Dear Apple: it’s time to start dealing with Game Center hackers
For most platform owners, hacking is a big deal and it’s rapidly stamped on. This isn’t the case with Game Center, Apple’s system that provides high-score tables and achievements for iOS games. At WWDC 2011, Apple proudly boasted iOS was the most popular games system in existence and that Game Center had 50 million users. “We’re making it even better in iOS 5,” enthused the now-ousted Scott Forstall, who talked about adding to Game Center photos, achievement points, friend discovery, game discovery, and support for turn-based games.
Here’s one thing Forstall didn’t announce: a means of dealing with Game Center hackers. And right now, that’s something the system desperately needs.
As a case in point, I’ve been getting addicted to Impossible Road, an extremely pure high-score-oriented game. At the time of writing, here’s the high score table:
9,223,372,036,854,775,807 points? Chinny reckon.I’m there at #5 (yay me!), Edge’s Jason ‘I can complete Super Hexagon while on the phone and eating lunch’ Killingsworth is at #4, and the game’s dev is at #3. And then two idiots have hacked the game with absurd and literally impossible scores, which they’ve helpfully also done across two other high-score boards on the game.
Such hacking makes a mockery of the system and, at best, is always-in-your-face spam. Other systems enable you to eradicate such idiocy, but not Game Center. There are no tools for developers that would enable them to boot the hackers from their high-score tables, nor are there tools that would enable someone to report an account for clearly hacked scores.
Frankly, I doubt Apple cares—it’s been pretty much oblivious to games for its entire history. However, gaming is a huge part of iOS, in terms of how people use the devices, the number of game created, and income that comes directly from gaming. Apple needs to start taking gaming seriously, and dealing with the mess on Game Center would be a good start.
Update: Developer Jeff Ruediger takes exception to the argument Apple provides no tools to aid developers. Via email, he says: “In iTunes Connect, Apple allows each developer to set a score range–min to max—per leaderboard”. This is server-side and can be changed without uploading a new binary. However, he adds: “Is it enough? No. I’d love the ability to remove scores by range or by Game Center ID. That being said, I’d much rather spend ten minutes making new features or fixing bugs than messing with fake leaderboard scores.”
It’s a shame – OpenFeint became a mess and now Game Center is plagued both with problems updating scores and cheats occupying the top spots.
I agree there needs to be some sort of reporting system. If Apple doesn’t want to bother with it, your other solution is better… why can’t they give the dev the ability to take down a score? Do they think we’d abuse the privilege? A small Apple team dedicated to Gamecenter would go a long way to showing they actually care about the integrity of the whole thing. Otherwise, the question will be whether it’s even worth adding to our games.
Hi,
It is not always something seeked. Months a go I was playing Roads of Rome in my iPad and I decided to play again mission 1. After finishing it I had more than 1 million points which was, of course a bug.
Maybe it is not an Apple’s problem.
@Manuel: Bugs happen, which is fair enough, but these scores crop up a lot, from the same accounts. It’s hacking-based spam, pure and simple, and Apple needs to deal with it or at least enable developers to.
Yeah, that is really annoying problem. It is sad that sometimes Apple just doesn’t care about us. I am sure they could find a solution if they want to.
Question: i seem to get some spam friend requests on game center in the last month, what’s somebody trying to gain with that?