Do cheaters always prosper on Apple’s Gamecenter?

Posted by on August 9, 2012 in Games

I’ve been playing a lot of iPad games recently that involve getting better scores. That means I spend a fair bit of time poking around the leaderboards, mainly to see how many of my friends’ scores I’ve beaten. But it’s also nice to see where I am on the global leaderboards. Am I in the top 50%? The top 30%? Dare I dream to one day reach the top 10%?

Except that something’s rotten in the state of Apple’s Gamecenter. Or could that guy whose name I keep seeing be that good?

After the jump, 9,999,999,999 points!

There’s a guy on Gamecenter named Finalark. I see his name a lot. For instance, he’s really good at Zombie Gunship.

That’s quite a score. It’s better than exactly 3,272,908 other people who’ve played Zombie Gunship. He must have spent a lot of time working on that score. But the remarkable thing about Finalark is that he’s not one of those guys who’s only good at one game.

Check out the global leaderboard for Jetpack Joyride.

He’s one of the people who’s gotten a perfect score of 30,000, which means he’s reached the end of the game at 30,000 meters from the starting point. But surely his crowning achievement is his score in Defender Chronicles 2, one of my favorite tower defense games.

Look at how much better he is at Defender Chronicles 2 than the guy in second place! But that’s nothing. Look at this score in Zombie HQ, a free-to-play micropayment-based grindfest.

That’s an awfully big number. Maybe he’s just rich and liberal with his micropayment money. Surely he can’t be that much better than player #2 in a game that’s strictly skill-based? But Finalark doens’t cease to amaze. Check out his score on Sugar High, a crappy Tiny Wings rip-off.

Why would someone spend so much time getting so good at such a bad game?

But Finalark also has discriminating taste when it comes to more hardcore games. Check out his score in Bug Princess 2, my recent favorite shmup.

Now you might think that he’s somehow hacked Gamecenter and that these scores weren’t earned fair and square. The same thing occurred to me! Which is why I’ve submitted several complaints to Gamecenter over the last week or so, using the “report a problem” button when you look at someone’s profile on the leaderboards. Obviously, the guys at Gamecenter know what they’re doing. Surely they would promptly close any account that’s egregiously hacked the leaderboards. Since they’ve done no such thing to Finalark’s account, I just have to assume the guy is simply that good!

  • DT

    “Since they’ve done such think to Finalark’s account…”

    Huh?

  • Ben

    I think what your seeing there is a rare contraction of they and haven’t .Keep still or it will hear you.!

  • Finalark

    As a award winning film director just out of school 24 I need something to do while I wait around for my big break. My parents tell me I need to move out and get a job, but they just don’t get it. I can’t be oppressed by an office job. Anyway I’ve got to go. I’m about to score my 11,000th win in ascension.

    Finalark

  • Mark L

    Yeah, Finalark didn’t bust his ass day in and day out to be raked over the coals by you Woodward and Bernstein Johnny-come-lately nooblords. Maybe if you spent a little more time playing and a little less time snarking you’d rise to a fraction of his skill level. Also you need an anime avatar.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Jason-McMaster/607680289 Jason McMaster

    That’s the account my cats use

  • tomchick

    Finalark hacked my grammar!

    However, unlike Apple, I fixed it.

  • Tim James

    Tom, was this prompted by our new Game Center friendship when you noticed I had 16,000 francs in Le Havre with only 18 games played?
    I hope you don’t feel threatened by my 19th century French business acumen. It’s just a glitch.

  • Nightwish

    I personally would much rather they just let me cheat to my gamers content in SP games (so that I can finish a few of them, or getting through the bore, etc) than having achievements.
    Having said that, I don’t support this kind of thing, but I don’t really care either.

  • anon

    Steam leaderboards have the same issue. Recently got a pretty good score in Jamestown, so I wanted to see if some of the <100 people in front of me were cheating; at least 5 were impossible scores.

