This in-game currency, stars, is used to level up your characters, to acquire new skills, and to increase your health points. Usually you get 1 star for each level you reach. A back-of-the hand calculation reveals that you would need about 150 stars to unlock everything. That's quite a lot of levelling.Ībout 15 years ago I was young and very interested in cheating in computer games. In fact - and literally nobody who reads this blog post knows this - the first app I wrote for public consumption was a cheat database. Its competitive advantage over other cheat databases was that mine had a save game patching engine. It allowed you to patch save game files for games included in the database and it allowed you to extend that engine with your own save game cheats. The commercial success of this program was $10, a pity buy from a friend. It's social success was worse, as one of my school teachers commented in my website guestbook. This was considered deeply uncool at the time. Later I also wrote a few game trainers (the ones where you get extra money by pressing certain key combinations) for Windows games. Nowadays, while playing Muffin Knight, I am starting to feel an old itch again that I have not felt in a while. I am now a level 62 Muffin Knight with most expensive things unlocked. I need about 50 more stars to unlock the rest just to reach the feeling of having beaten the game completely. 50 stars go for $4.99 if I buy them the official way or they go for nothing if I modify the save game. I have not actually looked into modifying Muffin Knight save games yet but according to save games can be traded so I don't see why they could not be modified. ![]() And even if they could not be modified, I have plenty of means to change the program code of Muffin Knight or modify the memory of the running process. In the end, I am sure that I could get the 50 stars for free using some sort of cheat technique. ![]() I am wondering what the moral implications of this are. Back in the old days, I only wrote cheats and trainers for single-player games. The game developers had already been paid. The lack of other players meant that only the player who chooses to cheat is affected. Does that make it OK to use cheats to access in-game content? But what about freemium single player games like Muffin Knight? I already paid $2.99 to get the game. There are freemium games like Muffin Knight and there are freemium games like Paradise Island and Tap Fish. ![]() Their freemium mechanics are very similar with one significant difference. Muffin Knight is structured kind of like Diablo 2.
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