The Metaverse has a couple thousand scores on it. About 5% of the people who have purchased Galactic Civilizations have used it so far. And about .05% of them are very focused and concerned over the robustness of the system.

The Metaverse was designed for 3 major reasons:

#1 So that Stardock could look at the top players strategies and incorporate their strategies into AI updates. We have been doing this and you will see much of this in the free expansion pack. But we have been doing this in 1.01, 1.02, and 1.03 as well. That is one of the big reasons why the AI plays more intelligently.

#2 It allows players to band together to create empires and in general form an on-line community.

#3 It allows casual players a persistent high score system in which they win medals, move up in ranks, get awards, etc.

Metaverse scores age. That is, games played in previous months do lose some of their value. This way, it gives people who buy the game later a chance to do well and keeps things fresh. But more importantly, it helps us avoid the dreaded "reset" that hard core players tend to want to clean things up. Resets are bad because they adversely punish casual players who just think it's cool to be ranked at all and they are a temporary solution anyway. Aging has the same effect without punishing casual players.

But still, the players most focused on their metaverse scores have shown increasing concern over potential abuses in the system. Most GalCiv players are adults. And so to a certain extent, the honor system is in place. That said, it is statistically certain that a percentage of people will abuse the system. Hence, people who are really into the metaverse have been asking that we put more effort into "plugging the holes".

The problem with that is that like a strategy game, game development is about managing limited resources. Any engineering hour devoted to making the metaverse even more robust is an engineering hour not devoted to improving the game itself.

Let me give you an idea of some of the stuff that would be involved in this, because we have given this issue thought for a long while:

1) You would need to do CRC checks on approved mods on the library vs what the user has when they submit a game. If they are using a non-approved mod then their score is heavily penalized depending on the values of that mod.

2) You would need to implement CRC checking on saved games themselves so that someone couldn't take a hex editor or something to their data.

3) You would need to have an encrypted submission system so that someone with a packet sniffer couldn't modify the data as it was being transmitted.

4) You would need to recreate the game such that anyone who wants to submit scores to the metaverse without being heavily penalized plays under very specific conditions (i.e. everything above plus certain map sizes, no Ctrl-N, limited saved games, more emphasis on making sure starting positions were somewhat consistent).

These 4 things don't represent the full requirements to have a truly robust Metaverse. They represent the beginning of what would need to be done.

What would the result be?

a) The casual users, the people who make up 90% of the metaverse players, would demand that there be a localized high score system. And rightly so.

It would ruin the casual player's experience for just wanting to be ranked, somewhere, on the system, getting new ranks, medals, etc. because they would have to play the more restricted settings to get their score to count.

c) Players would have to make the false choice between playing the GAME itself for fun or playing the metaverse (i.e. having to choose the restricted options to get their metaverse score to count).

And on top of all that I've mentioned, you would have the never ending battle of someone finding some loophole in the AI that no normal player would do but would give them some sort of scoring advantage on the Metaverse.

Now, some of this stuff we can budget into a Galactic Civilizations II someday in the future. But the effort required here is as much development time as we have budgeted for the Expansion pack. Which would you prefer? Which do you think most users would prefer?

I've been part of ladders on the net since there have been ladders. I can tell you that no matter what you do, there will always be a percentage of very vocal people ticked off at the system.

The current system isn't terrible. It's not broken. Like most ladders, the top 1% or so of players are probably prone to really focusing on their scores with the other 99% just casually interested. Such is the case on all ladders. A heavily modded game and a non modde dgame might make the difference of a couple thousand points. Some cheese tactic or whatever might make a couple thousand points too.

But ultimately, the system, as a whole, works pretty well. If you're a good player and spend enough time playing, you can get to the top of the scoring system. And many of them are no longer playing GalCiv anyway, they're playing progress quest with the Metaverse being the object of the game ratehr than the game itself. 

Such players are doing no harm to anyone. The 99% casual player group could care less. And that 1% player group will include people who will be testing the boundaries of how much they can get away with.