Hi, this is going to partially be me complaining about Ball Race leaderboard moderation, but is also why I think this would help.
I don’t normally like bumping threads, but someone mentioned something like this in the Discord earlier. Now that we’re a few Ball Race ban waves in from when this thread was last active, I think this system would be very nice for validating times in a way that doesn’t require you to join a third-party Discord in order to spare yourself from having your times sent in as being cheated/glitched, or require you to constantly having ShadowPlay, ReLive, OBS Replay Buffer, medal.tv, or other programs running in the background recording your gameplay.
The burden of proof should be on PixelTail or the Ball Race goon squad if they’re going to be taking down times and flagging users. Someone shouldn’t have to worry about their time getting wiped and being marked a cheater just because they got a good time but also happen to have low exp, few hours, or aren’t a name people are familiar with. In a gamemode as cracked out as Ball Race, it seems a bit unfair that you can get banned for something like buffering-esque launches when it’s something that can happen unintentionally because of jank physics and lag. Especially when that same ban would, I assume, apply for every leaderboard in the game. All those people who got banned and then unbanned in March (which includes the two other users in this topic) probably only got unbanned because some people noticed and stood up for them so they’d be unbanned. But let’s say you’re like The Lich or TheKidWithAHat on that thread, and have no way, currently, of knowing that you’re leaderboard banned/flagged as a suspected cheater (which most players don’t). Most of the other bans will show up in the chat window or on the Player Report page, but leaderboard bans are not one of those. So until that gets added (if ever), they’re just sorta in a state of not even knowing they’re a suspected cheater, which could give them time to potentially disregard evidence they may have had to protect themselves.
Someone who is banned from just about everything, including Leaderboard and Server Naming (which don’t show up):
The fact that you can get permanently banned from leaderboards in an early access game which has a bunch of bugs, has platforms that are affected by system performance, has a timer that is questionable, has a separate cheater issue which only got somewhat dealt with in December (and not completely), and you just have to sit there and try to defend yourself against TOP 10 PRO BALLRACE players or else they’ll get Caboose to send you to the shadow realm, is bizarre to me. Like- they may be more capable of spotting fake times than anyone at PixelTail is, but ideally a circlejerk fan club wouldn’t have as much influence on the leaderboards as they do. A replay/demo system seems like a good way for PixelTail to be able to analyze times for themselves, assuming it’s not implemented like bhopping was in LC (poorly). Demos have worked pretty well for CS:GO with their Overwatch and VACnet systems, but even a ghost system like that out of Mario Kart would be better than nothing, assuming platform position/map time, location/orientation, speed, version number, ping and other information that could affect a run are recorded.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.