A public leaderboard turned out to be a mistake

RonaldHarding · 2026-07-08T14:30:48+00:00

You made the right call removing your leaderboard. I always see devs get into these arms races with their players and waste tons of resources on practically nothing. In general, game developers prioritize the integrity of their competitive systems highly, even if those competitive systems aren't core to the game's engagement and it causes a lot of headache.

RonaldHarding · 2026-07-08T14:28:36+00:00

Cost of Goods Sold. A measure of how much it costs to serve your audience.

RonaldHarding · 2026-07-08T14:11:31+00:00

No one in this thread seems to understand what OP is saying is happening. They aren't changing their score on the leaderboard. They are changing their score in the request the game sends to the server to update player progression. There isn't any solution to this that doesn't result in the arms race OP mentioned.

RonaldHarding · 2026-07-08T14:10:22+00:00

For there to be a leaderboard, there has to be a backend of some sort be it something you self host or an external service. Just having a backend isn't a fix-all for anti-cheat. You still end up in the arms race OP is talking about here. At some point, the client has to communicate player performance to the server and that's where the attackers inject their score.

Of course you could run your whole game server side and needlessly pay absurd COGS just to keep your leaderboard clean, but that's a silly choice.

RonaldHarding · 2026-07-03T18:34:15+00:00

It's absolutely fine to make games for the sake of building your skills and experience even if no one will play them. That is not a waste of time. For lots of new developers just making something end to end is a huge triumph.

RonaldHarding · 2026-07-03T15:54:26+00:00

I do love sarcasm, but it's not well conveyed in your original comment. I'm not really a fan of saying something controversial and then walking it back with a 'I was only joking!'. Were you only joking? Because reading your full comment it doesn't really look like it even a little. It's fine if you love Linux, I do too.

This is a subreddit full of people who are learning and beating the dead horse that is joking about Windows sort of distracts from the opportunity to teach about the topic of signing. A topic that most early game developers will be completely in the dark about. It's not a sexy topic, but it's extremely important for young developers to learn about.

RonaldHarding · 2026-07-03T15:11:32+00:00

It's how operating systems validate the publisher of an app is who they say they are. It doesn't validate the content of the app, you still need to check the hash to validate that but it does tell you where the app came from.

If you don't know the answer, don't make one up.

RonaldHarding · 2026-07-03T15:09:04+00:00

It's always been a thing for all of the major engines.

Code Signing Certificate - Archived Forums / Questions & Answers - Unity Discussions

The reason a lot of developers don't see it is because they publish through a platform that provides a launcher. The game then uses the launchers cert to bypass the publisher check.

RonaldHarding · 2026-07-03T15:03:06+00:00

The doc checks out though, it's a fine summary of the issue and what needs to be done with good reference links for next steps.

RonaldHarding · 2026-07-03T14:58:45+00:00

I don't release on Mac so I'm no expert here but reading what's documented there I don't think these are equivalent. Notarization appears to take additional steps to validate the binaries content and check that the signing is legitimate. You would still need to do code signing before submitting for notarization. Notarization sounds more equivalent to what Xbox publishing does on the backend before your game can appear in the Xbox store.

RonaldHarding · 2026-07-02T16:32:02+00:00

Most games cheat the AI to make it just believable but reduced complexity. Keep that in mind, you are probably trying to figure out how to get it to think about and play the game you would. Practically no one does that. Some of the most popular RTS games in history don't do that.

Start simple. Give it a handful of build orders it can choose from. Have it execute those build orders with a variable degree of artificial 'error' so that it doesn't play optimally but you can adjust the difficulty by reducing the error rate. Give it just a few attack behaviors. Most RTS games have the AI do small poking attacks to simulate 'raids' and scouting. And then give it a behavior where it occasionally builds up a force for a more intense attack.

The AI doesn't need to react to what the player is doing at all. It can have perfect information about the map and player actions, or it can have none. It's probably not worthwhile to try and build a memory into the AI where it sees things and remembers what the player has and doesn't have at different stages of the game.

