Leaderboards
The Problem
Leaderboards are fundamentally broken. Most popular games have at least 10,000 players, and that number is usually closer to a hundred thousand or a million. These games usually have leaderboards. And by law of large numbers, you're probably not playing competitively to the point where you're in the top X players, whether X is 100 or 1,000 (or even 10,000). There's not much joy in moving from 13,653rd to 13,642nd place. What caused leaderboards to be a source of joy and excitement in the past for casual gamers?
The answer is usually “smaller cohorts”. The amount of players who had access to any given leaderboard was usually constrained by physical location, with arcade cabinets being the primary source of leaderboards. When there are only ten or a twenty hobbyist players of a game (read: above casual but below competitive), the leaderboards mean something. They're dynamic. They're personal. They're intimate.
In most modern games, you're presented with two options: a global leaderboard, and a friends-only leaderboard. If I and my friends are any indication, most console players don't have more than 10 friends, of which maybe five play the game you're playing, and two of which are playing at the same level you are.
The Solution
We have an opportunity to build a better system, and make leaderboards enjoyable for everyone. Following are some suggestions:
–> Put players in randomly selected subgroups by skill level. This is their current league. If they do well in it they move to a higher league. If they do poorly, they stay still or are demoted. Each subgroup/league contains, at maximum, 50 people.
–> Offer hyper-local leaderboards. City leaderboards, state leaderboards, country leaderboards, etc. If you don't collect location information, let players opt in by choosing their city/state/what-have-you.
–> Offer competitions with one other person (especially people on your friends list) as a feature of your leaderboards. Lots of self-improvement services already do this, where you compete for a high score over a set period of time.
Conclusion
We can make a more accessible, more interesting, and more dynamic leaderboard that encourages participation and which isn't only interesting to the top hundred players in a million-player game.