Great news gamers! Apple has finally given developers the ability to manage their Game Center leaderboard listings for their games. The company posted the announcement yesterday afternoon on its developer portal.
Of course, the big deal here is that game-makers can now delete all of those ridiculous fake scores you see sitting at the top of various leaderboards, but the change will also allow them to block players who post them…
Here’s the announcement, first spotted by TouchArcade:
“You can now view and manage the top 100 scores and usernames for all of your Game Center leaderboards. Protect your legitimate players by signing in to iTunes Connect to delete fake scores or block players that post fake scores. You can also restore scores and players within the same time period. To learn more, read the Managing Game Center Leaderboard Activity section in the iTunes Connect Developer Guide.”
Since Game Center’s inception, a number of top leaderboards have been plagued by fake, impossible-to-reach scores. And for those games that display a limited number of high scores, the leaderboards have been virtually useless.
While we don’t expect this to put an end to hacked top scores, we hope it will help substantially curb the practice. The only problem is that reading in the developer guide, it looks like scores are only editable for the first 30 days.
That means all of the current fake top scores will likely remain, unless Apple decides at some point to let developers reset them. Bummer.