I should point out here that Steam has a leaderboard feature which the devs have chosen not to use (recognizing that mobile platform users might not be able to see it). Steam’s leaderboard system allows for separate tracking of different categories simultaneously, as many as the devs want to support. So… there could be one leaderboard for event points, which is what we have now, a leaderboard for total wins, a leaderboard for highest-stat invasion team, etc etc. Even if the devs never use the Steam feature, it is still possible to have more than one leaderboard, in which case most of the arguments in this and other threads simply go away.
Sirrian has said that he and the other developers are opposed to banded leaderboards. They encourage a pathological style of play in which people intentionally slow down their leveling to stay in the current band (with presumably easier competition) for as long as possible.
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I didn’t say anything about banded leaderboards.
Whoops. Misread your post. Carry on!
(I am going to claim that you added all that stuff in the middle after I posted my reply.)
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Hmm, yes I saw that when @sirrian responded… I don’t quite get it, as in this game only three things influence experience gained:
- enemies slain
- armour
- vip level
Now… this would mean:
- anyone competing for a leaderboard will be winning matches, and slaying 4(or more) enemies a time, and so generating experience… the only way to reduce experience gain would be to play fewer matches… but then they wouldn’t get very high up the banded leaderboard they were supposedly trying to stay on!
- so they could wear lower tier armour… but the possible gain in prizes from deliberately staying in a lower band leaderboard would surely be outweighed by the loss of winnings (gold and souls) for having pants armour…
- so they could spend less cash… but there are very many players who don’t spend anything anyway… not sure that banded leaderboards would be a real disincentive to spend…
@Sirrian what haven’t I thought of?
…and if I’ve thought of everything, how about those banded leaderboards? 
One complication is that, if you can’t lock your level, you might accidentally level out of band during the course of the event. So if, say, the cutoff was level 200, and you started the week at level 194, you might hit 200 a few days in and have to either stop (losing progression for the rest of the week) or keep going (and suddenly enter a presumably more-competitive band).
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Which problem set is tied to the ‘same prizes’ idea while nothing makes that either necessary or wanted.
And making hard bands based arbitrary stats like level instead of allow voluntary joining is an other fishy design decision. Fortunately also neither necessary or really wanted.
Uh. We have 60+ posts here and over 300 others in half-dozen topics, you managed to read a full line of that before coming out with youwants?
I personally don’t give a damn about leaderboard. I was playing to top tier and wanted to just continue that. And are victim to massive collateral damage due to mixing in this 2.0 thing. The changes don’t just start after you went over the last tier to amuse the 100 or 1000 grinders but the 20-30k players who apparently stop around where I do.
Before I had a mix of all kind of parties climbing, a few tough, a plenty of old stlye. Now I’m offered exclusively 7500+ ones with maw/mercy and similar combos from start. Or can take the “easy” offer that is still onaverage 3x tougher than before and fight 3x the amount of battles.
And WHY I deserve that treatment? Why those who were around longer are forced to play more and harder to get to the SAME position as owners of lvl 1 goblins?
Also, you’re welcome to explain what the devs were actually after. Yeah, they could have done a dozen of different things that would make some sense, including what you list. The (almost) pure grind-based boards is what got ACTUALLY deployed. Those finishing on top are those who played on the account nonstop – possibly using several players to keep the game running. It’s just a small disturbing nuance that beyond the pure grind it appears preferable to have low level, less of a team – and latest hint suggest to even post a low-grade defense team to avoid being offered for good points.
Go ahead and explain how that creates a good game. Or at least how what we see relates to anything the devs SAID 2.0 will be. Like from the low tier it will be /gradually/ harder to climb.
I said the board should NOT be biased at all. Not by anything. What certainly makes it those who HAD done something in the past like building their teams able to use that advantage. While those who just entered or did not bother would lag behind or had to compensate by something else.
The idea of ‘performance this week’ could fly for me, but that would be like the old Arena just with a summary table and initial selection from all, not random 3. Pick your team independently of your roster, use fixed levels – then go ahead grinding. Do we have THAT? Not at all.
So *** you’re talking about? The current way DOES measure in your past performance and apply a huge set of handicaps based on that.
How is this
not the exact same thing as this
This game has gotten easier the more I level. Pretty consistently. I would venture to say that the people 100 levels below me are fighting harder for their wins and deserve more credit than I do.
But whatevs. Your whole argument boils down to “I’d like to make a standing reservation at the top of the leaderboards, or I will graciously accept any number in the top ten because I am such a gentleman, snap snap.”