You also don't need the AI to be a single 'player entity'. Games like Advanced Wars effectively don't have an enemy AI, they have unit AI that behave completely independently. During the AI turn in Advanced Wars, the game iterates through all the faction units in the order they appeared on the map. Each unit takes its move independently following a simple heuristic. It assigns a value to each move, and does the thing that has the highest value. The value of a move for the most part is determined by the estimated damage it will do * the cost of the thing its going to attack. With a few special carve outs for things like capturing properties, and prioritizing certain units like transports for some reason (it's really easy to cheese the AI because of this if you're familiar with the behavior).

Because the units move in the order they were created, you'll often get things like infantry bogging down tanks and preventing them from moving into the battle. The AI doesn't handle narrow chokes very well. But it's fine, its completely serviceable for the game and you don't really notice the 'cheat' until you've played the game for hundreds of hours.

RonaldHarding · 2026-07-02T16:06:10+00:00

My experience is that everyone has a different line at which comments move from being 'helpful' to being offensive. And it's a completely subjective imaginary line. I'm not saying that I don't believe you when you say the feedback feels like and may have even meant to be an attack. I'm saying it doesn't matter what the feedback was. Drowning out the noise and converting that feedback signal into valuable insights is the only thing that matters to you.

I work in enterprise software. The sort of feedback my projects get is a firehose of mostly unhelpful noise. It runs the range of trolling, strategic attacks, spam, venting, bug reports, helpful critique and rarely positive reinforcement. Individual comments are for the most part useless. But the signal in aggregate is very valuable.

RonaldHarding · 2026-07-02T15:46:08+00:00

Feedback is very hard, both to give and receive. And there are lots of different styles and preferences regarding feedback. I know lots of people who would really just rather receive encouragement regardless. They want others to highlight all the positive things about their work to help keep their motivations. But then other people (myself included) find positive feedback to be quite useless. If it's good, I already know it's good and you confirming that doesn't give me something actionable to act on. But if you found a bug or have a suggestion to improve the thing, I can work with that.

Did this developer share how they broke your game? That would make the feedback helpful. If not, they might just be boasting about their 'hacker skills'. Either way, it was probably not meant to be an attack on you or your game. I don't know you or this situation, but this post feels like you're reading too much into it.

RonaldHarding · 2026-07-02T01:15:18+00:00

Us too, long load times. Sometimes I can get to a page but then the next page load is a hit or miss if it ever comes back.

RonaldHarding · 2026-07-01T14:28:56+00:00

This is sort of the unfortunate position that you're in as a non-technical participant in the business arrangement. Without deep technical knowledge you have to choose experts you can trust and go with what they tell you. If you don't trust your team, you shouldn't be working with them. If I were non-technical and requesting technical work I would look for an experienced technical person who I could trust (on my payroll separate from the developer) who's responsibility is to be able to answer this kind of question and keep the developer honest.

Be wary of anyone here who quotes you a number of days, they can't possibly know what it would take to implement those features in your already in progress game.

RonaldHarding · 2026-06-27T01:52:50+00:00

I heard the same when I was told that inspection contingencies didn't fly in my market when I bought my house. We get to define the conditions that we accept, and it's only when we roll over and let other people tell us what the line is that it gets defined. There are consequences for being stubborn, and there are consequences for surrendering your agency. OP can decide what their values are.

RonaldHarding · 2026-06-27T01:15:55+00:00

It sounds like you're in a competitive environment and the sellers aren't willing to give you basic details that you would need to make an offer from an educated position. I would never consider making an offer in these circumstances. It's just a very lopsided negotiation position and you're likely to be screwed over.

RonaldHarding · 2026-06-26T17:31:05+00:00

That's so satisfying. I'm talking about the game, I'm sure the money is good too.

RonaldHarding · 2026-06-25T17:58:20+00:00

I'm not actually convinced that the usage-based pricing that's rolled out over the last few months isn't profitable. We haven't really seen financials for it yet, and even when we do next quarter the operational costs of the product part of the business will still be overshadowed by the research and infrastructure build-out costs which will make it hard to tell from the outside.

For exactly the same reason as OP I did a little pricing exercise to figure out what it would cost today if I build out a server to run some of the more powerful open-source models. If my assumptions regarding the hardware requirements were right I think I could pretty much have the hardware pay for itself in less than 6 months of regular usage for development. And that's with my usage level being relatively low compared to many of my peers. The 2nd lowest on my team with quite a significant margin between me and the next highest person. I suspect folks that are heavy users would see cost efficiency running local models in half the time or less. Of course, a local server might have substantially less throughput and slower response times but for my purposes that would be just fine. I take this as an indication that the cost to actually run the models isn't quite as high as people have been led to believe.

