Blustacks?

The only person I know who uses Bluestacks is to create an iOS environment on an Android device or vice versa.

(This person has the trust of SG and is firmly against exploits; I highly doubt they are using it for something nefarious.)

As for what is can be used for? That’s more than I know. Any actual
bluestacks user want to come forth and explain fully what is possible?

I’m absolutely against anything that let’s you stay online when not actually playing.

So, I’m a bluestacks user.

I started using it when my iPad died, and was no longer able to use the bluetooth keyboard. I tried using the keyboard for a little while with my phone, but that device is on it’s last legs too. After much frustration with scrolling at the pace of a snail, squinting at the tiny screen, dropping out of the game during detailed posts, and typing on that same tiny screen when the keyboard didn’t cooperate (it’s not the highest quality apparently!), I remembered a post I’d read in the forum - Bluestacks or PC version?

I decided to create a mini so that I could chat again in the game. (Though that was ages ago, and my mini seems to keep growing… might have something to do with my E&P addiction!) As mentioned in the linked post, it’s glitchy but still runs ok. It works well enough that I can go into global (and now Peer Support) to help players when I have the time.

As far as other stuff you can do with it, I don’t know. I’ve told other people about me using it for my mini here in the forum, in game chats, and in the moderator thread. Nobody has mentioned until now that it can be linked to other programs, so I’m not sure how well known it is that you can run cheats through it. So as far as I can guess, bluestacks usage is allowed, as long as you don’t violate Small Giant’s terms of service by linking it to something else and running bots, hacks, etc. Bluestacks on it’s own just runs the basic game, just like it does on my iphone, only with occasional missing fonts, and the occasional freeze of the program (a real kicker when you’re in a titan battle!!). So I wouldn’t say that it’s designed to modify or interfere with the service.

I can’t say for sure what SG’s position on the emulator is, but I’ll flag this thread in the moderator chat, and hope that they can give us an answer sometime Monday when they’re back from the weekend.

10 Likes

Thanks copper I look forward to hearing from them regarding this.

1 Like

I am curious as well however this goes way out of my league i needed to google what it is.
But i have the feeling it is posible to cheat this way and that should be taken care off

1 Like

I have a Chrome computer. It accesses the Chrome store which loads tons of apps, ones you’d recognize from your cellphone like World War Z, Pokemon Go, I think Clash of Clans was on there. These are all supported on the computer. Empires and Puzzles is not. I do believe it counts (Or should) under the third party software designed to modify or interfere with service because it literally changes the platforms on which the game is available. I’d also like to point out on the app store with compatible devices it only lists: Compatibility: Requires iOS 7.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

A cell phone is capable of a clicker as well, but it is far more complicated and voids warranties I believe.

1 Like

Hi, using emulators (such as BlueStacks) is currently not against our Terms of Service, so you won’t get banned for using them. However, we cannot officially support them, so we recommend to not use one.

14 Likes

‘currently’ - Are you planning to update them for this? :slight_smile:

While I can understand if you can’t/don’t want to give out full details, any measures being taken to tackle people using other apps in combination with the emulators? (no idea if it is even possible to find out if people use this, not a tech savvy person myself - just curious and figure more people might be, I know I’d be happy to hear ya’ll are looking into it).

2 Likes

Thanks for the reply petri.
This opens a huge can of worms.
What other platforms, add ons and/or programs that go against the Tos do small giant give a green light to use?

3 Likes

From what I read above, Vanilla bluestacks is not the issue…adding additional programs that CHEAT the system would be against TOS. :flushed:

4 Likes

So if extra programs can be added to it, which it can, why even allow it?

This is how it’s been handled in every game that I’m aware of.

Emulator use to play the game, no problem… various 3rd party programs to exploit the game environment REGARDLESS of what the game environment is run on, problem.

To be fair, PC ~= Mac > Android > IOS in terms of ease of pulling stunts, but that’s not a bluestacks issue.

1 Like

Android users could do similar, and I don’t think SG is going to disallow Android :). Apparently you can still root a IOS 11 device so that’s not immune either.

End of the day you have to trust the developers to catch and address exploits. Really the correct solution is allow people to be attacked anytime in my opinion for the one that’s been mentioned in this thread.

1 Like

As far as I know you can’t run scripts via bots on android which you can do on a computer.
I do see a good number of reasons why people legitimately use them, such as ones copper mentioned.

with as many bugs as this game has do you really think a great number of people wouldn’t and are not already exploiting this?

