The Game Center leaderboards seem messed up. First, they sort by ascending, so the more points you score, the worse your rankings get.

Second, the various timeframes aren't pulling the right data. According to the leaderboards, I've managed to score over 150,000 points today despite playing only a handful of games. My "this week" score is considerably lower than my "today" score. And my "all time" score is only 2,500-ish, and I have no idea what that means, but it sure isn't my total score and isn't a high score of any sort, as I've had many individual game scores higher than that.

The sort order was reversed which is causing all of these issues. It will be fixed sometime today but this will mean that our whole leaderboard in game center will be wiped clean and start from fresh.

However you won't lose any of your scores. After the reset, the next game you finish should make it right. All leaderboard scores in Sudoku Book are accumulative, meaning that your all games score is the total accumulation of all the scores from all of your games. Easy Scores is just all the easy games, etc.

The one place where your point will still be valid is in the "today" vs "this week" vs "all time" distinction. Since the scores we report are always accumulative, "today" and "all time" will be the same. (after the reset).

Thanks for your note.

It appears there may be another glitch. As of 11/3, 10:16pm Pacific time there is a person with an AVERAGE insane score of 249,999 and yet his total insane score is 499,999! How is this possible?

One explanation is that they hacked into their iPhone using easily accessible software and altered the settings file that contains the scores. It sucks but there's not much I can do about it.

If you look at any major leaderboard system, even call of duty on xbox for example, there are people in the upper .1% that have impossible statistics.

In future games I will encode the data so that it's not in clear text as it is now. And I'll do fact cross checking to make sure that everything adds up. I didn't realize that it would be an issue or that idiots would hack it.

I feel that I made a mistake in even including 'averages' in the leaderboard. The problem is that Game Center leaderboards keep track of high scores forever. An average-type leaderboard should show the LATEST reported score, not the highest score ever reported. Because averages go up and down over time. But once you report a high score, lower scores that you report won't show (under all time). So it's not an appropriate category for game center. And unfortunately at the moment we can't remove leaderboard categories from a live game. Meaning that according to apple rules I can't remove that category from this game.. ever. Lesson learned. As stupid as this sounds I suggest ignoring the average categories.

Also, until I write in some self-checks, asking apple to remove the score won't do any good because the bad score is already hacked into that player's pref's file. The next time they finish a game it will just re-report it.

Before this last update I did double check my math to make sure I was calculating the average score properly. That math was totally correct. If you look at the leaderboard right now, the current leader is setlyn with 834 games and a total score of 3,724,232. That's an average of 4,465. I believe this user is not cheating and actually plays a lot of sudoku and earns a lot of points. He/She is playing mostly insane games. There is a potential game difficulty bonus applied to each level:

easy 0, med 200, hard 400, expert 600, insane 800

So by playing the upper difficulty levels you can earn in the 4k range. 4465 seems like a very high average to me, but it's probably accurate. And by looking at this user's number of games played, totals and averages on all categories, it all adds up.

The average score you're talking about of 249,999 however is not possible - and I doubled checked the code to make sure it can't 'accidentally' happen - which means that user hacked their prefs file.

Anyway to remove hacks from the leader board? As of today, 1/20/11, itsBROSKE is in first with 110,074,304 points. Up until today, he/she never appeared on the leader board. I've played your game since forever, like when there were only 1,000 people total playing, and I was in 1st place (MomKat56) until this bozo hacked the game. Rather ticks me off that I've put all the effort into it only to be denied 1st place by a cheater.

itsBROSKE obviously hacked his/her score. In Game Center if you go back to leaderboards and then look at the total number of games played that user doesn't even show. This means that they just used the jailbreak hack to report whatever score they wanted.

The leaderboards on Xbox 360 and PS3 have similar problems. Hackers take the fun out of playing.

You are still in first place since the score is obviously a fake. I will ask apple to remove the score and to block the player. The problem is that the more popular this game gets the more score corruption we'll have to deal with. Hopefully apple will release Game Center 2 this year and include a way to handle things like this.

I'm sorry you're getting cheated out of your high score. Please keep playing and keep enjoying the game.

-Michael