Do MMOs Need Leaderboards?

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Posted February 27th, 2009 by Cody Bye

Are leaderboards the best solution for the competitive players?

Ever since the days of arcade gaming, high scores have dominated gamers' minds. Without fail, these game players always want to have that top spot on the leaderboard to insure their status among the geek community. In this week's In the Trenches column, Ten Ton Hammer's Cody Bye explores his own progression through leaderboards and asks some questions about their implementation into more modern MMOs.

Remarkably, the leaderboard concept seems to be an off-and-on sort of idea for developers. Although Warhammer Online implemented them for their PvP purposes and Lord of the Rings Online has dozens of achievements for players to earn, I don't know if any game has implemented leaderboards to the degree that EverQuest II did. Remarkably, even World of Warcraft has really jumped on the leaderboard bandwagon, even with all of their methods for tracking player data beyond simply PvP statistics.