A leaderboard that cannot be cheated

What it is

You do not fight in Legend Forge. You draft a hero from randomised abilities and stats, send them into an endless auto-resolving gauntlet, and find out how far the build carries them before it fails. Deep runs score; permadeath ends them for good.

The whole design rests on one thing: if the leaderboard can be faked, none of it matters. That is an engineering constraint dressed as a game mechanic, and it is why this is the piece here that best shows how we build.

How it is built

The client computes nothing that counts

Every roll, battle and score resolves server-side. The browser sends decisions and animates results it is handed. On top of that: replay verification and an anomaly log, so a suspicious score can be re-derived rather than argued about.

Balance as a test that can fail the build

A harness simulates thousands of runs and gates on real thresholds — how wide the score spread is, how often runs hit the cap, how deep the median and 99th-percentile runs go. A rebalance that breaks the maths does not ship.

Accounts that do not lose your progress

Guest play that upgrades into a real account, so the first run does not require a signup and the tenth is not stranded on one device.

The operational half

Error tracking, error boundaries, end-to-end tests, migration drift guards, and an admin dashboard for tuning balance without a deploy. A live leaderboard is a service, not a page.

Our own software, not a client engagement. There are no business figures attached to it and none are claimed — the point of the link above is that you can check the work yourself.