Leaderboard cheats already?

[Flith]

Wow...this was a problem in DG1.
Why bother with leaderboards if they are so easy to hack with fake scores.

[Venatacia]

The cheating was here within 3 days of the games realese. Cheating has been going on since the dawn of time, it's a human trait that will probably never go away. I don't even know why these companies bother with scoreboards anymore - I really don't. Soon as I saw the 1 million + scores I thought... well.. thats that then... no point even trying to compete in a gentlemanly manor. Spoils it for the rest of us that want to have a challenge. Now how do we know what scores are legit ?.. we don't = fun lost. And your right, it was a problem in DG1... still is in DG2 sadly.

[OldGrey]

It's a real disappointment to again see the leader boards ruined by these hackers with crazy scores

Come on devs there must be a way to filter out the cheaters & their fake scores

[mikeydsc]

Without having the scoring system run under some kinda server side drm checking there isnt much devs can do on the client side without people being stuck with always online to check for cheats.

[chillgreg]

It's easy to fix, Hidden Path are too lazy, same as DG1...

[Aerisana]

14 Trillion points for only using 1 tower in uber super hardcore death mode seems reasonable.

[Operation40]

so they "mod" their local game, get a high score offline, then what? unmod their game and re-connect online? and it uploads the score?

offline scores should just not upload then.

[Aerisana]

Anytime you are collecting anything in a Game. Money, Resources, it is gotten from the "world" of the game and added to "your inventory" (weather its a backpack or a score) at that exact moment you can sometimes manipulate that number to give you more of whatever. The Main server (if it is not too bright) thinks you picked that up "in the world" and verifies it.
Hence your 95 million score for a level that only could possably net you 150k score.

tl;dr you can fool computers sometimes.

[Kaboom]

Our first priority is to take care of bugs that are affecting people's ability to play. Once we have most of those resolved, we'll then work on creating tools that will help us manage the leaderboards. It might take some time, but it's on our list!

[NeHoMaR]

I was trying to get good points and then I see people with billions of points? everybody with 4 millons and one guy with 300 millions?

[chillgreg]

@Kaboom no offence but that's pretty piss-poor. Dodgy leaderboards and cheats were the bane of DG1 and should be a priority, not an afterthought

[Enemyvirus]

I agree with chillgreg, its not as if you guys were unaware of the issue as it plauged DG1. It should have been part of the core game for DG2.

[chillgreg]

Postat inițial de enemyvirus:

I agree with chillgreg, its not as if you guys were unaware of the issue as it plauged DG1. It should have been part of the core game for DG2.

^^^ How can it NOT have been a PRIMARY consideration?

[Icicle]

Technically, there is no way to solve this issue except for running part of the game code server-side.

Otherwise (even with online-play, as long as the calculations are done on your PC), you can always change the score in your systems memory and have it upload the wrong score. Sure, you can do sanity checks (excluding impossible to get scores), but you cannot weed out scores that are cheats, yet still in the realm of possibility.

So the only solution is requiring you to log into their servers for competetive play with the game's calculations being run by Hidden Path Entertainment. That is expensive and not trivial (you need that code to be able to be run in a client/server model as well as a pure client model, unless you want to force always-online ...). It'll also introduce some lag and probably make fast-forward neigh impossible. This really isn't an easy problem to solve. This shouldn't be a priority (imho).

[Razguul]

Icicle, there are lots of solutions to minimize/eliminate this. You just have to think it out while you're designing your game.

Here's an iinteresting one:

Send scores incrementally with timestamps. This gives you a log to see how often the score improved as well as a way to trace the highscore's "momentum".

You would then set milestones/criteria for your scores.

For example: A score greater than 20,000 can not arrive in first 20secs of a game. A score greater than 250,000 can not arrive without an entry greater than 200,000.

This is not exactly the same as sending a game state, but close to it.

[Icicle]

Postat inițial de Razguul:

Icicle, there are lots of solutions to minimize/eliminate this. You just have to think it out while you're designing your game.

Here's an iinteresting one:

Send scores incrementally with timestamps. This gives you a log to see how often the score improved as well as a way to trace the highscore's "momentum".

You would then set milestones/criteria for your scores.

For example: A score greater than 20,000 can not arrive in first 20secs of a game. A score greater than 250,000 can not arrive without an entry greater than 200,000.

This is not exactly the same as sending a game state, but close to it.

That isn't cheat-proof; it just makes it less trivial to cheat. Sure, there are ways you can make it more difficult to cheat; but you get into an arms-race with cheaters. You'll be expending significant development effort just to delay the inevitable (or you'll constantly have to update/patch your anti-cheater mechanics). This has historically been done (Diablo and maphacks, etc.), but it always was a losing battle.