Are players cheating my leaderboards?

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brendan asked Jul 4, '17

Are players cheating my leaderboards?

Question from a developer:

There are many users have impossibly high scores on my game's leaderboard. I checked their event histories and I'm not seeing any events, though. How is this possible?

Leaderboards and Statistics

10 |1200

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Answer 1 · 2017-07-04T03:00:16Z

brendan answered Jul 4, '17

Having reviewed your title, the players are able to cheat their scores because you have enabled allowing the client to post statistics (in Settings->API). This is off by default for all titles, so that players cannot post whatever score they want to - the idea is that you would have the client submit scores via Cloud Script, where you can use server authoritative code to check things you need to, like min/max score, time since last score posted, etc. This is called out in more detail in our tutorial on statistics and leaderboards, here: https://api.playfab.com/docs/tutorials/landing-players/player-statistics

The reason you're not seeing any events for some of the players is because the events in question are beyond the limit of your retention period (7 days). For example, the #1 player on your "Highscore" leaderboard, PlayFab ID 2ABBC00EF3A3A752, hasn't logged in since June 19th.

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10 |1200

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Esteban Feldman commented · Jul 05, 2020 at 01:52 AM

Do you have an example on how to implement Scores and Leaderboards for a simple game with Cloud Script? Thanks

Edit: Using the JS SDK if possible

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Esteban Feldman Esteban Feldman commented · Jul 05, 2020 at 02:43 AM

As you can see the only way you explain is the insecure way:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/playfab/features/social/tournaments-leaderboards/quickstart

```

Select Title settings off the Settings menu for your title.
Select the API Features tab.
Check the box for Allow client to post player statistics.
Click the SAVE button at the bottom of the screen.

```

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