In support of what Meleah said: I'm not sure what, if anything, can be done about this. I wasn't thinking it was bots, but it definitely is cheating. I thought perhaps there was a newly-published cheat code floating on the net, and a spate of game hackers descended on this single game on the AARP platform to test their mettle against each other.
Like Meleah, I too am a daily player of this particular game, having spent years on improving my score and figuring out strategies. Even with all my years of experience, I find it difficult to get a score in the 19,000s and have never gotten a score over 20K. Further, I have never seen the cheating scores like those seen in the past few weeks (36K, 49K, etc). These scores simply aren't possible to reach without cheating.
While most AARP games, like Mahjongg Toy Chest Classic, are open to anyone to play, I have to think the base of users are seniors who are using the games to improve dexterity, mental concentration, and frankly, give a small victory when getting onto the Top 10 high score board. The games pass the time for retirees, and it sucks the fun out of playing when you see usernames who have NEVER been on the top-ten high score board coming in and finishing in the 1st to 9th high score positions. We, the daily players, can no longer see our recognizable, legit, fellow competitors. We can no longer see our own names in the high score metric because playing the game by the rules is no longer enough to get you into the high score range.
For those of us who have spent so much time building our skills at this game, our game, it feels like our game was abruptly taken away from us. It now seems hopeless to attain a high score ever again, and that makes me feel like a daily routine I have long loved now is painful to undertake: it is pointless to play with no sense of seeing how well I am doing.
