HackerForever was an online MMORPG that ran in the browser, about the dark world of hackers. It was the successor of my 2005 Windows game HackTheGame, which was pretty popular in it’s own right.
I started working on the game in 2008. Later on my friend Sins joined the dev team. From that day on, whenever a bug emerged somewhere in the game, players were quick to blame Sins for it (even though the chances of him being the culprit were 50/50). And so jokingly the hashtag #BlameSins was born.
Because the game was browser based and relied on user actions to gather XP (and because a game about hackers attracks a certain type of user) there were a lot of cheaters. The cheating was mostly done in the section called Small Hacks where players could perform a hack by simply clicking a button. Random chance decided if you were rewarded a small amount of cash. To prevent spamming we added an interval.
Hackers wrote scripts that would do a small hack and then wait for the interval, then repeat. Profit. To counter this specific problem I wrote Small Hack Interval Timer or SHIT in short . It showed a players behavior on small hacks. If the interval between small hacks was always roughly xyz seconds (they were smart enough to add some randomness), we had a cheater on our hands.
I retired the project in 2018. At that point the game the database had around 13k player records.
A few copies of the game still run up until this day. Most notably www.endlesshacker.com which is ran by former game staff of the original game.