Handle global statistics

Hi fellow game developers!

I have a pretty tricky question I think. What we would want to do is to have our players save their highscore(along with much more statistic data about their game play) globally, which means they will be able to compete with other players to show who's the best one.

The problem here is that we can't obivously let the game client save their own highscore, due to cheating, so we would need a way of authorizing everything serverside. The thing is.. this is a singleplayer game. Would it make any sense of implementing networking on our singleplayer game for player to be able to rank online?

Do you have any advise on how we should be going forward in this matter?
Should we put up dedicated servers for just one player each? How are other games doing this?

 

I think you should look for UnityDB or something similar to parse for that (Parse is soothing down)

 

https API call to RESTful service is a possibility (a user wouldn't be able to manipulate this data without a valid token issued by an oauth provider). you could a) write your own service or b) use an existing API. a quick search found this one but I'm sure you could find a best fit. http://www.gameanalytics.com/features

 

Hmm I think I miscommunicated. I need to prevent cheating in order to prevent people uploading ridicoulus amounts of score and other data. Say anyone changes the HP to 99999 and continues playing. I have no idea of knowing if the player actually got it. So I assume I have to implement networking here. Take candy crush saga for example. They have global statistics and it's still a singleplayer game where there are a global ranking.

There are no technical parts covered here. I just want to know a general way of solving this issue