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This is such a silly argument. Here’s how it reads, “Let’s make it impossible for anyone but end-gamers to ever win a hard match, and only give end-gamers the opportunity to win defensive battles for additional rewards.”
The solution they’ve settled on is the ideal one: Difficulty is relative and points are rewarded as such.
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The two things you quote are clearly different to me; I read the first one as ‘players who are spending the most time now’ and the second one as ‘players who’ve spent the most time since the game started eighteen months ago’. One is current tense, this week, the other is past tense. I’m sorry that wasn’t clear enough.
Your closing point is simply a personal affront to trivialise what I wrote, mistakenly simplifying to some fictitious idea that I don’t feel and have never written here, presumably because you can’t understand my stance at all. Failing to see things from my PoV is understandable when we’re at different places, experiencing different things and valuing different things. But don’t insult me or the intelligence of those reading by substituting my thoughts for that nonsense.
Our whole difference of view is that statement ‘those below me are fighting much harder and deserve more credit’. I respect that you feel that but I do not feel the same way. My view of the parallel situation would be ‘those above me have (historically) worked much harder and earned the right to easier wins, and deserve the same credit’.
Let’s agree to disagree shall we? I’ve given my reasons, you don’t like them. Fine, but lay off the insulting insinuations please.
I’d agree to disagree, but how can I agree to something I don’t understand? Very perplexing.
I just do multi-variable equations and this is beyond me.
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Except it absolutely, objectively is not the same battle. The same opponent, sure, but not the same battle. And while it may be fair to claim that “difficulty” is solely dependent on the opponent, the amount of effort or time that completing that battle will take, as well as the chance of victory, is dependent on the resources available to the player. They are attempting to reward effort, not difficulty. They are attempting to reward the player based on their their skill, not their accumulated resources. Whether they’re succeeding or not is another matter.
The current point system bears a passing resemblance to ELO, in that it’s like people are betting on the outcome, and you get points based on the odds. If you win when you’re expected to lose, then you gain a lot of points. If you lose when you’re expected to win, you lose a lot of points. If you perform as expected, you neither gain nor lose very many points. Points are not a reward, they’re simply a system for determining the relative ranking of the participants.
PvP points have no value. You can’t spend them on anything. Aside from the tiers, it doesn’t matter how many of them you have – only how much you have relative to other players. And that’s who you’re competing against, and who they’re trying to make it a fair competition for. They could have gone the arena route and limited your troops to make everyone equal, but that would have cut out a large portion of the game from the dominant play mode. So instead, they adjust the points, in the hopes of making the effort and outcome consistent. How would it be fair for newer players to have to spend 2-5 times as much time per week to compete? You’re complaining about the number of battles required, while ignoring how long those battles take, or what the chance of victory is.
It all boils down to one question: What should the leaderboard measure? Not how should it measure it, which is what most of the argument has been about. You cannot evaluate a system without knowing the goals of the system. Complaining that a hamburger makes for a poor pillow is senseless.
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I can agree with almost everything you wrote here, very clear and logical… Just not the first sentence…
If you include the team/resources/skill/etc of the person invading then you are making the comparison of the battle subjective, in that the comparison view varies depending on the person viewing it.
If you exclude the team/resources/skill/etc of the person invading and only rate on the team/stats/etc of the enemy, that is objective, in that it does not vary with the person viewing it.
Here’s another contrived illustration:
- Bob has short legs and climbs ladders one rung at a time
- Ted has long legs and climbs ladders two rungs at a time
- Ladder 1 has 10 rungs
- Ladder 2 has 20 rungs
- Bob and Ted agree that Ladder 2 is harder than Ladder 1
- Ted can climb Ladder 2 faster than Bob
- but the height he gets to climbing it is the same whether Bob or Ted are climbing
- objectively, Ladder 2 is a set challenge, 20 rungs
- subjectively, Ted has it easier than Bob
- this game penalises Ted for having longer legs
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I thought you were going to go somewhere interesting with that example–i.e.,
–Ladder 1 has 10 rungs
–Ladder 2 has 20 rungs
–Ladder 1 and 2 are the same height
In which case the ladder with fewer rungs would favor long legs and the ladder with more rungs would favor short legs.
And then the question would be: what would be a fair race? You could
(a) flip a coin to pick the ladder, that way the match isn’t rigged in advance
(b) let Bob and Ted each climb the ladder most suited to their leg heights
(c) Tell short-legged Bob that if he beats long-legged Ted up the ladder with 10 rungs, he’ll get extra points for having won despite the fact that he started with a handicap.
etc., etc. There will be further options.
