How CricArcade Leaderboards Stay Fair Guide
A board is not your career
The single most useful thing to understand about CricArcade is that your career record and a leaderboard are two separate objects, and they are meant to disagree. Your career is yours. It counts everything you have ever played, including the seasons that went badly, the matches you abandoned halfway and the experiments you would rather forget. Nothing is filtered out of it, because it is a record of what you did.
A board is the opposite. It counts only what has been checked. That is the whole reason it exists as a separate thing rather than as a sorted view of everybody's careers. If a board simply ranked career totals, it would be ranking whatever the site had been told, and a table that ranks what it has been told is a table anybody can climb by telling it something else.
So the two numbers will not match, and a player who notices that their board position lags their own record has not found a bug. They have found the gap between a claim and a verified claim, which is the only thing a board is for.
Nothing arrives on trust
When a match finishes, the result does not go onto a board because your copy of the game said so. It is replayed independently first, and only a run that comes out the same way the second time is accepted.
This is worth sitting with, because it inverts the usual arrangement. In most games the client reports the score and the server records it. Here the report is treated as a request rather than as a fact, and the site satisfies itself before the result counts. The practical consequence for an honest player is that a board entry sometimes appears a moment after the match rather than instantly, and that is the check doing its job.
Rejected rather than adjusted
When a replayed run does not reproduce, the result is rejected. It is not quietly corrected to whatever the replay produced, and it is not split into a compromise between the two.
That choice matters more than it looks. An adjusted result would be a number nobody actually achieved, sitting on a table that claims to list achievements, and a board carrying invented entries is worse than a board with gaps in it. A rejection is legible: the match is simply not on the board, and your career record still has it, because your career records what you played rather than what was verified.
It also means the boards run slightly short of the truth rather than slightly ahead of it. Some legitimate results will fail a check for dull reasons, a connection dropping at the wrong moment among them. We would rather a board understate a good player than overstate anybody.
Why the boards rank on outcomes
The boards rank on what the game asks you to achieve, not on raw accumulation. The Chase and T20 Franchise Manager rank on titles won. The Follow-On ranks on Test series won.
Ranking on runs would be easier and would be worse. A player who scores heavily and loses has not done the thing the game asks, and a table topped by enormous innings from lost matches would be rewarding exactly the cricket the games are built to punish. The point of a chase is to finish it; the point of a five-day Test is to be in front when the fifth day ends. A board that celebrated a magnificent 140 in a defeat would be teaching people to play badly.
This is also why the boards feel harder to climb than a batting average would be. Outcomes are lumpy. You can play well for a season and win nothing, which is true of real cricket too.
Why there are three boards and not one
Each game ranks on its own terms, so the boards sit side by side rather than merging into a single table. There is no exchange rate between a Test series win and a T20 title, and inventing one would mean deciding how many tournament wins a five-day series is worth. Any answer to that question is arbitrary, and an arbitrary answer at the centre of a ranking makes the whole ranking arbitrary.
One handle carries across all three games, so a name on one board is the same person as that name on another. What does not carry is standing: being first in one game buys you nothing in the next, which is the honest position given they are different sports played on different clocks.
What a board cannot tell you
A board is a narrow instrument and it is worth knowing what it leaves out. It cannot tell you who is the best player, only who has won the most of what it counts, and a player who has played twice as much has had twice as many chances. It cannot see a season you played beautifully and lost narrowly. It cannot distinguish a title won against a strong field from one won against a weak one.
Nor does it cover everyone. Playing without an account is fine and your progress saves on your own device, but signing in is what puts a result on a board, so the boards are a ranking of players who chose to be ranked rather than a census of everybody playing.
Why we do not publish the mechanism
This guide has told you what the boards claim, what they reject and why they are separated from your career. It has not told you how any check is implemented, and it will not.
The reason is straightforward. A verification scheme published in full is a verification scheme with instructions for getting around it, and the people most interested in those instructions are exactly the people the boards exist to keep off. Every sport draws this line somewhere. We draw it here: the principles are public, so you can judge whether they are the right principles, and the implementation is not, so that knowing the principles does not help you defeat them.
If you think a board entry is wrong, the useful thing is to tell us which entry and what you expected, rather than to guess at the plumbing. A reproducible complaint is worth more than a theory.
Keep reading
The leaderboards themselves carry a short version of this note at the foot of the page, and how CricArcade works covers what the games are simulating in the first place. For the cricket the boards are actually decided by, start with chasing a big ODI total or the calls that decide a five-day Test, and if you have not picked a game yet, which CricArcade game to play first is the shorter question.