Scoring and Leaderboards (Gaming)

by Kahzgul, Saturday, March 25, 2017, 22:00 (2588 days ago) @ CyberKN

This is interesting.

I personally think that leaderboards are okay. They encourage players to play in a certain way so as to maximise score, and if you make several leaderboards that are scored on different criteria, you've essentially created new game modes simply through player efforts at optimization.

Let's look at my favorite example of brilliant game design: Kingdom of Loathing.

The leaderboards do some awesome things. First, leaderboards expire. There is no "all-time" leaderboard. After a certain amount of time (2 weeks? A month? I forget), your score drops off of the leaderboard. This means broken runs due to bugs eventually fall off, and it means that you have to show continuous greatness in order to stay on the boards. Second, the leaderboards rotate, and that often includes some... weird... stuff. There's one for "fastest playthough" of course, but then there's occasionally "most hamburgers eaten" or "fastest run as class X" or "largest collection of item Y." Since you don't know what each day's leaderboards will hold, you sometimes log in just to find out you're the tippy top player. Third, the leaderboards are often geared towards new content or new ways of playing old content with new challenge items, modes, or classes. So they'll have "fastest run as the new hotness" or "first to collect 10 of the new item" or "# of runs completed using only new weapon A" sort of things.

It's good stuff.

Then, on a micro level, individual leaderboards also exist, so you can always look back and see your own, personal best times, and you can look at the best times of other players as well. This is independant of the actual leader boards for the day, but offers a nice vector for players to look at and feel good about their own improvement.

Of course, the counter example of leaderboards done frustratingly poorly is also a thing. I recall that the VR Missions for Metal Gear Solid gave you codes at the end that you could punch into a website to put yourself on a leaderboard. And some players spent all of their time hacking the code to let them put in impossible times, and then the whole mode became a leaderboard of fake times, and then everyone was banned and the leaderboards were reset, and then real times that were notably faster than most other times were accused of being fake and a shadow was cast upon the entire process. Which sucked when you figured out a novel way to beat a level, because you knew you were going to be accused of cheating. But I'm not bitter, really. Anyway, those leaderboards were also permanent (minus the one total wipe of cheater times), and they got to a point where all of the top scores were basically perfect runs and every score had an identical (and nearly impossible to achieve) time. Remember when Diablo 3 had an auction house and item drop rates sucked dong because they wanted to limit how available items were on the auction house? This was like the leaderboard equivalent of that. Your "perfect" run through a level had to be done many, many times because the playstation's clock just might be .001 seconds ahead of the screen's refresh rate, causing you not to register on the leaderboards.

Anyway, I think that it's possible to do leaderboards in a fun way that encourages unusual play, but I'm not sure Bungie has the will or creative drive to do that. They know this game is only going to be around until Septembre, right? So why bother making something novel when a basic implementation will probably be fine.

And you know what? It'll probably be fine.