How some people can achieve such ridiculous scores?

[Espy]

On and off I've been wondering whether there's some sort of secret internal cheat mode that automatically rigs your first game to be awesome. The purpose being that users who try a new table pack before they buy get a much more hopeful impression of a new table and how nice it'll be to them.

When Junk Yard was released for iOS, I went for it right away and stopped to buy the table when it hit the score limit for free games, then I started playing again. I'd never played JY in real life so this was my first encounter with it. After a while I started wondering if it was some sort of easy game for kids or whatever, because the game went on for like an hour and a half and I got to the Bob/Outer Space level six times and I still had four extra balls to go. The damn balls just wouldn't drain no matter what I did, except when I flat out let go of the flippers and just let them drain. I didn't nudge once through the entire game. By the end I was getting low battery alerts on the iPad so I pretty much let the game die prematurely. By then I was at 328 million which gave me 1000 hall of fame points on Game Center.

All this would probably be perfectly normal for a good player who can keep going for hours, except I'm not that guy, I'm average at best. My aim leaves a lot to be desired, I have absolutely no hang of nudging, cradling multiple balls or any of the usual tricks. I'm lucky if I get to the wizard mode once; 6 times in a row is unheard of. My best HoF scores are 890 (98 billion) on AFM ('Rule the Universe' x2) and 866 (4.3 million) on Black Hole, but that's after hundreds if not thousands of attempts. On some games like Dr Dude or Genie I can't even get past 100 HoF points.

And indeed, every subsequent attempt on Junk Yard has been crap. Now it's suddenly behaving normally, which in my case means the outlanes are gobbling down those balls like starved hyenas. I managed 90 million once, but that's light years from the 328M I got on that first game. If that game wasn't secretly rigged then I don't know what the heck happened... except I was drunk. Never played TPA drunk before.

I can attest to this phenomenon too!

 

[EldarOfSuburbia]

Junk Yard does get easy to rack up big scores once you've collected all the junk, though. Just keep shooting the Sewer, which is not that difficult of a shot.

 

[Buzz1126]

You know, hacking the leaderboards are like getting to the end of the Internet. OK, you've done it. Now what? There isn't a trophy. There's no check. Doesn't the novelty wear off? Why not do like Matthew Brodrick did in "WarGames"? Almost start World War Three? Now THAT would get you some attention.

Edit: as for "standing in front of a machine for hours and hours" the leader in the current tournament on the Centaur table would have to score what the number twelve has scored, EVERY SECOND in order to have numbers like that. Every. Second. (its a timed twenty minute tournament). And if you see a problem, can it not be fixed? Think mebbe this might turn some people off? Hmm?

 

[Jazza]

Edit: as for "standing in front of a machine for hours and hours" the leader in the current tournament on the Centaur table would have to score what the number twelve has scored, EVERY SECOND in order to have numbers like that. Every. Second. (its a timed twenty minute tournament). And if you see a problem, can it not be fixed? Think mebbe this might turn some people off? Hmm?

Hoping you don't mean the gold tourney Buzz? I have the current top score of 12.2m and it is a legit score. Dylan_H has beaten it a few times but his score won't register. The number 12 score is 7.9m which isn't that far away so I'm assuming there's some ridiculous score at another tourney level?

Cheers

 

[Zombie Aladdin]

It is possible that score has been removed.

You know, hacking the leaderboards are like getting to the end of the Internet. OK, you've done it. Now what? There isn't a trophy. There's no check. Doesn't the novelty wear off? Why not do like Matthew Brodrick did in "WarGames"? Almost start World War Three? Now THAT would get you some attention.

The novelty wouldn't wear off so easily because as some people grow bored or move on to something else, someone else will come by and hack the leaderboards again.

There are also those who hack the leaderboards to get some attention. They know that the mods will remove it, then they'll put it back up, and as these people are mainly children or teenagers, they can devote as much of their time as they'd like whereas the mods are busy dealing with a lot of thigns at once. Sonic Rush Adventure was particularly annoying with this, as there were people hacking the leaderboards for months, if not years, until the moderators just threw their hands up and gave up. The people who cheat for attention are the most troublesome because they want the retaliation and the hatred flung at them.