After noticing that a cool three million people were playing Wooga’s gem clicker Diamond Dash on Facebook, reader Juan Aponte sent along a little program he created to ‘assist’ players in achieving ridiculously high scores. I’m not going to give it out, but I’ll show you what it does.
Cheating at Diamond Dash is nothing new, thanks in no small part to the social game’s click-friendly design. The player has to click groups of coloured blocks in order to eliminate them from the board, making way for new blocks. The key is there is no penalty for incorrect clicks, so creating a program that randomly clicks across the game board (90 clicks per 50 milliseconds) does devastating things.
Compared to some of the other Diamond Dash cheats out there, Juan’s is rather primitive — it doesn’t even automatically stop, which can lead to opening 200 Internet Explorer windows and having to reboot (oops). What it does do is show us how easy it is to screw with social games of this ilk. Juan isn’t a hardcore player, he just had some friends that played the game and wanted to mess with their heads. You can imagine what the people that care about their leaderboard position have come up with.
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