I have been a fan of this platform for 2 years now, logging daily and trying to keep a streak which is currently at ~750 days in a row. The first year i was killing it, spending 2-5 hours daily making no exceptions. I ended up earning all certificates and at the end of the second year i was in the top ~600 users worldwide and top 3 users in my country. The problen with TryHackMe is the cheating but i couldnt care less, I HAVE NEVER CHEATED in the platform with a few exceptions in buggy rooms or rooms that made no sense because of bad english (i mean, im no native english speaker and i know that you will find many grammar mistakes but thats nothing compared to some awfully written rooms). You see, people who cheat cannot be consistent because they do not enjoy what they do, in the end you will always take the place that your efforts deserve.

But i should care now, cause TryHackMe decided to introduce Leagues.

Leagues is a ridiculous way to give a purpose to the points that you earn for passing info / walkthrough rooms and challenges. Earn the most points in a weekly League and get promoted to the next League. There are five leagues: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Sapphire and Diamond, with each one having fewer spots that you have to reach to advance to the next one. There are also positions that keep you in the same league (no advancement) and of course earn a low position and it will throw you to the previous league wasting a week of your life. There are also achievements for finishing a league first, each league has one such achievement so basically we have five quite unique achievements / badges.

At first i saw the Leagues option but didnt care because i do not like point hunting, its the same reason that i do not participate in CTFs yet, the time that im going to dedicate to these platforms is always fixed cause i have to split my spare time into several hobbies. I passed bronze league without realizing it and passed Silver league in #1 position without realizing it again, i had to saw the newly unlocked badge that i have earned for 1st position to understand what happened. Up to this point, i didnt even bother visiting the Leagues page, with just my daily casual rooms solving i passed the first 2 leagues easily.

I decided to pay more attention in the Gold league and people started to go crazy, still managed to advance with ~2h of room solving each day but had to double that time on Sunday which is the last day of the league. No first position but didnt care.

I was watching leagues leaderboards and it was obvious there were many cheaters trying to finish first for the badge. You could see that the top 5-6 participants were logging in few times each day, earn 2k-3k making sure they were ahead of the 2nd place participant, and then logout. Now let me tell you how much is 2k-3k and how much time you actually need to get these points:

1. For walkthrough rooms, each question rewards you with around 5 to 10 points. If you’re lucky, these questions will be theoretical and the answers will be in the content above. For most walkthroughs though you will have to start a virtual machine and repeat / reproduce what the content is telling you to get the required answer. Usually a walkthrough will eat 1h of your time and will give you 50 to 80 points. So that’s around 65 points per hour. You will have to clear 25-40 rooms to get 2000 points which will consume 1-2 days of your life as long as you do not stuck in any room and do not go to sleep.
2. Challenge rooms reward you with 30 points per question, and usually have only 2 questions, one for a user flag and one for a root flag. Depending on their difficulty (easy, medium, hard, insane) and users experience, they will eat from 30 minutes up to some days of your life though most hard / insane rooms should remain unsolved for the majority of the users. So that’s around 60 points per few hours for challenge rooms.

You can easily understand that seeing people getting 2k-3k points multiple times per day is just not feasible.

I will totally skip the whole Sapphire league and will talk about my experience from the final one called Diamond. It was clear that trying to ethically pass that league in first position was not feasible so i have stopped participating after collecting around 6500 points in 2 days and getting surpassed from other users like 10 times.

This is the first time on the platform that i suddenly had no problem to cheat because most users who tried to end up first had completely empty rooms history on their profile, they were here for the bragging rights and had no problem to cheat to take that place from others who waste a good amount of their lives on the platform. I’ve started doing some research on available rooms and how much points each of these rooms give and started solving them without submitting the answers in the site, i was submitting them in a text file with the original room link. My plan was to give the impression that i was not a threat for the first position, i knew that if i submit my answers my league points would go up, and then people will keep surpassing me. I have dedicated the whole weekend to this purpose so basically i had a few thousand points on a text file and this still was not enough if i wanted the first position so i had to cheat many more answers taken from online walkthroughs.. I didn’t want to cheat many rooms so i have just found the ones that give the most points (around 1k each).

Just 3 hours before the end of the diamond league, i started submitting answers one after the other. In the top position, there was a user named SparkyRespawn. This user was in the site for 2 years and by watching his yearly activity on his profile, i could see that he only answered a few questions 2 years ago, have not solved anything for 2 whole years, and for the last month he was solving like 800 questions each day and reached 11000 in global leaderboards. It took me a full year to reach that position. But that wasnt the best part. He had 17k points in the Diamond league, or let me rephrase that: He earned 17k points in 7 days. It took me 2 whole years to get 100k points and reach that level and in a week he have earned 1/6 of my total points. Talking about skills, dedication and free time :)))

I’ve reached 20k points on Diamond League and stopped submitting answers and started refreshing the leagues page every 10 minutes to see who is going to make a last cheating attempt to surpass me. I saw that user active again and i have started refreshing the leagues page continuously and everytime i did, he had 30-60 points more.

I’ve started submitting more answers and it was literally impossible for him to surpass me so he thought he should message me on Discord. (he deleted his original message where he was saying that i’m cheating)

He also went from 17k to 19.5k in his last attempt in just a few minutes. And now it seems that he has deleted his TryHackMe profile.

So yeah, i had to cheat for many points and i do not brag about it, it was not because i wanted the badge but because i didnt want people who have no place in this scene to earn ten minutes of fame, let other people who dedicate much of their time on the platform to get it ethically. I just wanna emphasize how easy it is for every user to cheat on this platform and how unfair the leaderboards are.

You see, the main TryHackMe competitor (HackTheBox) will ban you for writing walkthroughts for new rooms and old rooms wont give you leaderboard points which is very fair. On the contrary, TryHackMe encourages writing walkthroughs and you can google any room name and find the answers easily. Even in rooms that solving them will earn you a ticket for a real prize, writing and using walkthroughs is allowed. So basically you may be the ethical type of person and compete for prizes against those who have exclusively used walkthroughs. And although i was ok with that for 2 full years, now many people cheat and reach a 4 digit position in a single day, in a site that currently has 4.5 million users.

Even if you can dedicate a whole week on a league (and i mean… all 168 hours), if you are a dedicated user like me, you wont have many unsolved rooms to pass the cheaters. And you cannot get points for solving already solved rooms even if you reset their progress.

I used to really like TryHackMe but at its current state leaderboards are completely irrelevant and prove absolutely nothing and stuff like these make me slowly move away from that platform.