I’m going to point out, because it’s always worth noting, that analogies are logical fallacies and not valid arguments. You can’t prove anything with an analogy.
But another analogy would be:
Country X is an empire with an army of 10,000 men. Invader Y takes an army of only 2,000 men and wins many battles. Amazing!
Invader Z takes an army of 20,000 men and wins many battles. Still good, but noticeably less impressive.
The numbers remain objective. 10,000 vs. 2,000 is 10,000 vs 2,000 no matter who is looking. And ditto 10,000 vs. 20,000.
The conclusions we draw about those battles (which is a more impressive victory, for example) are subjective, yes, but it would probably be easy to build some consensus around them.
(Though details could make the thing interesting; Hannibal vs. Rome and the 1903 British Expedition to Tibet both feature victors fielding comparatively small fighting forces, but nobody’s going to teach the British Expedition to Tibet at military schools.)
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We’re probably having a semantic argument at this point, but the first rule of measurement is to know what you’re measuring. You’re conflating someone observing a battle with someone participating in it. A battle generally has at least two sides, two participants. An opponent is not a battle. If you change one of the participants in a battle, then it is no longer the same battle. The point allocation is a rating of the battle, not the opponent.
Is it possible to reward one person without, in effect, penalizing another? Consider it a handicap. The point is to control, eliminate, or reduce the effect of unwanted variables on the outcome. To apply this idea to your “contrived illustration”, if you wanted to measure climbing skill, rather than simply who can get to the top faster, then you design the rules in such a way as to eliminate unwanted variables like leg length. The point is to find out who is better, not who has a natural advantage. The point is to answer the question of “Who would be faster, if their legs were the same length?” Their legs being different lengths makes it harder to measure, harder to answer that question. So you need to either provide challenges that are customized to eliminate that variability, like having two different ladders, either of different length, or different spacing between the rungs, or you apply some factor to the scoring to make up the difference.
Most players just want to win, and thus want to apply every advantage they can, and sometimes try to rule out or nullify advantages other people have that they don’t. But the designer needs to ask what it is they actually want to be measuring. Otherwise, the results are likely to be skewed by unwanted factors, and you can’t get any useful data out of the measurement.
To take it to what should be an extremely ridiculous extent, what if someone hacks the game for an advantage? They’ve applied their skills to “winning”, and who are you to say whether or not that’s valid? The answer is that they’re no longer playing the same game, so the measurement has been skewed and any comparisons to be made from it meaningless, and the developers are the ones who determine what skills should be applicable.
You want the resources you’ve acquired to provide you with a competitive advantage, even more than they already do. But what would be the value in measuring that? How would it be interesting to have a leaderboard that basically just ranked players by the amount of time they’ve been playing the game? What would be the motivation to develop such a thing, when level is already an indication of long-term commitment? I’ll ask again: What should the leaderboard measure? What should rank indicate?
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Now my brain hurts… 
…but my opinions are unchanged 
Well, if a system or its goals are too complex for its intended audience to understand, then it’s probably not going to be effective or appreciated. And that’s feedback that the developers should take into account. Games are entertainment; they’re fundamentally about subjective, emotional experiences. If that component is frustrating or unsatisfying, then a well-crafted measurement or competitive component isn’t likely to stand on its own.
I realize that there are problems with the current system. Some of them have come up time and time again in games where a persistent progression component is paired with a competitive component, and I don’t know that anyone has ever addressed them satisfactorily. If a competition isn’t fair, then it’s largely pointless to participate, but if people feel that their progression doesn’t provide them with value, then it’s largely pointless to go to the effort to acquire it.
I suspect most people aren’t going to be concerned about the point allocations, because they won’t have the interest or opportunity to compare them with other people, and thus won’t feel cheated in any way by them. However, the leaderboard is primarily for the kinds of people who are deeply invested in the game, enough to be active in its community, and thus do notice and care about the point system.
I do think that the way the rank and tier systems are intertwined is deeply flawed, and is a source of some of the problems. Without those fixed point targets, they would have a lot more flexibility tuning the point allocations. Basing it off level, rather than rank, is also deeply flawed, because it does create the feeling that players are penalized for progressing, while their effectiveness in battle is not strongly correlated with level. The system is overly complicated, and presumably doesn’t accomplish its own goals very effectively – assuming that the goal wasn’t strictly to reward time spent that week over all other factors. If that was the goal, then there are far simpler means to accomplish it.
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