Dookey Dash Targeted by Cheaters

Yuga Labs has many successful projects under its belt; there are the NFT collections like the Bored Ape and Mutant Ape Yacht Club, its wildly successful Otherside metaverse, and of course, its most recent Dookey Dash game which was announced last month. Soon after Yuga Labs confirmed the game, along with the perks for players, it was met with a wave of support from its fanbase. 

Sadly, barely a month since the game began operations, it is being threatened by instances of players cheating, with some people even offering a paid service to help players illegally score higher points. 

How The Game is Being Cheated 

These instances of cheating first came to light after some players went online to brag about their shady activities. After some online sleuths did some investigating, it was revealed that this ‘cheating’ is made possible by some technical glitches in the game.

Marco Marchesi, the chief technical officer at Fabricant, for example, did a video walk-through showing how game scores can be inflated. In this case, a player only needs to deliberately crash into some game obstacles, which inflates their score and could put them on the leaderboard. 

“Easy to hack the obstacles in #dookeydash Less easy to validate a score (and no intention to try @samwcyo ). I wonder if I should run a obstacle-less game as an artistic performance until the sewer closes in 7 days and see what score I can get live,” he explained, having scored over 3,000 points in his experiment. 

On top of this, others have speculated that there are ‘exploits’ ( digital hacks or cheat codes) that allow users to inflate their points without being detected by Yuga Labs’ anti-cheating mechanism. 

One hacker called ClearHat even published a Twitter thread in which they said that Yuga Labs neglected to encrypt some of its code which made it susceptible to being reverse-engineered. By doing this, players could exploit the game’s code and rack up points. And even though Yuga Labs eventually addressed this issue, the damage had been done.

The situation became so dire that some people were even advertising online that they could help others ‘beat’ the game for a fee. And given how popular the game is and the rewards that Yuga Labs intends to give to the top players, such a service was in high demand. 

Yuga Labs Pushes Back Against Cheaters 

Thankfully, Yuga Labs seems to have gotten a handle on the situation. In a February 8, 2023 statement, the company said that it had penalised anyone found using any of the cheating hacks. 

“We want Dookey Dash to be as fair as possible. As we’ve mentioned previously, we will not allow cheating. We’ve already noticed some #DookeyDash Sewer Passes associated with cheating. Those scores have now been removed from the leaderboard,” it said, adding that while anyone whose score was removed from the leaderboard can replay the game and legitimately earn points, anyone caught cheating moving forward will be banned from playing the game.