In just about any game I’ve ever played, global leaderboards are cheated or hacked by other players, and that already seems to be the case here. So players that obtain their scores legitimately are pushed down the list, though keeping the highest or a high spot would only mean bragging rights to strangers anyway.
This is to differentiate from the friends only leaderboards, where bragging or competing with friends for high scores seems to make much more sense.
So are global leaderboards pointless?
If you chose “other”, share your thoughts here.
I think overall they’re a good thing to have for competition/community, though there a number of issues that naturally come up. Like you said, there are some flaws that create inaccurate scores, specifically:
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Ball Race can be buggy in terms of physics, and the timer glitching out (Minigolf too to some extent)
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When adjustments are made to games, they can make old high scores obsolete
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Potential cheating or exploits
I’ll quickly address those 3 major points:
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This is probably one of the toughest. Sure, if there’s an absurdly high score that’s impossible to achieve, they could remove that, but once it gets closer to the realm of human possibility, it’s harder to tell. I really can’t think of any clear solution for this, other than just dealing with some occasionally suspect scores (Which isn’t ideal).
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One thing they seem to have done for the most part to help with this (In Bowling and Minigames iirc), is make top scores the total score/number of perfect games, not the high score, so changes to the game itself aren’t as impactful. Though there’s a fair point to be made that for things like minigames, people might want a global leaderboard for high scores, and at that point the leaderboard would have to be reset when the game changes (Also not ideal).
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For this, it’s really hard to tell due to lack of evidence. The most famous case is puck, with their perfect 10 million (Or whatever it is) Trivia score. Though I recall hearing that it was taken down, but then put back up when it was found to be legit (I have no details on this, just a random memory, so I might be wrong). Other than that, like I was saying with point one, there aren’t any scores that seem completely impossible (That I’ve seen, I’m sure there are a few, and those can/should be removed).
So all in all, they’re great in concept, but run into some flaws when the game encounters any bugs, exploits, or balance changes (Which occur pretty much in every game). There are some measures to be/being taken, but a perfect leaderboard is sort of impossible without verifying every single top result through some kind of replay system (Which would be cool, but hard to implement).
In the end, it’s about whether the pros of having a leaderboard outweigh the cons of some occasionally off results (And I think a lot of people would rather just deal with the cons). Personally, I’m not voting because I have no preference either way, though it would be a real shame to see leaderboards go (Even if there is good reason for it).
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I don’t know if there are any like actual hackers but I have a #1 score on a GLXY level because I joined in late and it bugged the timer or something so it said I completed it within 2 seconds, I think if the timer disconnect bug gets fixed then the leaderboard will have a bit more legitimacy so to say.