Daily Challenge
It is fairly obvious that the top finishers in each Daily Challenge are cheating by looking up the locations using a different account first. This could be easily fixed by simply not showing the correct locations until the challenge is over. You can still show the points, just don't show the actual locations. It would make it much more fun for everyone. Thanks.
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After pondering this I concluded that the top players are likely using a second account to find out the locations in advance. This ruins the challenge for me and is demotivating.
I was considering paying for the pro version but this puts me off.
If they implement your suggestion it would level the playing field and make the challenge fair for everyone.
Good idea!
Really, the best thing is to simply ignore the leaderboard and play for yourself, for fun. Pro is not really for the daily challenge, but for for playing more games and maps. Find a group of players, friends etc and create private leagues so you're sure nobody will join and cheat.
Anything done to try to crack down on it will only inconvenience the vast majority of honest players.
If you withhold the "right answers" until the end of the day, the challenge becomes less enjoyable overall -- part of the fun is guessing and immediately seeing where the actual location was / how far off you were.
You could mix up the locations but then you're not comparing apples to apples in the ranks.
If you start manually investigating scores instead, you'll get a lot of false positives -- it's also a lot of extra work and only incentivizes cheaters to add some extra slop to their answers to give themselves plausible deniability. Nothing stops someone from making up a logical explanation for any given answer and how they were able to get so close.
There's also technically nothing in the rules saying you *can't* use Google Maps or a second account (nor would these things be enforceable / detectable, especially if someone uses a VPN).
The ranks are kind of fun / interesting but you have to take them with a grain of salt. Treat it as more of a personal challenge - a way for you to see how well you can perform under time pressure, and get some general idea for how it stacks against others.
Most people just cheat to get the badge and move on anyway. If you want to see fewer cheaters, remove the badge entirely, or at the very least give it to everyone who hits the top score for the day. So if you have four people who hit 25k, give the badge to all four of them instead of just the guy with the lowest overall deviation.
In terms of the instant feedback, you can get a lot of value from seeing where the circle is on the map compared to where you guessed, but the game literally puts you in actual Google Maps at the location if you look back on it. All you have to do is just pin it, zoom out, and you have the exact location to within a yard. That's unnecessary.
Show the pin compared to the chosen location for feedback and restrict zooming in too close to the pin or the transfer to Google Maps until the next day.