Photo by RICHDGEB. He did not wish to share his score.As you might know there was a exploit in vail for a long time that allowed you to freeze a hardpoint lobby forever. This exploit was abused by tons of people to grind stats.
A while back I started tracking everyone's stats as I was receiving reports from friends catching GigaKnight abusing the hardpoint exploit to get to #1 on the kill leaderboards.
So back to present day, I have 67 million rows worth of stats and im tracking 77k vail users's stats constantly.
Up to this day this data has mostly been used to create ✨ pretty graphs ✨ but today that is changing.
The Cheaterboard
| Rank | Username | Kills | Headshots | Time spent |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Killer_ash2041 | 61 | 9 | 1:02:27 |
| 2 | matblack907 | 49 | 21 | 0:19:34 |
| 3 | skeleton_isby | 43 | 14 | 0:24:32 |
| 4 | Squishy.Ninja | 39 | 13 | 0:21:12 |
| 5 | Aimer1235 | 27 | 20 | 0:18:16 |
| 6 | KaayDogg16 | 25 | 3 | 0:15:30 |
| 7 | Thrasherpete666 | 19 | 4 | 0:24:04 |
| 8 | minipie449 | 19 | 1 | 0:15:33 |
| 9 | WickedOrb | 11 | 3 | 0:16:33 |
| 10 | JENfam247 | 8 | 2 | 0:21:21 |
| 11 | weekyle.2022 | 6 | 2 | 0:31:54 |
| 12 | Jujofazer | 6 | 0 | 0:33:17 |
| 13 | arkhamdaknight232 | 5 | 2 | 0:27:09 |
Lets talk about the numbers
This data has been gathered by my (unofficial) VAIL API which is constantly watching the leaderboard for changes and then saving a snapshot of that user's stats in QuestDB for timeseries purposes and also saved to our "hot" db using SQLite.
Unfortunately I was a bit of a moron and accidentally wiped my database and misattributed stats to Maple 😭, so this only counts data after 21 May 2024.
We detect exploited lobbies by checking for increases in gamemode-hp-game-seconds that are longer than hardpoints can possibly last while not increasing your gamemode-hp-games-won/gamemode-hp-games-lost/gamemode-hp-games-drawn. If any other wins/losses is registered, that snapshot is immediately discarded as I want to keep this as false positive free as possible.
This works as stats are only submitted once a match is finished or you leave.
The only false positive that can happen is that you join a hardpoint lobby -> get kills -> leave before it ends on repeat for the duration you are here on for. If you win/lose a single hardpoint game this won't count.
False negatives has a decent chance of happening here, sadly not much I can do about it. This should catch most of the "major" exploiters anyway.
Accidentally finding more cheaters
Before I knew that stats was misattributed to Maple for the first day the stat scraper was on, I ran the script with no cutoff and to my surprise Maple was #1 on the leaderboard with 1657 cheated kills.
This was quite a surprise to me as Maple has been very against abusing the hardpoint exploit, so I DMed Maple.
I may have then uh given maple a mild heart attack (oops, sorry!) after asking him. After which he did confess to using it, however we found out this was before I started tracking the stats so he is not on the cheaterboard.
