In many racing games, when balance adjustments are made, it becomes impossible to update times.
In the current version of 0.13.3.1, the “Accelerate: Fixed oversteering when drifting into a boost” fix has been implemented, making it impossible to beat the times of all the top users.
I’d like to see the leaderboard removed every time there’s a balance adjustment, bug fix, or lap number change.
I definitely agree. I do think it really is unfair for some scores to be completely wiped, however, this game is still early access and players shouldn’t expect things like that to always be permanent. In a previous suggestion for Accelerate, I pointed out that you can efficiently take every single Sunrise Isles shortcut without any boosts from melons, which people have already taken advantage of, so hopefully whenever this issue is worked on the leaderboards would also be reset.
Same thing for Ball Race, it really sucks starting levels and looking at the leaderboard on your screen only to see some absurd score for 1st place like “4 seconds,” yet if you play that level perfectly, you won’t be close. I’m still unsure if some of these scores are hacked, as I know some scores can be gotten from bugs, which I myself have a few higher up scores because of, but since these are now fixed it would be great for a leaderboard wipe.
At the same time though, I have no idea if the TU team is planning on not wiping the leaderboards until (for example) the game is out of early access. Which of course, there can still be bugs even after the official release, so leaderboard wipes may even occur years down the road.
I do hope that some day people can browse replays of people in the future, or atleast browse replays of the top 10-ish people to see how they did it, especially because then scores could be proven legitimate or not.
Maybe you could simply make the leaderboard seasonal? Their records would still be listed. But you’d have kind of an idea why they got that record in season 1 when the game was more exploitable.
All records will probably be purged when Accelerate leaves Alpha, and after that the game world should be closely balanced to the final version.