Challenge League Toiyabe Canyon weird top score in World Leaderboard

[RevampedSine732]

Using the template below will greatly help the team reproduce the issue and ease the process of fixing it. Before posting, search for an existing report. If you are not sure it’s a bug, please first report in User Support Hub.

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ISSUE DESCRIPTION

Description of the issue:
On 30 March 2025, at around 22:00 UK time, an impossible score appeared in the World Leaderboard

[PC Only] Did you remove all your community mods/add-ons? If yes, are you still experiencing the issue?
N/A

FREQUENCY OF ISSUE

How often does this occur for you (Example: Just once, every time on sim load, intermittently)?
Since the time mentioned above.

REPRODUCTION STEPS

Please list clear steps you took in order to help our test team reproduce the same issue:

1. select Challenge League
2. select Toiyabe Canyon (do a race if not yet done)
3. select World Leaderboard

OR when this Challenge League week is finished:

1. select Activities
2. select Low Altitude
3. select Toiyabe Canyon and look at the World Leaderboard

we can see a significantly lower score at number 1:

YOUR SETTINGS

If the issue still occurs with no mods and add-ons, please continue to report your issue. If not, please move this post to the User Support Hub.

What peripherals are you using, if relevant:
N/A

[PC Only] Are you using Developer Mode or have you made any changes to it?
No

[PC, MSFS 2020 Only] Are you using DX11 or DX12?
N/A

[PC Only] What GPU (Graphics Card) do you use?
RTX 3090

[PC Only] What other relevant PC specs can you share?
N/A for this

MEDIA

Please add a screenshot or video of the issue occurring.

[END OF FIRST USER REPORT]

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Do you have the same issue if you follow the OP’s steps to reproduce it?
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Provide extra information to complete the original description of the issue:
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[Fiswiz]

Challenges lacking 2 features: moderation from the Asobo and reporting tool. They only removed 1 result from leaderboard where player scored score 0 which was obvious bug. For example what moderation would look a like: there are ingame ghosts for every player in every challenge it would be easy to just store top 10 ghosts on server from the every leaderboard and check them every month and look if that ghost is flying non bugged path. And second how i would report myself if i have found bug and flew path that is faster by 1 minute than second top ? there is no such tool.

[RevampedSine732]

And read this thread I made 3 years ago:

Spot Landing Challenges: Recent Scores close to 2 million points: caused by a bug, or something else?

Thank you using the Bug section, using templates provided will greatly help the team reproducing the issue and ease the process of fixing it. Are you using Developer Mode or made changes in it? NO Brief description of the issue: Recently, in Spot Landing Challenges, several scores close to 2 million points have appeared in several landing challenges. Notably, they are all multiple of 200, meaning the landing Smoothness was 0 fpm. As I wanted to see with my own eyes how to land at 0…

[Fiswiz]

Those are valid concerns as you show in your post. I know a thing or two how to use cheat engine and you can fake the landing if you want to. But i would never do it by myself in multiplayer because that would destroy the competition and the drive to improve your times.

[RevampedSine732]

What is a “cheat engine”? Fake a landing??? Then, the system needs improvements!

In any case, if it’s not done the hard way, it has no value! Why would someone want to do that???
No merit, no money to be won, and they only show that they did some dodgy business!
They only show everyone that they are cheaters! They show their name tags, so this put them in full light that they cheat.
This is crazy.

I think Microsoft should clean leaderboards of cheated scores, at a minimum.

[FamousFlyer6099]

I agree there are very likely cheaters in some challenges, most easily identifiable in the Races and Low Alt Challenges. Impossible high scores here so obviously stand out.

However with the Landing Challenges I believe it is not so clear cut.

Your whole reasoning regarding what is a cheat is based on what you say is, quote, “I noticed scores close to 2 million points that are multiple of 200, meaning the Smoothness can only be 0 fpm”

I think this is probably a mistaken assumption. Here is my reasoning…

If 0fpm is exclusively needed to achieve 200 then the max possible ‘achievable’ smoothness score is 199, making highest possible total score 1,990,000 and not the 2,000,000 presented in the Detailed Results Panel
eg your screenshot of Kingston Nevada score 1.854,160/2,000,000

As the variable X.feet per minute (fpm) has so many potential values from 0fpm easily up to and probably over 1500fpm, and the awarded smoothness multiplier only ranges 1-200, it follows some grouping of fpm results is necessary to calculate the actual multiplier from the fpm result.

On examing the score calculation coding file I can see that there are ‘threshholds’ for fpm and corresponding ‘Result values’ for smoothness rating.

Simply put, here are the listed calculation results for the top three smoothness ratings from the coding file (airliners in this case, it is slightly different for lighter aircraft)…

From 32fpm to 20fpm rating is 198
From 19fpm to 12fpm rating is 199
From 11fpm to 0fmp rating is 200 (0fpm must be included here otherwise it would rule out 1fpm)

Consequently it seems 200 does not mean exclusively a 0fpm ‘impossible’ rating.

