I have to commend this hacker. With great power comes great responsibility and, despite the fact he’s found a way to disable observer mode in random regions, therefore allowing him to destroy other people’s cities at will, he hasn’t used his power for evil. All he’s done so far is destroy his friend’s cities, in a way that didn’t synch, meaning that no lasting damage was done.
So, this was done by editing the SimCity packages, tweaking some code, and getting the game to think that, when I visited a random person’s city in a random region, I WASN’T in observer mode, and force enabling of edit mode so that I had full access to the city as if it was my own. There is still no city syncing at this most basic level, so you can wreak havoc on a friend’s city, quit out, log back in, and it’s back the way it was – great fun! I am worried about people that go deeper into the code and start spoofing the owner ID’s of cities and start doing this maliciously though. Hopefully there are server side safeties on this…
Very interesting, but we can only hope that another person doesn’t find a way to make this an easily accessible hack for the multiple evil human beings out there. No-one wants their perfectly crafted city reduced to rubble and dust by some brutal troll!
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