After playing for a while, I got tired of the game and decided to test out some theories. I broke out some classic hacking tools available to the public, and discovered some interesting things.
For one, there are a ton of hackers currently in-game. During certain times of the day, I found that 50-75% of my opponents were cheating. Usually, it's fairly obvious: too many characters drop at once in the beginning of the game. Or, if it looks like they could lose early on, they suddenly drop too many cards that they don't have energy for. They might also heal quickly too.
I tested out the usual stuff, like tweaking money and point values, but they are all stored server side. LuckyPatcher obviously doesn't work either, it's mostly for old titles these days. So no surprises there.
However, during PVP battles it appears that they don't use server time to syncronize the events, but rather both of the clients are syncronized together (via the server) with time updates generated from both competing clients. This allows speed hacking, which can have some very interesting effects.
Now keep in mind that this desync bug can occur naturally or unnaturally. The game is very demanding on your device, and if you have a slow mobile, slow internet, unreliable internet, or on a cellular network - this bug can still happen. With a speed hack, you can typically force it to happen, but it's not always reliable.
If it works though, you can ensure victory on every PVP battle with a rooted phone and GameGuardian. If you already have a rooted phone, jump ahead. Otherwise here are instructions on how you can start cheating right away in 'Phone Destroyer' on your own PC.
Install & Play 'Phone Destroyer' on your PC
Nox is probably the best Android emulator out there right now, and it comes pre-rooted. It's such an awesome tool and you can get it up-and-running very quickly.
1. Download it here: https://www.bignox.com/
2. Install. Go into Settings, and turn on Root. Reboot.
3. Download the GameGuardian tool: https://gameguardian.net/download
4. Drag and drop the .APK file to your Nox screen, and you can select to install it.
5. Then just go to the Play Store, search for "South Park Phone Destroyer" and install it.
What's helpful about 'Phone Destroyer' is that your progress is saved on the cloud. So, if you link your Google Play account within Nox, you can continue playing the game from where you left off on your phone/tablet. OR, you can create a new Google Play account, cheat away, and link it onto your phone later after you've maxed out your rewards and ranking.
What's also cool about Nox is that you can customize keys and automated tons of scripts to make in-game activities and PVP very easy.
How to cheat in PVP
Speed hacking affects the energy bar, allowing you to generate energy very quickly. When you use speed hacking in PVE, the computer will also accelerate, so it's not very effective in single-player missions. You can slow the game down however, to make more calculated decisions.
The GameGuardian tool is typically used for memory editing, which is (*mostly) useless in-game. However, it comes with a great Speed Hack tool that you can find under its options. Run South Park, run GG, link SP to GG, and then launch the Speed Hack tool. You'll see an onscreen speed controller that you can move anywhere on the 'Phone Destroyer' screen.
Okay,
- When the PVP match starts, you can ramp-up your speed by 1.5x, 3x, 6x, 9x, etc. However, really weird shit happens (including some Mutually Assured Destruction stuff when playing against another cheater) when you do this, so be prepared.
- Cheating, normal experience: After you ramp up speed to 2x, your opponents players will freeze in place but you can still attack them. They will remain on screen and appear to be immortal, but your players will eventually ignore them and attack the player. At this point, you might as well go back to normal speed. Just focus all attention on the main player. You can't do ANY damage, unless it's poison or direct spell damage. So get your spell cards, and characters who poison the main player. All you need to do is get them down 1 of their 3 bars, and you'll receive a Victory when the countdown ends.
- Not cheating, normal experience: You're doing well early on and don't need to cheat. If you suddenly freeze and the game hangs, it means that the other player is cheating and you've been disconnected. They will receive an "Opponent has left the game" message and they get the victory.
- Cheating against another cheater: If it appears that they are cheating (dropping too many cards at once), ramp up your speed to 3x or 4x. There's a good chance you'll disconnect them, and you'll get the message "Opponent has left the game". Then change back to 1x, and finish up the PVP battle against the player with any characters or spells (they will all work this time.)
- Cheating against another cheater: Occasionally if you ramp up the speed right away when starting the game to like 3x or 6x, the Opponent will leave the game or they will automatically die for an instant Victory. This is also an indication that they had a speed hack running in memory too.
- If the normal player or cheater does not disconnect: Typically, you'll get to a Sudden Death stage if the player does not disconnect. Focus everything you have on knocking down each bar of the players. You only need to eliminate one bar to get the win.
I mentioned that memory editing *mostly useless in-game. However it does work on the locker selection menu, in a weird way. Apparently, when you open the first three lockers, the reward is generated from the server. But you can still open the others to receive rewards, but it's a weird client side glitch.
