Player swipe to remove match

Question

Let's say I have a turn based match with two players. At some point player 1 recognizes that he is about to lose the game. When it is Player 1's turn, he uses Game Center App to do a swipe to remove the match.

Issues:

A. Take turn timer never expires on Player 1. So the match's turn will not switch to Player 2 when the time expired.

B. The game also offers a view only mode so players can view the game progress while he is out of turn. But since no status was updated to indicate that Player 1 had removed the match manually. App can offers no resolution. Also, you can only end match while it is your turn.

Ideally, I want to declare Player 2 as a winner and end the match.

How do you handle in this situation?

Answer 1

I finally found a workaround for this.

If you delete a match, then call GKTurnBasedMatch:loadMatchesWithCompletionHandler, the deleted match doesn't appear (as expected). However, it turns out that you can still re-download the deleted match using GKTurnBasedMatch:LoadMatchWithID, if you happen to still have the deleted match's ID.

I think we can reasonably assume that The Cheater is going to play the game again; otherwise, why would they care about incurring a loss? Therefore, I implemented the following:

1. Maintain a table locally, on the device, of matches.
2. On startup, pull the list of local player's matches from Game Center and compare against my local list.

When The Cheater recognizes the situation and deletes the match using the Game Center interface, the match is removed from Game Center, but not from my local DB. When The Cheater starts my game again, I see that they have more matches locally than on Game Center.

I then call either participantQuitInTurnWithOutcome or participantQuitOutOfTurnWithOutcome, as appropriate, with an outcome of GKTurnBasedMatchOutcomeLost.

This passes the turn to the next player and records a loss for The Cheater. It won't work if the cheater never plays the game again, though. (But, if they're not playing, they're not wrecking any more matches, so the chaos is contained)