Exploiting leaderstats?

[Soulsplosion]

Hi, I have a small but confusing problem.

My game has a leaderstat which is “Time Alive”. It is how many minutes you’ve been alive. It resets when the player dies and also resets if they leave the game while they are in combat. It is saved when they return to the menu or when they exit the game while not in combat. Returning to the menu triggers a countdown on the server which is severed if the player moves or is hit by an attack, so there is no way to exploit it to save their values at will. Aside from these details, everything is handled by the server and there is no backdoor that would allow them to alter or save leaderstats at will. Characters use humanoids.

I have a few players who are exploiting to keep their Time Alive from never resetting, and they also somehow have Time Alive values of over 1,000 minutes. This is theoretically possible with absolutely insane roblox children but I’ve had players tell me that these players in question have died but their leaderboards do not reset. I also know these players are capable of exploiting and have in the past, but I’m trying to figure out how and am using them as guinea pigs until then.

How could they be doing this? Is there some obvious exploit to leaderstats and humanoid death that I’m overlooking?

[MichaelEpicA]

Are you checking the death on the server? There’s a possibility that they could be using metatables to hide the fact that they died.

[Soulsplosion]

Yes, death is checked on the server

[Soulsplosion]

found out that that this is done by taking advantage of datastore’s loading speed.

when a player dies they would immediately join the game again on the same account on a different device, causing their data on that other device to load in before the data (that records that they’ve died) is saved, which rolls back their data

to fix it, I’ll probably have to make data in a datastore be marked as in-use or not-in-use so that it isn’t loaded on one server before being saved in another

if you notice things like a player’s death penalty not being applied when by all means it should, keep this in mind!