Simply use GameGuardian to search for the lockers remaining number (ie, 3, 2, 1), use BYTE field, and keep changing the value back to 3. Do NOT freeze the number, or the game will hang. And leave a couple lockers still closed so that your number expires and you can move onto the next screen. You don't want to be stuck on the locker menu. The rewards you receive after the first 3 will be weird, and you will NOT get the "Top Rewards" since they are only server generated.
I think this menu can be further exploited in the future with a mod pack (simulating Ad rewards) so that players can select all lockers and actually get good rewards from them though.
This is a weird hack, but if you try it out, you'll see what I mean: the lockers don't initially have the "best rewards" behind them - so you can't peak using a hack. When you open a locker, the reward is randomly generated from the server. However, they all contain client-side one item simple rewards that you can receive, after getting all of the server rewards. But this might not be worth the effort as the items likely won't stick with server authority.
Exploiting PVP without hacking
This is a very simple and old-fashioned method that works in 'Phone Destroyer'. Create more characters by running multiple instances of Nox. Keep them all around the same rank. Create a different VPN for each instance, so that your client has a different IP address. Click "Join" at the same time on two instances, and you'll keep getting paired up by their Match Making engine. Occasionally you'll get another opponent, but you can win-trade with your own characters.
If you're not familiar with VPNs, an alternative is to use Nox normally on one PC but connect your phone (with 2nd Google Play account) to your cellular data service.
PVE Mission Energy Hack
Apparently, the energy bar is all client-side during PVE missions. So, you can easily blast through all of the zones with a full energy bar!
Here are the steps:
1. Start one of the missions.
2. * If you are extremely paranoid, turn on Airplane mode during the battle. You can still fight, but WiFi and Data is turned off.
3. Pause the battle.
4. Launch GG. You are going to search for the Energy Bar value which is a decimal. For example: 3.23332554454000
5. If the bar is between 8 and 9, search for "8~9" as a FLOAT value. You can use the tilde ~ character for a range of decimals.
6. Go back to the game, unpause, change the energy bar.
7. Pause the game. Search for the new value like 3~4.
8. Continue until you find one value that seems to match the energy bar, like 2.23933720589 (which is 2 plus a little bit on the bar.)
9. You'll get the hang of it pretty quickly, and it usually only takes 2-3 searches to get the right number.
10. Change the first number to 9, leave the rest alone. For example, 3.23332554454000 becomes 9.23332554454000.
11. FREEZE the value in place. (A main feature of GG.)
12. Unpause the game, and your Energy Bar will be locked at 9 and a bit.
13. Go crazy.
14. Watch the bosses health. Before you're about to kill them (25-40% HP), pause the game, disable the FREEZE and continue.
15. * For the extra paranoid: Turn Airplane mode off, and wait for WiFi to reconnect.
16. If you leave the FREEZE enabled, you risk the chance of the game locking up during the following loading screen.
17. Boss dies, collect your reward.
Whether WiFi is turned on or not, the Energy Bar trick still works fine. Rinse & Repeat for the next stages.
If you know what you're doing, you can grab the offset of the Energy Bar and import it each stage to speed things up. I suspect this will also work in PVP, if you don't want to use the Speed Hack, but you'll need to understand offsets and pointers and lose some matches at first. Then you can cheat the energy bar with little detection.
Alternatives: Using an Emulator and Cheat Engine
If you're not comfortable using GameGuardian active while SPPD is running, you can also use a program like "Cheat Engine" _outside_ of the Nox emulator. It does make a lot of activities much faster, especially in PVE. You can have two windows open, and just jump back and forth to exploit the energy bar.
All you need to do in Cheat Engine is go into Settings, turn on MEM_MAPPED option.
Select the process 'VoxVMHandle.exe'. Select 'FLOAT' value, leave the 'Truncated' button turned on, and search for the exact number (like, 2, 6, or 9). No more ranges are needed, CE will do the work for you.
Finding offsets within the emulator is much more difficult, but if you happen to find any online instructions that the average user can follow, let me know and I will post it here.
Seeing how easy it is to manipulate the energy bar (not server controlled), it won't be long before dedicated hacks or modded .apks come out for SPPD that allow players to generate energy quickly and without crashes. Likely something for the single player missions too, that will allow you to progress through all of the missions and zones very quickly for huge returns.
These bugs/exploits should be a quick fix for the developer, Redlynx. There are even many super simple bandaid patches that can be applied to prevent cheating, and very quickly. It will be interesting to see if the developer/publisher respond, and how long it takes them to address these issues.
If you found this information helpful, please credit the blog link. A lot of content gets stolen from this blog, and it would be nice for someone to actually credit the origin every once in a while. =]