Cheating (2024)

Cheating is the act of using dishonest techniques to gain an advantage in games. It often involves hacking, but cheating can also involve no use of hacking, such as using macros to gain an advantage in the game. Cheating is often frowned upon players of the community. Cheating, whether or not it involves hacking or not, can lead to a ban by Ninja Kiwi.

Issues

Aside from the usual hacking in PvP games such as the original Bloons TD Battles (including Flash and Mobile version), cheating is inevitably occurring on any game that involves the use of online features that also involves competitive gameplay. Cheating is not limited to using hacking, but it also involves actions that give an unfair advantage to the performer. Given that most of Ninja Kiwi's popular Bloons games fit under the strategy genre, external actions played in the game that go beyond the focus of exploring core in-game mechanics are normally unfair.

A common instance of cheating happens in Bloons TD 6 during Race Events, one of many competitive game modes in the game. Race Events players can use cheat engines to artificially slow down the game as a way to improve their micromanagement by milliseconds. Other instances of cheating in Race Event contexts include use of macros and use of save scumming.

Another instance of cheating in Bloons TD 6 happens in Ranked Boss Bloon Events and Contested Territory, two other competitive game modes. Some players may utilize major exploits via bugs in order to rank higher than intended, which can occur in Boss Bloon Events. In Contested Territory, players can grief a team in order to oppress another team or their own.

In Bloons TD Battles 2, a common instance of cheating involves using alternate accounts for purposes of raising the main account's arena rank illegitimately. Private and Casual Mode matches, however, are excluded due to only giving Tower XP and having no impact on public placement on Hall of Masters leaderboards and all Battle Arenas below Hall of Masters.

Signs of cheating

Cheating, by definition, involves unfair and/or dishonest methods to gain an advantage. However, some signs of cheating are easily spotted. Some easy signs of cheating include:

General

• Abusing exploits for in-game advantages. Exploits for the purposes of ruining the experiences for others, including griefing via exploits, are easy to detect because a negative experience can be experienced from obviously unfair gameplay. Look for any noticeable discrepencies compared to normal gameplay, and report the incident in detail.

Bloons TD 6

• Ranking implausibly high on the leaderboards compared to most players. Many of these cases are the result of hacking.
• Achieving a rank faster than the rounds can be beaten in Ranked Boss, if a player has a leaderboard score in under 20 minutes since the boss launched, their time is almost always illegitimate.
• Extremely low times on Ranked Boss leaderboards, or extremely low times on Boss rulesets in Contested Territory. Look for anomalies based on the type of Boss. (Note: Time given in MM:SS.mm)
  • Bloonarius the Inflator can be beaten extremely quickly due to its lack of special immunity other than bulk RBE. Any ranked time for below about 00:30.00 for Normal and 00:55.00^[1] shows how the second top scorer with a 01:02.68 time beat the boss legitimately. Unless more powerful paragons or towers are added in the future, or there are special modifiers allowing for extremely fast instakills, it is unlikely that the time will dip below 55 seconds because of how much health is involved.
  • Lych is the slowest to beat due to its many invulnerability phases not allowing skipping of skulls at all. Since it takes about 3.75s each to go in and out of each phase perpetually, or a total of 7.5s if counting both, any ranked time below 03:06.65^[2][3] for Normal or 04:15.00 for Elite is obviously cheating. For CT Lych, any score below 00:37.33 for one-tier or 01:14.66 for two-tier is obviously cheating.
  • Vortex: Deadly Master of Air is quite slow to beat due to being immune to skipping skulls, making it harder to quickly kill it without chaining abilities together, in addition to being able to stun nearby towers upon reaching skulls. Any ranked time below about 00:30.00 for Normal and 02:00.00 for Elite are most likely cheating.
  • Dreadbloon: Armored Behemoth is a lot like Bloonarius in that it can quickly be bursted down with almost no timegated immunity phases. However, its unique gimmick of having immunities to entire tower categories means that many prevalent damage options will be unable to damage Dreadbloon for a good portion of the fight. Thus, any ranked time below about 00:30.00 for Normal and 01:20.00 for Elite are most likely cheating.
  • Another potential sign of cheating will be players achieving times extremely close to the meta tower times with the meta tower or heroes being restricted during the event. Thus, if Spike Factories, Goliath Doomship, Overdrive, and Sun Avatar are restricted in a non-vortex boss event, a time close to the values listed is likely illegitimate. Similarly, If a Vortex event restricts Goliath Doomship, Master Builder, Full Auto Rifle, Artillery Battery, and Plasma Accelerator, it is highly likely illegitimate if it gets close to the values lsited. There are more towers that can play a factor, so it is best to check for a top 1-3 video of the boss that week if one is available before or after the event ends.
• As a rule of thumb, a player with very low numbers of badges, low experience points, or low tower statistic counts, all despite ranking high in a competitive event, may be cheating. Check a player's statistics by pressing the blue "information" button. If a player has video footage of their run, then they are typically not cheating unless the footage displays obvious signs of cheating.

