Steam Leaderboards (or, leaderboards in general)

[Anesah]

I love Heroes of Steel very much, but there's a point where I just have to say, "Anesah, you know you should be doing something productive instead of playing through Oskahold for the eighty-sixth time." Never having finished the game (because I always want to tweak something about my party, or I like the idea of a different dialogue choice that I missed, or I feel that I missed a few secret doors) and wanting to play on a high difficulty, I decided to speed my way through the game. This was no problem, and as a bonus ten minutes of <insert my method of cheating> inflated my score by almost two-billion points.

At the time, I had no idea scores were being made public or that I was competing against anyone. If this has put anyone out, or worse, made someone very confused, I apologize.

I would very much like the ability to opt-out of the leaderboards. The best implementation of this would be a check box on a per-save basis, but I'd settle for something in the options. Obviously this is not at all a high priority. I feel like I might be the only person that would use it (lol). But I value fairness, had to at least ask, and having an artificially inflated score on the leaderboards that others might work on to achieve a place on is just not that. If someone knows of a way to do this through Steam already, I'm all ears.

For anyone not on Steam, view an image here.

[slayernz]

I don't know if an opt-out needs to be implemented, but rather a turn validation that checks the current score to the previous save score, looks quickly at where you are in the game and determines if you are cheating or not. if you are cheating, it'll let you keep going, but withhold your score (or put a flag on your score) that indicates you are not playing on a level playing field.

Checks can be done at save times, so shouldn't impact on game speed much.

[slayernz]

Oh, and rather than smite your karma for cheating, I'm going to exalt you for being honest and genuinely playing for enjoyment, not realizing that your actions have impacted the public leaderboard.

I'd also hope that there is a way for Cory Trese or fallen to be able to moderate the leaderboards ...

[Anesah]

Jan 18, 2015 3:10:18 GMT -5 slayernz said:

I don't know if an opt-out needs to be implemented, but rather a turn validation that checks the current score to the previous save score, looks quickly at where you are in the game and determines if you are cheating or not. if you are cheating, it'll let you keep going, but withhold your score (or put a flag on your score) that indicates you are not playing on a level playing field.

Checks can be done at save times, so shouldn't impact on game speed much.

That's actually a smart idea that I hadn't thought of. It could even be simplified to spot checks, two or three checks per episode where there is a known upper bound for the score. Since the high scores are for games far in progress, it makes sense not to enter a player's entry to the leaderboards until at least the first check, anyway.

The question would be whether or not this would retroactively affect scores already on the leaderboards. That's where the moderating comes in. Since I saw a post in the HoS forum about changing the leaderboards format from an overall high score to a seasonal high score, it would follow that they can make some kinds of changes to them, though to what degree I'm not sure.

[fallen]

Anesah - you could share your method of cheating with us privately and we will see if we can close it. I can also nuke that score off the leaderboards, but it will come back again.

[Anesah]

Gladly. [e-mail] incoming er...when I write it.