  • anon

    Ya, this is one of the arguments against GFWL. They try to encrypt savegames and config files to ensure the integrity of achievements, and it screws over a lot of people.

  • http://twitter.com/WarpRattler Evaccaneer DOOM

    Calling BS all over the place for anything higher than that 2.3B score (as of the time of this post, where there are three scores over eight billion and then the 2.3B score), and not just because they seem too high compared to the rest of the scores on that leaderboard.

    I say this because I just checked the leaderboards for the 360 port of the same game, along with the Arcadia world records (which are pretty much official, being tracked from real arcade hardware in real arcades). The highest score anyone’s earned on Ultra on 360 is 3,999,999,999 (which is also the world record for the arcade version), and the highest anyone’s earned in God mode in Black Label (which has quite a bit more going on) on 360 is a little under a billion more than that (arcade world record: 7,065,606,585). I know for a fact that the iOS version doesn’t have any extra stuff going on for better scoring, which leaves cheating as the only possible method for these scores.

    Sadly, Game Center is rather vulnerable to this sort of rampant cheating. It’s just less obvious in niche games like Bug Princess 2 than in, say, Temple Run.

  • D.Z

    Just googling, I found this: http://www.pangeasoft.net/forum2/index.php?topic=681.0

    The guy seems pretty well known for it.

    Honestly, at this point, when it comes to achievements and leaderboards on Steam and Game Center, I tend to just compare with friends, I view overall stats as meaningless exactly because of this.

    MS have made us pay a high price for it but Xbox/GFWL seems pretty secure in that regard.

  • anon

    The one GFWL game(SF4) I played had hacked scores.

  • Nightwish

    Why don’t they just disable them? I couldn’t care less about measuring my gaming achievements, I know I suck and I don’t have time or even the inclination to get better at it, just let me use this thing I bought the way I want it.

  • tomchick

    I do sympathize with how vulnerable they must be, but there’s really no excuse to leave active such a blatantly hacked account. This guy has his name at the top of all sorts of leaderboards and many of his scores are — as you note — literally impossible. It’s a real slap in the face to those of us who care about leaderboards that Apple does nothing about it.

  • http://twitter.com/WarpRattler Evaccaneer DOOM

    The big problem is that Apple seemingly doesn’t care about fixing a lot of stuff on their platform. With Game Center, they probably don’t bother because a lot of games use OpenFeint, even though the feature set is different (aside from the part where both are obnoxious wrappers I’d rather not have taking up system resources in every iOS game I play).

    In-app purchases are another big one. There’s no consistent implementation, even between apps by the same developers, and there are far too many “free” apps that abuse the system to (try to) sell you the other 99% of whatever it is after you download it. Worse, for people running jailbroken devices, it’s trivial to spoof in-app purchases in the majority of games, which is a double whammy for games that download extra content from proprietary servers when you purchase it.

    Of course, Apple has no incentive to fix anything, because they make piles of money without doing so.

  • Heh

    Well, obviously anyone can submit any score to a leaderboard.

    You need to play online-only games if you want competition, duh.

  • https://twitter.com/AceOfBlades247 AceOfTrolling(Was:AceOfBlades)

    Finalark has Negative 1 points on a leader board which you can’t gt and is Number one on every friggen ame.

  • Name

    you know all thoese extremly identical extermialy high extremily exact running game scores? i think thoese are cheating, but im not. my temple run 2 is glitching right now, and won’t stop racking up my score even though im technically dead. trying to get it to stop. this glitch was activated somehow when i unlocked my ipod in the middle of a game i had started over 24 hours ago. i was in a mine, and when i left it, the minecart didnt dissapear and when i fell off a cliff, it decided i was still going. somehow sucks

  • http://www.facebook.com/bryan.r.sandoval.5 Bryan Roberto Sandoval

    I just hate how they hack scores like in hambo had my fav game fearless took the place now some other one with an impossible score wat a cheater and add me: