L
leahcim
-
leahcim
No it isn't an easy job. If bugs like slow down and speed up exist then it's not possible.
Perhaps for "obvious" fake times it might be,, but as I said, if it's possible to get an obvious fake time then clearly all times are in question...and, for people that can actually drive, the difference in lap times is tenths or even less. Can you really tell if the game dropped or added one tenth from looking at the replay? Not easily at all...and it's obvious that if the game can post a time that's 1 second out, it can probably be 1 tenth out too.
Get it now?
And again calling glitches that people have no control over "cheating" misses the point I made that a fair %age of the bugs that, for example, broke Race Pro's leaderboards had nothing to do with cheats and everything to do with a badly written game.
Plus there's the issue of scale. You are basically saying the equiv of "All email is readable, so it's easy to delete spam" Perhaps, but the actual problem is, there are millions and millions of email messages and it'd be huge expensive task to have someone reading and deleting them all.
Clearly (and if you'd read my post you would have seen this) any popular racing game is going to quickly make manual leaderboard editing both impractical from a cost and time perspective (indeed, you can see over at nogrip how one moderator has complained that the start up time for steam / gtr evo is too slow to make checking laps practical, if he had a popular game on his hands it wouldn't be possible)
It simply is not a solution however "easy" it appears to be to look at a lap and detect an obvious glitch or cheat.
So again, a popular, serious racing game has to be right and be trusted, otherwise it's a waste of time racing and competing in that game. Worse because people decide what times are possible and moan about times which are obviously wrong, but often simply accept times that look reasonable without thinking what the glitches really say about the potential for every time on the board to be wrong.
But yes, you're right to note that if you have a very small clique playing a game where the vast majority simply aren't competitive at all and are seconds off the pace, even in the same car then you could, in theory, accept any old crap code and just delete laps as you see fit....but if this is what you think Simbin and other game authors mentality is shared with yours, it's just a death knell for PC racing games. Simply put, you can't write your game using the theory that so few people will use it that you can manually check every leaderboard time. It's simply not cost effective.
