Over the past few weeks we have noticed that there seem to be a number of issues with the Achievements and Leaderboard we put into Word Search Party. This became most apparent when, during some testing, my own score jumped from under 300 to over 12,000 with a single game!

After a lot of investigation it seems that sometimes when I ask Game Center for my score, instead of giving me my score, it tells me the value for my highest scoring friend! Obviously, this wasn’t an issue during testing, as I always had the highest score. Equally, I didn’t see it on the live game until I added Hektor666 to my friends list to congratulate him on being the first to reach 10,000 words. Then all of a sudden I realised things were going a bit peculiar, as I leapt to the top of the score board and had to go on a hunt to find out why.

The other issue we’ve spotted is that the larger valued achievements (for 5,000 and 10,000 words) don’t seem to be recording correctly. At first I assumed it was because the scoreboard wasn’t actually reporting your correct score and that’s why Hektor666 hadn’t got the awards. Then I noticed my own achievements:

If I’ve found 500 words, then surely I should have at least 50% of the 1000 words achievement, and 10% of the 5000 word one. Clearly something was going wrong here!

After much investigation and then confirming on the Apple Developer forums that it wasn’t just me, I found the answer. Whilst I can tell Game Center that you have earnt 5.8% of an achievement, if I then ask Game Center how much you have, it tells me 5.0%! With it constantly rounding down percentages, trying to build up the larger awards just isn’t working. Obviously I tested the lower value achievements before release and given they all worked fine I had no reason to expect this strange behaviour.

I have sent a bug report to Apple regarding these issues, but there’s not been any response as yet. I was hoping for a response before I wrote this post, so I could tell you all that it would all be fixed soon… but it’s been 2 weeks and as we’ve had a couple of emails enquiring about the strangeness I wanted to explain.

My initial decision to let Game Center manage the scores and percentages, and to always ask for their current values before updating, was to allow people with the same account across multiple devices to have one score & set of achievements updating correctly regardless of where they played. Obviously, I wasn’t prepared for the two oddities which have appeared now that we have so many people playing our game and finding so many words! I have a plan to do all the score and achievement calculations locally, but of course this means if you’re playing across multiple devices there might be some small discrepancies, but hopefully not to the extent we have been seeing!

When we thought we just had a leaderboard issue, our intention had been to reset your score based on your achievements, but now we know they’re not correct either. We’re still discussing the best way to approach this. It might well be to start a new leaderboard, using your achievements to make a best guess at your score, and go from there. I realise some people really have found crazy numbers of words, and for them, I will hopefully be able to keep the old leaderboard updating too. Hopefully we can come to a resolution everyone can be happy with.