As you said in your own post, “Hence, it completely stupid to need 0 fpm to get 200 points!”

Please bear in mind I am not trying to just point out that you are wrong, I have full respect, admiration and support for your pursuit of fairness.

I merely wish to add my findings to the discussion for your perusal.

Offering blanket accusations to all who achieve 200 is perhaps not the way to present this, although, hearing that there are ways of cheating does tend to make one suspicious around very high scores.

I personally do not participate in the Challenges, but I now feel some honest players may possibly be unfairly branded a cheater.

Perhaps Asobo can at least remove the obviously fake scores on the leaderboards and possibly corroborate my findings.

[RevampedSine732]

Someone told me at the time how they did it and I checked in a challenge that kept only the last score.
I tried and I got smoothness of 200 just slewing on the target.
Then I did another landing to remove that score.

~ April 2022, plenty of near 2000000 scores appeared and they were all multiples of 200.

Unfortunately, I am not wrong. I had a personal thread with a moderator at the time who told me not to say much, and he confirmed Microsoft/Asobo were aware.

@FamousFlyer6099

From 11fpm to 0fmp rating is 200 (0fpm must be included here otherwise it would rule out 1fpm)

I did once 11 fpm, and got 196 points for it: so imagine what needs to be done for 199 points…

Before I was told how they do/did it, I had the same conclusions as in your post above. Unfortunately, this does not reflect what happens.

I found a screen shot I took at the time when I tested the method someone told me (a genuine addon for something else made Slew mode available in landing challenges. I am not allowed to tell which one, I was told at the time). Here is the proof: 200 points is for 0 fpm

Also, in the FS2020 STRONG wind challenges, there were as many ultra high scores multiples of 200, like 1998600 and this would not be possible with such high winds. The real best scores are far below.

Before I made the thread at the time, I had spent weeks investigating.

Note: I don’t know if that addon works now in FS 2024. I haven’t tried. There may be other addons doing this.

To go back to Toiyabe canyon, I assume someone made a small scenery project for themselves flattening some terrain allowing to fly lower.

As for last week Grand Canyon race, numbers 3 and down are genuine scores, but look at the first 2: no 1 has less than half of no 3. This can’t be right. This must have been flat all the way…

Asobo/Microsoft know but did nothing.

[Jummivana]

Thank you for the bug report.

We have created an internal ticket to see if our team already has this logged, and if not they will attempt to reproduce the issue and create a new bug report. This item is now marked as feedback-logged. If there is an existing bug report or one is created, we will move this thread to bug-logged.

[RevampedSine732]

Orlando Landing Challenge has 1,976,200 points

To land an airliner at ~ 135 knots at near 0 fpm is not doable.
Even at 10 ft per minute, that would be 0.1666 fp second which is 5 centimeters per seconds

(1 ft is 30.48 cm, so 10 ft = 304.8 cm Say 304.8 cm per minute. Per second it is an average of 5 centimeter VS. This is not possible at airliner speed at touch down)

Formula:

Score = (P + C) x S

where:
P, Precision, and C, Centerline, up to 5000 points each
and S up to 200

the max score is (5000+5000) x 200 = 2,000,000.

So, we must divide the score, by the possible smoothnesses S, starting by 200, then down 1 each time. Any P+C being an INTEGER corresponds to a possible value. Here 1976200 is only possible with Smoothness S = 200, as we can see below:

NB: once we reach P + C > 10000, we can stop as P + C can only be 10000 maximum.

[SIMinVRYTub]

I’d like to extend my sincere congratulations and thanks to RevampedSine732 for his outstanding work, professional-level analysis, and tireless effort in identifying and removing cheaters from the leaderboards. His dedication is a major asset to the MSFS community, and the flight sim experience is better for it.

It would be invaluable for the MSFS2024 team to consider bringing him on board with the Challenges Division—his expertise and passion would undoubtedly strengthen the integrity and quality of upcoming events.

One suggestion I’d like to add: please consider making the World Leaderboard scrollable to display at least the top 100 scores. This would enhance visibility for dedicated players and encourage healthy competition.

[RevampedSine732]

@SIMinVRYTub

Thank you.

Well… I am lost for words.
It’s not often I get something that heart warming.

Not sure what more to say at the moment…

[RevampedSine732]

This is getting beyond ridiculous now:

[RevampedSine732]

Thank you for cleaning up this leaderboard!

But shame that nametags are now truncated since SU2 !

Now going to look at other ones…

[Adilaw30]

**Since SU2 release timer or score is no longer available when u restart the Challenge **in Challenge League , u have to go back in the challenge league home menu and select the race again to display the score or the timer and this work only one time if u crash or restart the challenge timer no longer available , please fix this.

[RevampedSine732]

I don’t have that problem, but some people have.

[RevampedSine732]

What is going on again? 1 and 2…