The point of the walk down memory lane: either of the old methods was open to far more abuse and all it would take would be one serious jackbum willing to let the scripts run every day to always stay in the lead.

Really, it’s the nature of the “there can only be one” leaderboards that lend themselves to the problem. The leaderboards existed before I started playing, so at maximum they were created when there were fewer than 10k characters. There are now well over 50k. The more characters, the more frequent and noticeable the whoring will become and the more frustrating and impossible it will be for collector/achiever types to have reasonable goals.