Why are cheaters still going unbanned (or disabled from leaderboards)

[wyldmage]

This has been a thing the entire life of the game. Right now, leaderboard top 20 is almost exclusively cheated scores.

top 18 are all 248,000 to 447,000 score.
#19 is 8352

Top 55 fastest clears are all 0:00:00.
#556 is a solid 15 minutes even. And I'm sorry, but if you're clearing all 3 stages in 15 minutes, I'm already suspicious (though I believe it is doable). But most likely these people are running scripts at the very least. Human use of the UI simply takes too long for this many people to have 15 minute or faster clear times IN THE PAST WEEK.

Having the leaderboard exist at all means that the devs should be aggressively dealing with people who are cheating. Yet years have past with this being a chronic issue.

Devs - if you don't want to fix cheaters, remove leaderboards from the game. Or remove global leaderboards at least. Though if that's done, it'd be nice to have a weekly/monthly/all-time leaderboard among me and my friends.

Edit: Also, would love if the ingame leaderboards mentioned which content they covered (since potential score is wildly different in custom games).

[JellyPuff]

With fast mode and some Whirlwind/Flex/Offering setup as Ironclad, under 10 minutes is doable even, though it requires some serious RNG swings in your favour. I've also seen infinites being able to crack the 10 minute mark, but that requires even better RNG.

Simply having obviously impossible scores and times not show up by implementing a filter on the leaderboards would be enough. Streaks only seem to go up to 99 and i'd say it is technically possible, but i remain suspicous about their legitimacy. Still, having 2 or 3 people in the world with a 99 streak really doesn't seem completely impossible, if they live and breathe this game.

[wyldmage]

Postat inițial de JellyPuff:

With fast mode and some Whirlwind/Flex/Offering setup as Ironclad, under 10 minutes is doable even, though it requires some serious RNG swings in your favour. I've also seen infinites being able to crack the 10 minute mark, but that requires even better RNG.

Simply having obviously impossible scores and times not show up by implementing a filter on the leaderboards would be enough. Streaks only seem to go up to 99 and i'd say it is technically possible, but i remain suspicous about their legitimacy. Still, having 2 or 3 people in the world with a 99 streak really doesn't seem completely impossible, if they live and breathe this game.

Right. I understand that it is doable in some setups. It is TOUGH though.

Which is why I didn't say that there are 556 people obviously cheating. But 556 people all managing to get 15 minutes or less as their best time in the last week doesn't sound correct. The majority of the people playing are not trying to get a fastest time record every week. Many players are still in the 1 hour plus zone per game as they simply play casually. Etc. It is the fact that this record is only players in the last 7 days that makes so many 15 minute times stand out.

Same with streaks. The only reason the pair of 99s is suspect is because there is a HUGE gap between 2nd and 3rd. In theory, if 99 is doable, there would be several people failing at 70 or 80 or 90.

And both the 10-15 minute times and win streaks would be within what I could stomach if cheaters were otherwise being cracked down on. But that's obviously not the case, and if cheaters are *obviously* on the board, then there's nothing to say "well, we should assume that this guy got his result legit".

[twins10]

not really any way to detect the plausible cheating (anything that isnt 600 points better then anyone else or absdurdly fast) that isnt a lot of coding work and comparing past results for the user with a lot of criteria for determining reasonable versus not reasonable, and having to handle complaints from people who get tossed off the board and say (correctly or not, no way to prove) that they were legitemate.

the leaderboard just isnt worth the man-hour cost.

the best you can hope for is some quick and dirty check to remove the most obvious fake results.

[Enemy Unknown]

Just start at #19 as to be the #1.

Easy to code a filter that deletes 0 second runs, etc..

Just start the counter for yourself by #19. If it gives something to the cheater, let them, until the devs start to take care about it.

[sandman25dcsss]

I think nothing can be done here. If some filtering is added (runs shorter than 5 minutes, more than 2k score etc. Are filtered out), cheaters will adapt their code to those filters (we will see 500 runs with exactly 5 minutes and exactly 2k score).

[DaBa]

Because banning those people is pointless. There will always be more. I am sure devs have better ways to spend their time than to tilt at windmills. You can discard the obvious cheaters yourself easily enough. People cheating is a reality of every single play PC game and there's no good remedy for it. Unless you want to spend your time and resources implementing anti cheating software, which nobody will do in a single player game for very obvious reasons.

[Enemy Unknown]

The Souls series had a good idea.

If they cought you cheating, they banned you from Online game mode, you had one chance left with the white ring.

At slay the spire, they could lock out the obvious cheater from the leaderboards. Simple as that. There is no reason to buy it again just for the leaderboards, are here there is no money to make.
You have to think twice if it is worth for your ego, to cheat and stay for a short amount of time at the Top Ten list and risk to get locked out of it for the future, or if you behave and measure yourself with honest gameplay.

