Hey,
Duels.com is finally back, with a couple of changes to the game play. The total numbers of players hooked on to the game has also risen, so has the complexity of their HTML challenge issue forms !
The spoiler hack that I had earlier written to advance in the game is no longer going to work as they have made some interesting and smart changes. Getting around the current conditions is a little tricky, but someone with general knowledge of Javascript can actually write a script to do this. The process of advancing is now a little more involving and time consuming. I am NOT writing a script for this, specially after the reactions to the last hack, but would surly want to discuss the nuances of this new hack that someone could potentially exploit.
Also, writing a script for the current form submissions involves a little more of HTML parsing and stuff, and I am not sure if it is worth that effort. Last night, I was talking to a "certain friend of mine" who did succeed in getting something that looked like a good script, but there were way too many things remaining to do, before the script got working. Added to all these was the fact that there was a random id being passed, hidden in the form, we needed a map between the actual player names and the ids, to issue the challenges etc.
However, I realized that the fundamental way the game functions has not really changed. I was expecting the people at Duels.com to add certain conditions like losing in XP points on losing duels above a certain level, prevent challenge spamming to players etc. Also, they still are not checking for the referrer URL to all incoming challenge requests. Another problem with writing the script is that it has to be constantly updated as the site changes. As I am not a developer with Duels.com, I don't think it would be a great idea for me to constantly update stuff that I have written for fun.
So here is the solution for all these. There are two parts to it, some way to accept all challenges that are thrown to me, and another way to search for people who are in my XP level, and challenge only them (also only those who are online). A script for this would be complex, and that is where the firefox extension, iMacros comes into play. iMacros is basically a record and playback browser tool for firefox. It is simple for a novoice to use, but the script that is generated can actually be changed to give enough flexibility. iMacros in a sense is a scaled down version of a HTML automated test framework like SilkTest
Another option that I am considering is using a combination of Chicken foot and Aadavark, but I may drop it in favor of iMacros, primarily because iMacros allows me to record, while in chickenfoot, I need to script down elements. Lets see what comes out of this experiment !!
