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Comment by s3cur3 | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, to clarify, our thinking on this point was: our players aren't particularly motivated to lie to the server since there isn't a "goal" to a flight simulator. Given the choice between shipping (much, much) faster and completely locking down the experience against the vague, yet-to-be-realized threat of people sending fake packets to the server, we opted for the former.

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Have you had any reports of multiplayer griefing so far? I wonder if griefing happens in serious flight simulators like X-Plane and what form it takes if it does. (If there are griefers, then they might conceivably find a way to exploit this. But I am asking mostly because I am curious about what the player community is like.)

Griefing, yes. The audience for our mobile app skews young and, shall we say, less "serious aviators" than the desktop sim, so to some degree people like that you can buzz a 747 on short final in an F-22. :D

Long-term we've talked about things like a reputation system, where flying responsibly would earn you points to get into a separate "world" filled with people who also want to do more serious flying.

I would also wonder about vectors for causing vandalism (botting your client to write racist words in the sky with a fleet of stunt planes emitting smoke trails), or other general forms of malice (trying to DoS or otherwise crash the server).

Presumably X-Plane is small enough and "boring" enough that your only malicious interactions would be only lazy drive-by attempts, but those kinds of situations would be more concerning to me than someone modding the client to make their plane fly at Mach 7.

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