[DaBa]

Postat inițial de Enemy Unknown:

The Souls series had a good idea.

If they cought you cheating, they banned you from Online game mode, you had one chance left with the white ring.

At slay the spire, they could lock out the obvious cheater from the leaderboards. Simple as that. There is no reason to buy it again just for the leaderboards, are here there is no money to make.
You have to think twice if it is worth for your ego, to cheat and stay for a short amount of time at the Top Ten list and risk to get locked out of it for the future, or if you behave and measure yourself with honest gameplay.

It's still a waste of time in a game like this. Sure you can take care of obvious cheaters, it's only going to make people more sneaky. You'll still be dealing with cheaters that are not detectable by just looking at their scores. You can already ignore scores that are obviously not legit, taking extra effort to find them and make a feature to ban them from the leaderboards is a waste of development resources.

[JellyPuff]

Postat inițial de Enemy Unknown:

The Souls series had a good idea.

If they cought you cheating, they banned you from Online game mode, you had one chance left with the white ring.

The softban system in the Souls games is horrible. It ruined modding and cheaters just use family sharing to go around the ban.

Bone of Order/White Circlet only act as a second chance, if you're penalized from disconnecting/ALT+F4ing too much during online play.

I doubt, that if StS would make obviously impossible scores invisible, that more cheaters would try to make their score appear more legit. Those who'd make an effort in looking more legit, probably already do so right now. Who knows if a normal looking score, you're looking at, is actually legit.

[Enemy Unknown]

Postat inițial de JellyPuff:

Postat inițial de Enemy Unknown:

The Souls series had a good idea.

If they cought you cheating, they banned you from Online game mode, you had one chance left with the white ring.

The softban system in the Souls games is horrible. It ruined modding and cheaters just use family sharing to go around the ban.

Bone of Order/White Circlet only act as a second chance, if you're penalized from disconnecting/ALT+F4ing too much during online play.

I doubt, that if StS would make obviously impossible scores invisible, that more cheaters would try to make their score appear more legit. Those who'd make an effort in looking more legit, probably already do so right now. Who knows if a normal looking score, you're looking at, is actually legit.

That's right. It doesn't work at all in MP games. I'm aware of that, but here it is just a Leaderboard. Neverless you are right, it is the effort not worth at all. I was just posting some ideas and solutions. If they are practicable or makes sense at all... *shrug shoulders*

I don't care about the Leaderboards aswell, my problem is more of starving for more content. ;O)

[K E N N I]

How do these cheaters even affect you? It's a purely single player game and the leaderboards have no bearing on anything. The cheaters don't get anything besides satisfaction. Is there even a formal reason to ban them? I don't think they're breaking TOS agreement or something.

[wyldmage]

Postat inițial de patryk.drobinski:

How do these cheaters even affect you? It's a purely single player game and the leaderboards have no bearing on anything. The cheaters don't get anything besides satisfaction. Is there even a formal reason to ban them? I don't think they're breaking TOS agreement or something.

They affect me because if I look at the leaderboard, I have to put in extra effort to get any useful information out of it.

Saying "let them cheat, it's a single player game" ignores the fact that there are leaderboards that are *supposed* to be useful.

And it's not something new. This has been going a long time.

As Enemy posted, the best solution is a zero tolerance policy. Get caught cheating, get banned from leaderboard permanently. Don't release exact rules for detection of cheaters (but obviously 0 seconds = too fast). Sure, they can get around it. That'll just get another account banned. And another. And each time, the cheating account gets removed, keeping the leaderboards clean of blatant cheaters.

Would it stop 100% of cheating? Of course not. But would it stop enough cheaters to make the leaderboard more useful? Absolutely. Several leaderboards the entire front page is full of obvious cheated results.

And I stated in my original post "If the devs don't think that there is a problem with cheating, or aren't willing to fix it, then just remove global leaderboards, since they are obviously meaningless anyways due to rampant cheating."

That option is a much quicker solution, and shows that the devs would rather stick to the single player experience that doesn't encourage competition between strangers on a worldwide leaderboard. If they WANT the leaderboards to matter, get rid of cheating (or at least give a good effort).

[sandman25dcsss]

I'd like to reply to "how do the cheaters affect you". They stopped me runnig daily challenges. Daily challenges are equivalent of custom game, their single point is in you comparing your run to runs of other players. And cheaters disable that single point. If there are 500 runs at 0 seconds, it does not matter how good you play, you still will be far in the table and will not know your real place. Maybe you were the best, or in first hundred, or in first thousand but you never know unless you waste your time scrolling through the leaderboard to find where non-cheating results begin (at 501th position or at 856th or whatever)

[chaos4u]

as polluted as the leader boards are may as well get rid of them all together , no sense at looking at bunch of bogus runs and scores.

[Baraz]

The top scores have a timer of 0:00:00. ...

I rest my case.