Its an issue for massive concern. A third party add on that allows infinite log in, constant farming, keeping tower empty and other in game processes.

The fact that SG has said this is OK to use and as rook mentioned given the green light to others to use without making it publicly known is rather disgraceful as well.

They clearly stat in tos that stuff like this is not acceptable, yet here they are saying use it at your own risk but you won’t banned.

The playing community deserves a very clear and detailed stance on this from small giant, to not only what is allowed with but other ones mentioned and others not yet addressed here.

I thought it has been clearly stated in this thread three times: use of PLAIN bluestacks (not overhauled to cheat cheat cheat), FINE. Use of additional third-party cheaty tools is against TOS, not allowed, and you will be caught and booted. :roll_eyes: :roll_eyes:

(You keep not hearing this. Are you not listening?)

2 Likes

Seriously rook?
How do you expect SG to monitor additional apps to a third party app.
Blustacks alone is a third party app, yet not stated in Tos that it is acceptable.
Why did SG give the go ahead privetly to certain individuals and not the generally gaming community.
If you can’t see the way people can exploit this dont come here being a defender of it applications.

1 Like

It’s not even really hard to do on Android, I can load third party (or my own) applications easily… even in something pretty closed like a Kindle I can do that.

Bluestacks isn’t the problem.

Other programs on the system running Bluestacks are.

If you are aware of an exploit, either forward it to SG or post without explicit user details here I suppose. I’m pretty certain looking at the fluctuation in the top 50 that people are still logging off to sleep at least, if you know differently that’s worth SG’s time to address.

1 Like

“…Covertly gave the okay to certain people…”

I’m not reading that between the lines in the one post by SG. I think perhaps you have in mind “certain people”. If you think someone is cheating, please by all means report them to SG.

1 Like

SG should have what baseline behavior for X Y Z member looks like.

For enforcement of this example, you simply go looking for patterns outside the norms… if they look at your account, or mine, or Rook’s, or a number of other players I imagine they can pretty easily see we log off pretty regularly.

If they look at Arien’s, I suspect they’ll see he’s on a lot except when he sleeps. That’s not a crime and he’s on IOS FWIW.

Then it’s just a matter of looking through the logs (which I know they have) outside of that… if you have an action every 5 minutes or whatever (I’m not actually certain what the idle timeout is) over the last 96 hours, pull out the ban hammer.

That should be pretty easy to pull out of the logs; humans have to sleep, so if you have a pattern where there clearly isn’t sleep, even sophisticated bots are going to get caught unless they mimic human behavior so precisely to render the whole thing moot anyway.

End of the day we have to trust SG to enforce such things, as it goes to the integrity of the game.

I would note that while Bluestacks is a third party program, it is not designed to modify or interfere with the service as written in the current TOS. If I write a stupid little script that performs a click at X,Y coordinate at a given frequency, that script is the issue and is clearly (imo) a breach of the TOS.

4 Likes

I’m not even going to pretend to know what you IT savvy people are talking about in detail, the way I see it from perspective of technologically challenged individual, the use of any enhancers or help tools is plainly unfair. I can understand what you are saying, in some cases this is completely harmless… but I agree that it opens a can of worms to what is acceptable and where the boundary is crossed . And again the different options different devices can give you to potentially abuse this third party programs , not fair… I would like to hope that if sg doesn’t have tight enough security in place to prevent this, they would at least have a monitoring system in place to alert them if individuals are exploiting this.

1 Like

Bluestacks is not in any way an enhancer or help tool. All it does is allow one to run android programs on a pc. That’s it. It will run pretty much any Android app in the world, this isn’t an issue that’s unique to this game. And there are plenty of other emulators besides Bluestacks. Scripts can be written for any OS, and frankly I have no idea if there are any scripts for this game but in the end, this is probably one of the least worrisome games I can think of when it comes to scripting. I can’t imagine what one could write that would provide a huge competitive advantage. There is zero competitive advantage to having 3000 cups vs 0 cups other than bragging rights. Level 40 over level 20 gets you a couple extra maximum action points and some room for a few extra heroes. Big deal. The only advantage I see is if it could somehow get someone more 5* heroes or ascention items, but I really don’t see a way scripting can help there and if it could, it could be written for android or ios as well.

3 Likes