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 href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/features/in-the-trenches"
target="_blank">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 href="http://warhammer.tentonhammer.com/" target="_blank"> style="font-style: italic;">Warhammer Online
implemented them for their PvP purposes and href="http://lotro.tentonhammer.com/" target="_blank"> style="font-style: italic;">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 style="font-style: italic;">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.

• target="_blank">To read the rest of this week's style="font-style: italic;">In the Trenches
  article, click here!