My current game is going to be tracking characters in a mysql database. I know flash documents are inherintly insecure, and even when obfuscated they can be cracked with arguable ease. The script obviously has class methods that can modify the character database.

Is there a way to prevent this? (turn based polling game using AS3->PhP->MySQL for all communication)

Looking at the number of leaderboards that are hacked so the top 20 scores are all 999,999,999,999,999 I am concerned this might not be possible.

If you can't prevent it programmatically, how do you personally deal with it? Does it bother you? Or do you take a more laid back attitude and not care, if cheating is fun for them, so be it.

My game won't have any pvp so the worst that could really happen is that you could group up with someone who is crazy overpowered. I guess I could add a system to report suspect cheaters or people who are abusive (good idea anyway since chat is possible).

Just wondering how you guys/gals handle cheaters and also wondering how rampant it is in the flash gaming community. Do you find cheaters in all/most/none of your games?