Bloons TD Battles 2

• Deliberately setting the "syncing" screen at critical moments when it is obvious the syncing screen moment is not coincidental. If the cheater's intentions match your own legitimate intentions in the game and syncing occurs at that moment, they probably want to ruin your chances of fair play.
• The same matched player disconnecting during the hero selection menu or the tower selection menu. Either that player is "map scumming" (i.e. trying to cheat the map selection system) or trying to deliberately waste your time. In either case, this is an obvious case of cheating and does not constitute as coincidental.

List of methods of cheating

This is a list of possible ways that the community may consider as "cheating" in Ninja Kiwi games, more specifically relating to Bloons TD 6 as the majority of the list discusses. However, this list is purely here to make the list visible so that players want the games to be played legitimately can call out players who attempt to use the below methods of possible cheating.

General

• Hacks to modify the game to make it artificially easier to beat games. This is always considered serious breaches of cheating.
  • Cheat engines can be used to hack into the game by artifically changing aspects of the game environment to the disadvantage of other players who don't use cheat engines. Whether or not it affects the game itself with or without the hack, it is still unfair to players who play legitimately by not using cheat engines.
• Macros to automate micromanagement or gameplay. In most cases, it is seen as cheating but to different degrees.
  • Can be used to allow the player to continually sell and rebuy a tower super fast.

Bloons TD 6

• Macros have previously seen much use in BTD6. Generally frowned upon in this game.
  • Utilization of macros can be used to automate farming of Collection Event currency, to farm up Insta-Monkeys.
  • Race Event attempts can be farmed with macros that run very specific patterns, mostly to maximize wins and relying on RNG of each automated attempt to turn the tides rather than using human input. Some players report other players potentially using macros in Race Events to automate Race Event attempts.
  • Auto-clickers were previously used in races to send many rounds quickly. Since the introduction of the 0.2 sec per round send delay, this has no use now.
• The "time machine" trick to revert a save by manipulating with the old game saves, which evades defeats on games, especially for CHIMPS. This is accomplished by manipulating the save files to revert to a particular save state, such as by the use of multiple devices to exchange save states, or manually copying save states from the game files and loading them at will. In other gaming communities, this method of cheating is often referred as "save scumming". While some players may see it as not cheating, other players are against the use of this exploit. The "time machine trick" is liable for Ninja Kiwi to ban account if used to cheat out Race Events and other time-specific competitive events, but otherwise there is no action by Ninja Kiwi against this exploit. The same exploit is no longer possible to revert an Odyssey progress if defeated on a certain round without using a continue, as of Version 23.0, because attempting to do so just auto-restarts the game to set Odyssey progress back to the first round of the current island.
  • "Exit and reload" to the current round is almost certainly intended game behavior from NK, and thus is not considered cheating to use "exit and reload". Evidence of this is that it is detected in CHIMPS mode as the medal and border (if all other gamemodes have been completed) on the map are downgraded from black to red and gold respectively, meaning the game is aware of and can check for this behavior but still allows it. In Race Events it is not currently possible to start at the current round.
• In Contested Territory, intentionally sabotaging another team by ruining that team's chances of winning is a bannable offense if reported. An example is using an alt account to join a team in order to waste tickets.

Bloons TD Battles 2

• Using an alt account to artificially rank up the main account. This is dubbed "boosting" by the r/battles2 community and Ninja Kiwi. Such felony is what caused Season 2 top player "e1893" got banned a few seconds before the season ended. Sam from NK describes e1893's abuse as "cheating". (Link)
• Deliberately quitting the game in the middle of either the hero selection screen or the tower selection screen. An exploit exists that makes it easy to quickly force-quit the game and log back into the game.
• Using exploits that involve forcing the opponent to surrender by abusing the Ninja Kiwi servers.

Patched exploits

Please refrain from showing currently working exploits, especially if they are game-breaking. Only patched exploits are listed here.

There were several game-breaking exploits in Bloons TD 6 that were later patched in later updates. These include:

• Discovered in Version 31.2, and likely a bug in the Version 31.x series, there was a glitch that allowed multiple of the same Paragon to be created by clicking the upgrade hotkey at the same frame as clicking another eligible Tier 5 capable of upgrading to a Paragon. At the time, the only applicable Paragons available were those for Dart, Boomer, Ninja, and Buccaneer. Such exploit could be used on Boss Events to cheese Bosses. Ninja Kiwi handled it by banning any player who uses this exploit in Ranked Bosses.
• In Version 25.0 and Version 25.1, there was a game-breaking exploit that made it possible to use Challenge Editor codes to gain free Monkey Money and map badges. This even included Blons badges. Ninja Kiwi took extreme measures to prevent this exploit from spreading, even to the extent that they would copyright strike YouTube videos that showcased the glitch. This was fixed on Version 26.0. This was the most game-breaking exploit throughout the entirety of Bloons TD 6, even more so than hacking in to the game with APKs.
• Another exploit involving infinite abilities was present in Version 17.x that involved Chinooks and certain abilities, allowing them to loop indefinitely. This was patched in Version 18.0.
• The money-generation glitch via Arctic Wind a long time ago, on around Version 16.1, is another patched exploit. It involved using an Arctic Wind and any map with an unplaceable land spot on the very center of the map. If a tower was sold on the Arctic Wind platform with the following conditions, the tower would sell twice, resulting in a profit. Of course, it did not work on CHIMPS, and so the exploit was limited to non-CHIMPS games. This was patched in Version 17.0.

References