Tilt to Live 2: Redonkulous

[Kamikaze28]

(05-14-2013 08:53 AM)Phyresis Wrote:  Again, the hackers may just tone down their numbers a bit to get around this. I dont mean to be playing the devils advocate, but it seems like a lost cause tbh.

Yeah, that's what I wanted to express with the last sentence of my post:

(05-14-2013 06:28 AM)Kamikaze28 Wrote:  Okay, basically this is a hopeless pursuit.

However, it could be the case that if they can't exaggerate their scores to show how badly they can mess with the scoreboard, they might just not bother.

On the other side of this idea is of course the case of a false positive. Say you have a nicely established score distribution and someone just knocks the ball out of the park and legitimately achieves a score which is 10% above the previous #1 score - the system might flag that score as being fraudulent and drama would ensue. The question then becomes: what would you rather deal with as a scoreboard service provider?

Just to continue my current train of thought and maybe to give others here something to think about: from a computer science standpoint, I would argue that this problem is inherently unsolvable. No matter what game we are talking about, the score is just a variable which is increased or decreased during the game until a certain point when it is submitted as a score.
The honest player adheres to the rules of the game and only uses the game to manipulate the score variable. The dishonest player can, with more or less effort, manipulate this variable from without the game and trick the game into thinking the score is still true.
You can equip the game with logic and redundancies to detect tampering - but then again these precautions can be subverted and the arms race begins anew.
Sparing you the details of cryptography and hardware and software architecture, I think there is no way in the current mobile game environment to ensure the validity of scores a game submits.