Darren Posted March 19, 2008 Report Share Posted March 19, 2008 I'm normally a pretty gracious loser, but I just noticed that all my high scores in the LAVA Arcade (and there were 19 of them) were miraculously beaten within the past day or two by a new user named "SweetVictory". I'm suspicious as to the validity of these victories, however, as some of these scores were attained in 45 seconds on games that have an average play time of about 20 minutes (see the high scores on Plumber 2 as an example). The only valid excuse I would accept for this incident is if we discover that SweetVictory hacked the LAVA arcade using LabVIEW. -D Quote Link to comment
Michael Aivaliotis Posted March 19, 2008 Report Share Posted March 19, 2008 Thanks. It's been taken care of. Quote Link to comment
Michael Aivaliotis Posted March 19, 2008 Report Share Posted March 19, 2008 Well, In repairing the damage from the cheater, we lost a lot of the high scores in the arcade. Sorry. I also took the opportunity to install some new games and remove most of the old ones that had the cheating bug. Quote Link to comment
Justin Goeres Posted March 19, 2008 Report Share Posted March 19, 2008 QUOTE (Michael_Aivaliotis @ Mar 18 2008, 02:10 AM) Well, In repairing the damage from the cheater, we lost a lot of the high scores in the arcade. Sorry. I also took the opportunity to install some new games and remove most of the old ones that had the cheating bug. Awww, man, all my favorites (i.e. the ones I had good scores in) are gone! Is the scoring working right in http://forums.lavag.org/index.php?autocom=arcade&code=stats&g=179' target="_blank">Gravity? I got approx. 1m46s but the high score table says "7". EDIT: Nevermind, I see it scores by "Level Reached" and not "Time Alive". Quote Link to comment
Aristos Queue Posted March 20, 2008 Report Share Posted March 20, 2008 I used to have the high score in both Lightening and Flowers. Both of these games have now been removed, I assume because they have the bug that allows cheating. I just want you all to know that my high scores in Lightening, where I was almost 100,000 points ahead of the next player, and Flowers, where I was about 2000 points ahead, were not achieved by any cheating. I can't help it if I have an obsessive nature when game playing that leads me to play until I can do such things as predict which card will come next or identify the advantages of removing from certain columns of flowers over certain others. Quote Link to comment
Darren Posted March 20, 2008 Author Report Share Posted March 20, 2008 QUOTE (Aristos Queue @ Mar 19 2008, 10:36 AM) I used to have the high score in both Lightening and Flowers. Both of these games have now been removed, I assume because they have the bug that allows cheating. I just want you all to know that my high scores in Lightening, where I was almost 100,000 points ahead of the next player, and Flowers, where I was about 2000 points ahead, were not achieved by any cheating... Yeah, of the 19 games for which I legitimately acquired the high score, 17 of them were removed. I'm not feeling incredibly motivated to go reclaim my top spot in the arcade, for fear of another unexpected reset at some point in the future. On the bright side, I do like the fact that there are more word-based games now. -D Quote Link to comment
crelf Posted March 20, 2008 Report Share Posted March 20, 2008 QUOTE (Michael_Aivaliotis @ Mar 18 2008, 04:10 AM) I also took the opportunity to ... remove most of the old ones that had the cheating bug. Why? There are reasons to play games that don't involve high scores. I say leave them in, but maybe put a note on them saying there's bug. There's no need to take away the games just in case someone cheats... Quote Link to comment
Michael Aivaliotis Posted March 20, 2008 Report Share Posted March 20, 2008 I'm honestly really so sorry everyone. The score removal was not intentional. Blame it on bad backend software that doesn't warn you when a irreversible operation will happen. It was my first time using that arcade admin control panel. I promise that this won't happen again and I'll try to bring back some of the original games. Quote Link to comment
crelf Posted March 20, 2008 Report Share Posted March 20, 2008 QUOTE (Michael_Aivaliotis @ Mar 19 2008, 11:44 AM) I'm honestly really so sorry everyone. Meh - I know I'm only speaking for myself, but I'm not too concerned (yes, I had a high score or two in there). Now if you reset my post count I might be a little upset Quote Link to comment
Justin Goeres Posted March 20, 2008 Report Share Posted March 20, 2008 QUOTE (Michael_Aivaliotis @ Mar 19 2008, 08:44 AM) I promise that this won't happen again and I'll try to bring back some of the original games. Aside from the initial shock I'm not particularly bugged by it. Contrary to what my playing habits might indicate , I don't take it all that seriously. Years ago I was involved with a small MacMAME high score site, and one of the problems we ran into was that the scores for any particular game tended to become very static over time. After a while, the highest scores got so high that nobody was motivated to play anymore. I think that was starting to happen on some of the games in the LAVA Arcade. So even though most of my trophies went away, I think there's an argument to be made for why the arcade is better off with a semi-wipe like this every once in a while. In fact, I wouldn't mind if some kind of wipe happened say, once a year. We could identify a handful of untouchable scores and hold a poll about whether to just retire them and replace them with new games. There could even be a simple Hall Of Permanent Untouchable Champions page so that the results are preserved for when we Google our own names . All that having been said, some scores do matter. For instance, I beat Jim at last year . http://lavag.org/old_files/monthly_03_2008/post-2992-1205949686.jpg' target="_blank"> Quote Link to comment
Jim Kring Posted March 20, 2008 Report Share Posted March 20, 2008 QUOTE (Justin Goeres @ Mar 19 2008, 10:47 AM) All that having been said, some scores do matter. For instance, I beat Jim at Galaga last year . Losing to Justin did hurt. But, when I saw a guy roll the score counter at 999,999 I felt very small Quote Link to comment
Michael Aivaliotis Posted March 20, 2008 Report Share Posted March 20, 2008 Well all of this has prompted the install of some more new awesome word and puzzle games (and even one math one) that I think are more geared towards the LAVA engineer-type crowd. Quote Link to comment
Justin Goeres Posted March 21, 2008 Report Share Posted March 21, 2008 QUOTE (Jim Kring @ Mar 19 2008, 10:21 AM) Losing to Justin did hurt. But, when I saw a guy roll the score counter at 999,999 I felt very small A physics professor once told me, "All minima and maxima are local." I like to think of it that way . While it would be kind of nice to score seven hundred thousand more points in Galaga, I like to think I'm investing those points elsewhere, keeping my karmic portfolio well-diversified (although while the game is in progress, winning is Serious Business ). Quote Link to comment
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