Proper Leaderboard


Dart737

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My Suggestion: A Proper Leaderboard

I've really enjoyed the slight competition of seeing how far some people can get and how some people love the game so much that they actually take the effort to go well beyond the 200 day mark. But, some of them are people simply editing their save file with a much larger day than earned. I'm not entirely sure how to prevent the occassional "Cheat" in the leaderboard. The best way I could think to do it is comparing the person's playtime to the # of days they've survived. It seems to be a pretty clear definer of if someone rightfully earned their time or not.

My thought in order to achieve this is having the person screenshot what day they're on, and maybe their gear to prove that its high end stuff, no beginner would have it, though this could still allow cheating once someone gets a decent, "end game" gear in a sense or simply make a seperate leaderboard where youtubers or streamers are kinda competing against each other, enticing people to make more videos and streams of the game, further getting the reputation of the game out there, and keeping at least one of the leaderboards fair. While also giving the youtuber or streamer a purpose to making it, for the sake of competition. I like seeing my rank on the leaderboard, despite it not being very high, and seeing my friend's in comparison. But its kinda annoying to see several of the very very top spots were taken by people who simply edited their save. (#1 on the steam leaderboard for voyageur only has 60-70 hours of playtime, but has made it exactly to day 24,855 "Somehow". No, I'm not being paranoid about it, he's actually the owner of a mod on indiedb that edits saves.) I get that some people like to edit their saves cause it allows them to get interesting things or get back a save they lost, but I think the top leaderboard spots should be to people who really well earned it.

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I agree, at the time I just wanted to try if it really would work. Obviously it's not a nice thing to do, but didn't see much harm since the leaderboards is filled with cheaters anyway, at least my score is so obvious that you don't have to guess whether someone is really that good.

My idea would be to send the whole save file to the server, rather than just the survival time. From the save file you can pretty easily see if someone has really played the game that long or if they just started a new game, changed one variable and then died.

Btw, my survival time was even number, because at that time TLD had a bug where survival time didn't advance after 42 days and 16 hours unless you were sleeping or crafting. I was the first one to report the bug, kinda weird though. But anyway that mens that a lot's of player really survived more than their score says.

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Yeah, most leaderboards inevitably end up that way. I just want a somewhat cheat-proof leaderboard. Also, the save editor has its purposes, I just think that some people play the leaderboard for the sake of competition and would like a more fool proof way of doing so. Sending in the saves would be a good idea, that way they can check the logs to see if something strange jumped it up that far, and people wouldn't have to record an entire series if they didn't want to.

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I agree the leaderboard is theoretically a cool thing and a little bit of competition makes the extreme efficient playstyles more fun. But as long there is cheating possible I don't think it should exist because it only causes frustration. If the log has days without activity then the safe could already be counted as invalid. But I guess there would be ways to manipulate that as well.

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