until recently I have played Europa Universalis 4 only in single player. Yesterday that changed, and i was surprised to see this option in the multiplayer lobby of that game:
So, seeing that they already have it in one game, maybe it would be possible to make it standard option for all currently developed and future paradox games? It's a small but super useful feature.
Thank you.
Last edited:
- 2
