One of the things I like doing is seeing how fast people can complete a level, max gold collected, longest time survived, etc. Some people do very smart things to get a good spot in the leaderboard. However, many of the people in the leaderboard either have code that doesnt compile(i can tell by spectating their solution), or they complete the level in an unrealistic amount of time, yet solving it much slower. For example, they may complete a level in “2 seconds” as warrior when i spectate them, they dont even finish half of the level in 2 seconds. These errored leaderboards are really annoying because I cant see people who actually put the time to make very creative codes in levels. Is there any way to fix this?
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This usually happens due to earlier versions of the levels containing bugs or exploits that allowed very abusive ways to achieve the goals.
One of the problems is that when a new version of a level is published, the scores for the old versions stay in the leaderboards.
There also have been a few general exploits that could be used to change the place of anything in the map or to instantly kill anything. These have also been fixed now.
I believe a high-scores removal tool was in the plans, but it is not the highest of the priorities as far as I know.
Finally, there have been several compiler changes (mostly improvements) lately, but that may also have broken quite a lot of existing solutions.
And it is worth mentioning that the leaderboards are not quite secured, I believe it would not be very much of a challenge for an ill-intentioned attacker to intercept the submissions and manipulate their own scores.
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Oh man, I just had the idea to run the new level testing verifier thing we made in order to validate high scores. Instead of trying to manually nuke high scores that look too good to be true and then don’t check out when we manually inspect the solution, we could automatically check everyone on every leaderboard and remove the ones that didn’t pass.
Unfortunately that also can’t be a priority yet, but it might be a fun project if anyone wants to hack on it.
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I would be very pleased to see the implementation of of this idea
When you see the results in the top 5 of leaderboard is unrealistic and unreachable
This greatly reduces the motivation to improve code