Sega resets Sonic 4's leaderboards due to cheating

by Mike Schramm on Nov 27th 2010 2:00AM

Look, Sonic the Hedgehog is fast. He can run faster than the speed of sound, but even if he ran full speed through Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1's shortest level, it would still take him longer than 0'00"00 to do it. That's just physically impossible, even for an improbably proportioned and colored hedgehog. And since some hackers have posted those times and impossible scores on the game's Xbox 360 leaderboards, Sega has decided to go through and reset the whole thing.

That means you might have to go back and try to re-earn that record time you picked up on Lost Labyrinth Act 2 (no easy feat). But you might not want to grab that controller right yet -- Sega hasn't actually announced a fix, just reset the leaderboards. So there's a good chance the hackers will still hack, and there will be another reset to come. Thanks for nothing, cheaters. Can't we all just let the hedgehog run?

(Also, cheating at Sonic? Where did our innocence go?)

Via: Destructoid, Sonic Stadium
Source: Sega forums

Tags: cheating, hackers, leaderboards, microsoft, psn, reset, sega, sonic-the-hedgehog-4-episode-1, xbla, xbox

Reader Comments (52)

Hacking the Casino Street Zone? Looks like they were...

*puts on sunglasses*

...taking a gamble

@FuriousMailman
YYYYYYEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH

@FuriousMailman

Looks like Sonic will have to...

Clean up his ACT.

@FuriousMailman

Looks like these cheaters will walk away...

*puts on sunglasses*

...with their TAILS between their legs.

@FuriousMailman

Looks like they had...

*puts on sunglasses*

...an Ace up their sleeves.

@That Zombie Guy
haha CSI Miami style. lol

Clear all the CoD boards too if that's the case.

@Goaliegeek

Bricks would surely be shat

I kind of find it amazing that people care enough about this game to cheat at it.

Damn you Sega, you've tricked us before, but this time really takes the cake.

Reminds me of the leaderboards for Sonic Adventure on PSN. I got the game a couple days after the game came out, and the top scores for the Big the Cat fishing on the first level were 9,999,500g. It's obviously not a legitimate score because even if the players had caught a fish with the maximum weight every minute since the game came out they would only be up to about 7,000,000g.

What really bothered me though, was the fact that people even cared enough to bother cheating with Big the Cat.

@Ryan P
Actually could be legit, since it's an old game a lot of people have learned tricks with Bigs the Cat. In my old Sega DC version my Biggs score was upto like 8 mil g on the first stage because as soon as I played that stage all I wanted to play was that stage. So for like a week I did nothing but play it non-stop. Plus hasn't it been out for like a month or two now?

@The Aquacharger

Well, it's not so much the score itself that bothered me as it was the fact that the game had only been released for about 48 hours when I saw those scores, and in order to have a score like that you would have to have scored 3,472g every minute since the game was released in order to have maxed out your score.

They can't just remove the hacked times and keep the legit ones?

@ZoneoftheEnders Um, no, that would require a games company to use common sense...

@ZoneoftheEnders
How do you know which times are legit? If you posted a score .01s quicker than the highest legit score, nobody is going to know.

What? I was in the top 100 (last time I checked) for special act 7...that's even with the 35 Hacked ones.

Also does this reset my progress towards my achievment for submitting all scores and times? That would suck.

Are we sure they were cheating and didn't simply have the game glitch?

@Landosystem
We aren't, but very likely Sega is from their server logs.

@Landosystem
Yeah, the game just happened to glitch to that score for every single stage in the game.
Please unban them Microsoft, it's not like they go around bragging about doing bad things and posting up gamesaves.

I kinda wish Nintendo would police the Mario Kart leader boards too. Not even the instant bullet bill hacks can pull the world records they have posted.

Funny if the hackers were actually people on the development team ;)

I'd be really pissed right now if I had this game. Nice to see Sega taking initiative against cheaters but this is harsh for the whole audience. Imagine that you were deliberately playing prior to this to get a good leader-board score. You suck at the game, but there was one run you just managed to press the buttons at the right times etc and you made it into the top 100. Now your evidence is gone.
Anyway, like I said, good to see them taking initiative against cheaters.. but :(

I hope they're not touching the PSN boards. I haven't seen any of the hacked times everyone complains about on there.

Why are the cheaters' gamertags censored in the picture? Let us destroy them

@imadogg the so-called "fastest player" with 0:00:00 time across the leaderboard was "THEno1SonicFan2" on the 360 version.

@imadogg I think because one of them was named "c@cksucker".

If you gonna cheat, at least be a bit believable.

What kind of nerd hacks a sonic game?
Anyone know?

@Barkley610

http://imgur.com/r2PQj

hey! why is the US at the top?

Ubisoft needs to learn that this is how you reset a leaderboard. Their attempt at a reset for GRAW is/was a complete joke.

Oh who hasn't used debug mode?

Seems like Eggman won this time

Can't they just delete the times that read 0.00? Leave the scores that appear legit on the board?

It's a shame that people can't even enjoy leaderboards anymore since so many people like to cheat when statistics are online. I guess legitimate leaderboards will only count on arcade machines.

cheaters gonna cheat.

it dosn't help that in some ps3 games they require you to play online via the leaderboards but most of the time it's impossible becasue of this kind of thing.

this is the main reason i don't bother with the online side of ps3 games becasue of of the time they cheat and it's impossible to even supras that score, simply not fair :(

also how the hell are they cheating on the xbox 360 version? i know you can cheat on the wii but not xbox 360... i don't mind cheating in offline games and having fun, but when people go online and make it unfair for others then it gets really annoying!

im pretty sure you could look at any online game for the 360 that has any type of leader boards and find the same thing. my theory is the people who cheat are the ones that have such a pathetic life that they need to do it in order to get some sense of satisfaction about being good at something. ironically though the people figuring out the cheats are probably smart enough to get jobs programming games in the industry to prevent these types of things.

@killploki
No, if it ever comes back and shows you had any input with anysort of cheat/exploit most companies will fire you and explain to each company after that what you did.

Damned kids and their music.

@Jacksons

Subtle Family Guy reference?

why care enough to wipe the leaderboards?
isnt it clear to ignore the 0.00s and pay attention to the first after them?

The worst case scenario is some guy gets fooled by it. It's not the end of the world.

Innocence with Sega games? Sir I believe you must be insane!

Ours, and Sonics, innocence was stolen when the Dreamcast died...

I prefer to blame Big the Cat for everything that goes wrong with Sonic games, even the ones he's not in. It makes it easier that way.

Problem is, your save files are rendered invalid. Good job, Sega.

Are the obvious cheaters perma-banned from Live?

If not, why not?

I mean, almost every leaderboard I've seen has a couple obvious cheaters on it...

@Hawaii Jeff
Money

@Hawaii Jeff
Obvious cheaters know they are obvious. All of the ones I have seen this year are using one-time gamertags. That is, they learn how to cheat, make a new gamertag, use a free 2-day XBL code, and they are then on the leaderboard until it gets wiped. Mission accomplished.

It takes a lot more attempts and evidence to get a system permabanned.

@Chazzr

No, that is French.

My goal is 00'00"01.

obviously some folks have inadequacy issues if they need to go to the extent of hacking a sonic game that nobody likes to measure their digital p*nis.

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Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1

Sega resets Sonic 4's leaderboards due to cheating

Reader Comments (52)

Posted: Nov 27th 2010 2:09AM FuriousMailman said

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