Guild Wars 2

First, I want to say I appreciate the regular additions to the game, and I accept that not every new feature or content will be relevant to every player.

That said, I’m honestly wondering what the point of leader boards truly is. Invariably, leader boards in any game always ended up being dominated by players who fall into one of two categories: cheaters or players who have played since day one and continue to play 16 hours a day every day. Your normal player, no matter how skilled or how much effort they put into it, will never ever see themselves on a leaderboard. The names in the top 1% of any leaderboard I have seen almost never change, either. Individual names may shift a few places up and down (when John Doe #9 takes a break to go take a dump, in those few minutes he will fall a place, but he will make it back up when the guy who passed him breaks to microwave a hot-pocket), but that list of top 100 names is nearly always the same names for all time. I have no idea about the current number of Guild Wars 2 players, but considering 2 million copies were sold in the first two weeks, a system that only tracks the top 100 seems like a lot of effort to implement a system that will ultimately be a pretty static list of players only relevant to 0.005% of the population.

I do realize ArenaNet said that in the coming weeks, they will add more tools to sort the leaderboards, but I’m just lost as to the point of a system that only 100 people out of thousands will be able to use (because if you haven’t been playing since day one, and you are not currently on the leaderboards, then you will never, ever be on there).

If I am completely missing something here, please feel free to set me straight!

There’s been a lot of talk about the game having no progression or drive after 80
… I guess this is their attempt at creating some?

I can’t think of any other reason.. the whole thing seems silly to me.

toastman.7689:

First, I want to say I appreciate the regular additions to the game, and I accept that not every new feature or content will be relevant to every player.

Sorry. There is no room for rational thought on these forums. I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you to leave.

It’s a small advancement towards building a competitive aspect, which is deeply needed if this game is expected to keep players feeling challenged.

Snow White.9680:

I can’t think of any other reason.. the whole thing seems silly to me.

Yeah, that’s kinda where I stand. And, I suspect, 99.99% of the rest of the player base (seeing as they are not, and never will be, on the leaderboard, thus making it pointless for the 99.99%).

Just to make this a constructive conversation, as apposed to a kitten-fest, we should try to come up with some tweaks or algorithms that would correct the problem of leaderboards only being for people that never miss a day.

Here are some thoughts:
Achievements – daily and monthly achievements make up such a large part of the achievements leaderboards that you have no chance of ranking if you have not completed the daily nearly every day since launch. Perhaps using a weighted score where repeatable achievements (such as dailies and monthies) have diminishing value in ranking calculations? (hypothetical example with made-up numbers: first 100 dailies are worth 1 point for achievement rankings, next 100 dailies are worth .5 pts for rankings, next 100 are worth .25 pts, etc). That would still give people some credit for having never missed a daily, but not so much that they can make it onto the leaderboard and never fall off by simply having done the daily every day since launch.

WvW – perhaps use play time in WvW to weight the score slightly so that players who play less but are highly productive (and thus have a high effectiveness/efficiency) have a shot at the leaderboard, and/or doing a diminishing returns on a player’s score based on hours played in a timeframe so that the longer someone plays past a certain number of hours, the fewer points they get for performing the same actions.

PvP – they are already on the right track for PvP rankings I think by basing the top 100 on win/loss ratio. Too many competitive games base their leaderboards solely on number of kills or victorys so that players who simply play more rate higher than highly skilled players. I also don’t ever do the structured PvP, so my thoughts here may be ill-informed. Most I think some systems to detect or avoid people gaming the system, such as diminishing returns for killing the same opponent.

Hoyvin.3241:

Sorry. There is no room for rational thought on these forums. I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you to leave.

Darnit!

the leaderboards (at least for pvp) take into account people who have been doing tournaments since last month, not since the beginning of the game; most of the people at the top aren’t “cheaters” they just run with a premade

hamsteak.1368:

the leaderboards (at least for pvp) take into account people who have been doing tournaments since last month, not since the beginning of the game; most of the people at the top aren’t “cheaters” they just run with a premade

this.

