Scoring and Leaderboards (Gaming)

by CyberKN , Oh no, Destiny 2 is bad, Thursday, March 23, 2017, 18:01 (2583 days ago)

I just read an article on the spin-off "Breach" mode in the latest Deus Ex game.

The article is mostly about the creation of Breach mode and how the team debated the implementation of microtransactions, but one thing that stuck out to me was line about how players would be motivated to play and re-play levels to reach the top of the online leaderboards...

And it got me thinking: Isn't the "Climb the Leaderboards" model of incentivising your players terribly out-dated?

From what I can gather, leaderboards in games originated back when arcade machines were in vogue, and were used as a method of proving your skill to your peers. But they were always local to that machine, or at very least that particular arcade. Thus was a way to foster friendly competition in a local scene.

With the advent of the internet and online games, where everyone's skill is being compared and contrasted on the same scale, I feel like there's far less motivation to "Reach the Top" when the competition has swelled from a few dozen player to millions. What was once a task that required a moderate amount of effort and determination to achieve can now feel like an impossible feat, accessible only to those with an inordinate amount of free time and the mindset to focus all that time on improving their performance on this singular goal. As soon as I contemplate this and it's implications, any motivation to achieve it evaporates.

On top of that, I think most games have simply come up with more appealing ways to incentivise and reward players- When I play through DX, it's because I want see how the different choices I make can influence how the story and encounters plays out, not so that I can have a bigger number attached to my name.

This is also why I was taken aback by how many people reacted positively to the introduction of strike scoring; at no point, before or after the update, did I care about having my performance graded; I just wanted to shoot aliens and move through these neat spaces. Yes, we did have weekly spotlights in the THAB on the best of the best in PoE, but that seems like a poor reward for the effort required.

Anyway, I was just curious to see if I'm in some weird minority on this. What are your thoughts on numerical scoring and leaderboards these days?