Devil Daggers

Edit: I was able to get help from the developer and have changed my review to positive. Thank you Matt!!! It pains me to write a negative review for a game that I enjoyed so much for the first majority of my playtime that was so up my alley that I couldn't put down for multiple days but it feels like my time as a player is not valued. With the main purpose of the game to go for PBs and high scores and/or to get the "Devil Dagger" achievement by staying alive for a soul crushing 500 seconds. So I set out to achievement hunt this game and do exactly that. After about 34 hours of playtime when I finally got my first and only run above 500s (just barely and not perfectly but hey that's not important) I was so thrilled and excited as I finally did it only to see a crushing message "score not submitted error". I saved my replay and closed my game thinking a relaunch would help as I have never had a problem submitting scores before. I learned from the Discussion pages and the DD Discord that it turns out as I was using practice tools (which are permitted) and spent most of my time grinding it section by section to try and see how fast I could get the achievement. However this caused me to not have enough playtime in non-practice submitted runs. You need roughly 666 minutes or 40k seconds of approved scores for a score over 500 to submit to the leader board and for the achievement to pop (of which I had about 34k seconds). I have heard this is done to stop alts and smurf accounts from filling up the leader board. Of which I can totally understand why these measures exist to protect the integrity of the game. However that does not change the fact that as a regular player these limits are obfuscated and not clear. How was I supposed to know I needed an arbitrary amount of playtime for my score to submit? It feels like a punishment rather than a accomplishment for beating it earlier than expected. I have reached out to the development team to try and get some help with submitting my score and fixing the achievment (as I have heard and seen they have helped people in the past with similar issues). If that does happen I will happily change my review but until then I will leave this up and negative as a warning to others. I loved playing this game but this issue has left me frustrated.