As some people may have noticed, Stardock conducted a Metaverse scoring audit. The intention is to try to ensure the general integrity of the Metaverse. 

According to the Metaverse auditors, there were a number of top ranked players who had figured out a way to submit multiple entries for what was essentially the same game. We don't know precisely how they did this (hex editor, decompiler, etc.) but the only things that would appear different in the game were the gameID and sometimes the first researched tech.  Otherwise, it was still the same map, the same enemies, the same everything.

As a result, some people were able to quickly rise to the top of the Metaverse by submitting dozens of 60,000 (max score) games per week.  I have instructed our moderators to find anyone who has done this sort of thing in any significant way and zero out all of their games. Most of the top players were looked at closely.

Some players who have high scores have them because they took advatnage of a legitimate (though in hindsight bad idea on our part) feature of enabling people to resubmit games they played and replace existing scores with them.  So some players who had built, over time, many good games could resubmit as they figured out how to win.  We consider these games to be legitimate and won't be penalizing them (though in any GalCiv 2 this will be changed so that once a game's submitted to the metaverse, it's saved forever).

We also reserve the right to remove scores based on "Cheesing".  However, we have not done so thus far and before we would (if we ever do) we would first post explicitly the tactic being used that is considered off limits before acting. So any sort of cheese tactic wouldn't be arbitrarily chosen and would have to be publicly defensible on the forum (i.e. we would have to make a compelling case as to whether a given tactic was cheese).

If someone feels they were unfairly harmed, they can contact [email protected] who is in charge of the moderators on the Metaverse. No games were deleted, they were simply hidden and taken out of the counting.  But beware, don't waste our time with false claims of innocence. Looking at the scores at the top that remain there, I can assure you that the games were looked at thoroughly at at considerable expense (in engineering hours) on our part.

We consider the integrity of the Metaverse to be somewhat important as it has to be fair to the entire community. Not just to the dozen or so people who are focused on having very high rankings. It's not fair to the people who play the game fairly and submit their scores to be zapped into obscurity simply because a handful of people have found some exploit or cheat or whatever you want to call it to push up ridiculously high scores.