A leaderboard is only worth chasing if you can trust it. If the name at the top might have typed its way there, the climb underneath it means nothing. So before the demo goes out with its ladder switched on, we spent a round making the race honest — and making sure the effort you put into a character can't be quietly taken away from you.
The board now only counts runs it can prove happened. As you play a ranked character, the game leaves a trail of server-stamped markers — proof of real time spent in the world, real fights, a real approach to the boss. A score with no trail behind it — the kind you'd get by editing a file instead of playing — simply never appears on the board and never triggers the Herald's announcements. It's accepted, stored, and ignored. Beyond that first wall, every submitted run is checked in depth against the game's own rules; anything that reads as tampered gets its character locked — pulled from the board and barred from ranked play, so an exploited hero can't keep trading on stolen ground. Honest mistakes are reversible, of course; the lock exists for the deliberate stuff.
Underneath the competitive layer, we hardened the thing you actually care about: your character surviving. A crafted flask used to quietly lose its work the first time you changed zones — the modifiers you'd spent currency on evaporated, and the currency with them. That's fixed; a flask you craft stays crafted, across doors and across sessions. And for the rare day when something genuinely breaks, ranked characters now keep a short history of their own past states, so a single hero can be rolled back to a good moment without disturbing anyone else on the board.
There's quieter polish in the mix too — a "lock cursor to window" option so a stray click during a fight can't slip off onto a second monitor, and a pass over ranged combat so a screen full of arrows stays smooth instead of stuttering.
None of this is the flashy part of a game. But it's the part that decides whether a ladder is a real contest or a suggestion — and whether the hours you sink into a run belong to you. We wanted both answers to be yes before we invited anyone in.