When Will Apple Fix Fake High Scores on the iOS Game Center?

And here you thought being an achievement junkie was hard work.

For the uninitiated, we're referring to the practice where one goes absolutely crazy within a video game that offers unlockable milestones for everything you can do within the title. Multiply that by every game in one's collection — and an ample amount of free time — and you have a recipe for digital disaster. Er. Determination.

However, if your zest for accomplishing everything within your favorite video games translates over to high scores as well… and if you happen to be a frequent gamer on, say, Apple's iOS platform, then you might be in for a bit of a shock. Dan Crabtree has published up a wonderful little piece on Kotaku today detailing the ever-so-annoying problem by which creative "hackers" — if one can really call them that — have found various ways to modify the scores of various iOS games scores to propel them to the top of Apple's Game Center leaderboards.

And we're not just talking about a hundred-point boost or so to barely squeak one's way onto the top of the charts. In Crabtree's case, he noticed that those sitting atop the Angry Birds Star Wars leaderboards have somehow managed to rack up an impressive score of just around 9,000,000,000,000,000,000 (give or take a few quadrillion).

The issue? Those hacking their way to the top of the leaderboards are undoubtedly using a variety of Cydia-based applications that allow one to change one's score in Game Center-friendly titles. Doing so violates Apple's "Terms of Acceptable Use Policy" for the Game Center, but it doesn't seem to be a high-priority item for the company in terms of cracking down on obviously impossible scores. Even developers, too, can feel a bit stymied.

"We did implement some security," says Ryan Holowaty, of game developer Noodlecake, in a May article from Edge. "but in the end some of the encryption stuff didn't pan out as well as we wanted it to and then kids just hacked the crap out of the game. Unless you hire those kids to do your security for you, there's really not much you can do about it."

Crabtree notes that Apple is currently encouraging developers to secure and encrypt players' scores, in addition to setting minimum and maximum values for their games' potential scores. This would allow obviously fake scores to immediately be thrown out of the ranking system upon submission. Of course, that's all well and good until those looking to falsify top honors on the game leaderboards figure out said maximum values – and so repeats the process once again.

"The Game Center leaderboards have become a Road Warrior-style apocalyptic barrens ruled by roving marauders and that one kid who's really good at Jetpack Joyride," Crabtree writes. "It would seem that the empire has already won."