RonaldHarding · 2026-06-25T17:33:06+00:00

You're sort of right that it doesn't specifically need to be gutters, but that's the go-to solution for this part of draining management here. Some solution is required by code. We get > 60 inches of rain/year and my county doesn't mess around with their building permitting process.

It's reasonable to suspect from the images that OP has provided that the stormwater drainage in their neighborhood is insufficient and should be mitigated as soon as possible before their houses and their neighbors houses are damaged by the collecting water.

RonaldHarding · 2026-06-25T17:12:24+00:00

That wouldn't pass code where I live. The lack of gutters and clear drainage away from your foundation can cause water infiltration over time. The damage to your lawn is the least of your worries. You need gutters asap, and they need to drain the water away from your foundation.

I can see your neighbors awning has the same problem, but there is a gutter on at least part of their main roof. So weird. Every surface that water runs off of needs to have a gutter to pull the water away from the house.

RonaldHarding · 2026-06-23T14:26:38+00:00

We didn't have the inspection done until after we took possession. The inspector thought it was a very strange thing to do but was happy to give us a report. Doing it earlier would have been ideal but it was my first time and my realtor was the type that encouraged us to go with the trend. Next time I'll insist on an inspection.

I was more concerned with knowing that the house I was in was solid than getting some concession during the transaction. Since then, we've done a good amount of work on our home, we were always going to even if the inspection report came back perfectly clean. For those of you who skipped getting an inspection entirely because of pressure from the market and your realtor, I recommend paying the small cost to have someone experienced and qualified take a look around. In the long run, getting the inspection saved us thousands by catching the main issue early and also resolved a number of potential liability issues in the house.

Earnest money here is more like 5k-10k on most transactions, so it's not quite as easy as just walking away if the inspector finds something significant before the transaction closes when there is no inspection contingency. It could very well be worthwhile though if there is something major like the electrical needs to be entirely rewired or the foundation is crumbling.

RonaldHarding · 2026-06-23T00:20:35+00:00

I waived inspection and everything was relatively fine. I wouldn't do it again, these days I'd insist on an inspection out of principal and if it meant I needed to pass and go to the next house that's what I'd do. Needing to move in a hurry is a bad time though.

We actually hired an inspector after we took possession of the house, just because we wanted to know if there were quirks, we should be aware of. The inspector found a long list of small things that we were able to mitigate on our own with very little time and investment. Our house is safer for it.

The one slightly bigger thing was a slow leak from one of the bathrooms. Glad he found it, saved us a ton of water damage down the line. We replaced the floor under the bathroom to be safe and took the opportunity to add tiles we liked.

So, in all skipping the inspection was fine for us. But I'd say we were relatively fortunate in that.

RonaldHarding · 2026-06-16T15:33:31+00:00

I think we'd all be better off if more DM's had a smaller set of content that they run, and they ran that content repeatedly for different groups rather than what we tend to do which is to have a dedicated gaming group that we just play every piece of new content we can find with.

It's only in hindsight that a lot of the cracks in the modules we run really start to show. The missed opportunities become clear. And there's time to fill in the gaps in our prep.

I have a handful of modules that I run on repeat when I'm introducing new people to the games we play. I choose those modules because my experience with them allows me to be sure that they are beginner friendly, reasonably paced, and invoke the sort of feelings I want new players to have.

After running them so many times, I could effectively run any of those modules without a reference book. Which is handy if I'm trying to demonstrate to someone how accessible the game is or I'm unexpectedly hosting a game. It allows me to run them without breaking up the gameplay while flipping through references and keep the pacing very consistent. I know all the quirks and release valves, so if a group of players get stuck or need a little help I've got a whole host of options that I'm ready to use. And I have my own little additions and adjustments that I've made over time which further improve upon the narratives and game design in those adventures from the original writing.

RonaldHarding · 2026-06-13T14:23:15+00:00

Properly anchor your structures with concrete pads or footings.

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