Tolunart: as for me personally, I do most of my time in PvE, and couldn’t really care less about the competitive aspect (though I do enjoy the large scale chaos possible in WvW). My question is more one of intellectual curiosity about the purpose of something that appears to serve, well, no purpose. In fact, you reinforce the point by illustrating how the system only rewards the tiny percentage of obsessive players. One other point, you mention top 1000, but they are actually only tracking the top 24 in WvW, which is such a tiny number of players it left me scratching my head.

So people can measure their E-Unmentionables. That and they’re desperately trying to make PvP an Esport. It’d probably work better if Spvp wasn’t so boring compared to GW1’s variety of PvP.

hamsteak.1368:

the leaderboards (at least for pvp) take into account people who have been doing tournaments since last month, not since the beginning of the game; most of the people at the top aren’t “cheaters” they just run with a premade

Then I will concede that point. As I mentioned in my initial post, I don’t do much sPvP, so I don’t pay as much attention to how that one works.

I’m mostly interested in a discussion to think of ways that the leaderboards can become of interest to a wider player base, and can become more dynamic as apposed to having the same names for all eternity.

There are those that seek to make themselves feel more important and/or more powerful then all others. Not all mind you but still many.

They want their egos stroked. That is why there are leader boards.

This game was designed to fit a wide player base. So unfortunately they. Must cater to these weak souls.

It is best just to not concern yourself with it and just play the game as you like.

In other words…… just have fun.

There is absolutely no point to the leader boards. The only people that care about them are the people on them or those desperate to be on them. The rest of us, which I suspect is the vast majority, don’t and never will care about them. I didn’t even realise they’d been added until I saw this thread.

The day I top an MMO leaderboard is the day I seriously have to reevaluate what I’m doing with my life.

There used to be a leaderboard site for LotRO which displayed All-Time, Monthly, Weekly and Daily “rankings” and included each player’s guild. This covered all servers, or only a selected one. While the All-Time lists remained fairly static, the Monthly and Weekly lists were pretty dynamic and the Daily list changed constantly.

As for the “server firsts”, I was a founding officer in a LotRO guild that achieved about 75% of the server firsts… and the server was 4-5 months old before we even started trying. Some of those “firsts” still hadn’t been successfully completed when I left the game, two years after the server opened. My point is, though, that you don’t need to be starting a game in Headstart/Beta and playing 16hrs a day to get these things. Unfortunately, though, GW2 doesn’t have that kind of content.

I hope they release a tool that will let you search up your own rank in categories. Then players would get a sense of where they are compared to other players and the leader boards would actually be useful to me.

Doesn’t salvaging get you achievement points, and a lot of them? They should remove those points from the Leaderboards then it would be a bit more meaningful. Reaching the top because you salvaged a lot of rags doesn’t sound epic.

Astral Projections.7320:

Doesn’t salvaging get you achievement points, and a lot of them? They should remove those points from the Leaderboards then it would be a bit more meaningful. Reaching the top because you salvaged a lot of rags doesn’t sound epic.

They did remove them. Check your points.

Some of the comments here are pretty arrogant.

The leaderboards are a very tiny fraction of the many options players have to set goals for themselves. It doesn’t need to be blown out of perspective. If you don’t like the system, then don’t indulge in it. You’re not being punished for choosing to ignore it. So there’s no reason to shun those who do.

Rhaps.8540:

The day I top an MMO leaderboard is the day I seriously have to reevaluate what I’m doing with my life.

Ha! Agreed!

Deadly Spirit Guy.4769:

I hope they release a tool that will let you search up your own rank in categories. Then players would get a sense of where they are compared to other players and the leader boards would actually be useful to me.

Also agreed, and I give it decent odds this is coming as this seems like a pretty obvious feature.