The Shrine

Just a quick topic, I seem to remember seeing a discussion recently (maybe not on here) about how leaderboard systems are futile by nature to the 99% of people or more who end up ranked far, far from the top. While I didn't disagree with the statistics, I thought there was an irony there, because I'm listed in the top ten for a leaderboards on a game (just one) on XBLA, and it's actually kind of a cool feeling.

Just curious to see, with so many other hardcore gamers here, if anyone else has cracked the leaderboards on any game that tracks them. I'd expect there have to be a couple, it's not like I'm a gamer of surpassing skill measured against you lot. Currently I hight #9 on the Hard leaderboard for Assault Heroes, which fact I put up on my XBLA profile - as if anyone I played ever actually bothered to take the time to look or gave a shit if they did, but at least I know how well I did. It's just odd to think that I actually have the ninth-highest ranked score in the world on a difficulty setting for any game. In the universe I know, statistics ought to have predetermined my place right in the middle of the faceless thousands. (Thankfully for my ego, Assualt Heroes is one of those that actually does have hundreds of thousands of scores.)

A leaderboard is a strong as a game's ability to keep people from cheating/working around it.

Starcraft's original ladder obviously became a joke relatively fast due to win trading, and Blizzard could never do anything to stop it. With WC3 it became a bit more legit.

Street Fighter IV's original ranking system had rampant disconnecting people who would just pull the plug with no drawback if they started losing. Their Championship mode quelled this a bit.

I cracked SF IV's leaderboard in Champion Edition, and posted ma replay

My guild in WoW was #24 in the world at one point!

If you take a score based leaderboard (not every game lends itself toward a win-loss score board, and all win-loss scoreboards have some kind of implied score based on your win-loss anyway), it'd only be meaningful if the scoring system is reasonably well thought out. For example if the top of the leader board is 11 billion and the average guy scores 5000 then that scoreboard is kind of meaningless except for the top 10 or whatever guys at the top. For example here are the some of the scores I looked up for the Touhou games:

TH8
My best score - 1.3 billion
World record - 6.5 billion

TH10
My best score - 100 million
World record - 2 billion

Assuming that the difference between me and world record hasn't changed between the time I played the two games, clearly one is more friendly toward trying to get a better score than the latter, which is why I played TH8 a lot more than TH10. Now I'm well aware each billion is another huge jump in skill but at least at a glance it looks probable if you have 20% of the score of the world record as opposed to 5%.

I think ultimately a scoreboard is only useful if the scoring system itself is meaningful. I remember seeing a game (Giga Wing?) that had scores that was measured either in quadrillion or quintillions. I don't see what would be the point for any average guy to play this game in terms of getting a score.

Hexic's (XBLA) leaderboard had some sort of cheating behind it because there were people with impossible scores. Not sure how they did it, though. I would have been up there if it wasn't for that.

E4's (Every Extend Extra Extreme, also XBLA) leaderboard seemed legit, but it was closer to an endurance match, which is what the game itself seemed to boil down to. I played for about 4-5 hours on one game and got pretty high (triple-digit rank), but it was disappointing that it's a song-based game and you hear a favorite song get turned to shit because you've heard it 200 times for the past 5 hours.

I remember Gradius 5 had a leaderboard system where you get a score and then a code to verify that you had that score. Ignoring the fact that there's probably some way to cheat, I remember the scoreboard's top score was the guys who can do 4 loop in one go or whatever and it's way higher than anybody else, and like Sine says it becomes some kind of endurance challenge. Megaman 9 had this endless stage scoreboard and after a while it looks like you got to just stop and keep shooting respawning enemies to get all the powerups you need periodically and that also drags on.

So these are examples of bad leaderboards.