Was a long time ago, but I used to play this game called DayZ, which back then was just a mod for ArmA2. I played on a private server hosted by a friend.
Back then the game was very easy to cheat in because even though the map was huge, the client kept all of the objects in memory along with their positions all the time - and it was very important in the game to stay hidden from other players and to hide your stashes of objects for later use. All of these was available in memory for grabs and there was no anticheat.
So there were people who wrote cheats that just grabbed the positions of those hidden stashes and bee-lined through all of them, robbing them.
The server logged the position of static objects (like stashes) on startup and logged the position of every player every few minutes. So I wrote a very simple application that parses that log and puts all of that information (position of stashes and players) on a human-readable map. The admin could then select a player and track his journey. It was very easy to spot people running in straight lines from stash to stash, it was obvious they were cheating and should be banned.
After that I added some heuristics that detected these behaviours automatically and gave hints to admin on who to check. There were more abuses possible in the game later on that I also detected.
For example, there was a "dupe bug" which allowed a player to duplicate a backpack full of useful items and give it to their friend. It involved two players staying in the same spot, dropping the backpack on the ground, trying to open it up by two people at the same time, one of them disconnecting, etc. The backpack was duped due to lag on the database on server side.
I modded the server files to log the information that a backpack was dropped or picked up (along with a list of items inside it in order they were arranged). Then I modified my log parser to look for two players being near each other, dropping and picking up the backpack, disconnecting and reconnecting constantly and detecting two backpacks with exactly the same list of items in the same order they were arranged it (which was very unprobable to happen out of itself) - detecting this gave a hint to the admin to check these people out as possible dupers.
I live in a small town in Poland and when I was a kid, my whole street was a community. My parents were friends with all the neighbours (some less than others, but still). My mom used to host "coffee time" every other day around noon were women from the neighbourhood would gather for an hour or so to gossip around coffee - of course me, as a kid, just lingered around them.
All the kids on the street hang out together, playing games, kicking some soccer ball, going to the woods, etc. People on the street were so close together that it was possible to organize "cleaning the street" events from time to time where everyone would gather up with their gardening tools etc and we would just go through the whole street, cleaning up overgrowing grass, cutting out weeds on the forest border, etc.
I must say, looking back, this was a wonderful time and a GREAT environment to be raised in. I think that being a part of a small community like that is really important for mental wellbeing.
Unfortunately, all of that pretty much died along with my mother and grandmother. Other elderly people on the street died as well, the community loosened up, new people moved in and I rarely see them or know their names, they are not interested in random chatter on the street (at the rare occassion you ever meet them outside the house) and I don't have the courage to pick up my mother's wonderful idea of "coffee time". A bit of a shame, but I'm still trying to get to know the people around my place. The way things are going here in Poland, I might need to pick up Duolingo and launch some Ukrainian course though :)
Doing it right now. Entire company is migrating from AWS to Azure for reasons I can't discuss, and I'm currently tasked with this migration in the team I am in.
Honestly? It's quite fun. Despite considering myself more of a programmer than devops, I really like the devops stuff - as long as I'm doing it as part of a team and I know the domain and the code - and not being that general devops guy who gets dropped into project, does devops for them and gets pulled into another one to do the same.
Working out all those little details of switching from AWS to Azure is fun and enjoyable and I also feel like I'm doing something meaningful and impactful. Luckily there's not much vendor-locking as most of the stuff lives in k8s - otheriwse it would be much trickier.
Tibia was the game of my childhood. As someone mentioned, in Poland Tibia was what WoW was in the US.
I spent half my time playing outside after school and then hunting monsters and making a name for myself in Tibia.
That game - much like many other MMOs back in the days - was great because it wasn't hyper-optimized for endless grinding. It was just another world with very little facilitation mechanics. You had to live it, hunt monsters, make friends and make a name for yourself. Given the huge death penalty in Tibia, your action had weight and dying was very painful - which, combined with very loose anti-PK system, meant you have to watch out to not make enemies for yourself.
I really miss those MMOs from the early days, where the focus was on meeting people and socializing and playing WITH each other, not just NEXT TO each other.
I kinda had this feeling again with Classic WoW launching - with everyone still in the starting zones, the world felt alive, going to dungeons required actually finding some nice people and actually travelling to the dungeon instead of clicking a button. It was great.
I've also played on Lunara and I remember Liches of Archinare to this day! I remember how proud I was when I became a member, even though I was just a low-rank peasant :P
Back then the game was very easy to cheat in because even though the map was huge, the client kept all of the objects in memory along with their positions all the time - and it was very important in the game to stay hidden from other players and to hide your stashes of objects for later use. All of these was available in memory for grabs and there was no anticheat.
So there were people who wrote cheats that just grabbed the positions of those hidden stashes and bee-lined through all of them, robbing them.
The server logged the position of static objects (like stashes) on startup and logged the position of every player every few minutes. So I wrote a very simple application that parses that log and puts all of that information (position of stashes and players) on a human-readable map. The admin could then select a player and track his journey. It was very easy to spot people running in straight lines from stash to stash, it was obvious they were cheating and should be banned.
After that I added some heuristics that detected these behaviours automatically and gave hints to admin on who to check. There were more abuses possible in the game later on that I also detected.
For example, there was a "dupe bug" which allowed a player to duplicate a backpack full of useful items and give it to their friend. It involved two players staying in the same spot, dropping the backpack on the ground, trying to open it up by two people at the same time, one of them disconnecting, etc. The backpack was duped due to lag on the database on server side.
I modded the server files to log the information that a backpack was dropped or picked up (along with a list of items inside it in order they were arranged). Then I modified my log parser to look for two players being near each other, dropping and picking up the backpack, disconnecting and reconnecting constantly and detecting two backpacks with exactly the same list of items in the same order they were arranged it (which was very unprobable to happen out of itself) - detecting this gave a hint to the admin to check these people out as possible dupers.