I'm Uberer Than You!

Keeping Score in MMOs

By: Savanja

 

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Keeping score in online gaming is not a new concept. A lot of online games allow for players, guild, clans, etc to boast all about their gaming prowess in many different ways. Take the popular online game, Counterstrike, for example. It's not hard to find posted rankings and clan competition information all over the internet. This hasn't really moved into the genre of MMOs, aside from the rare person who feels the need to post their character stats and bank numbers in their forum signatures.

So why not? Why hasn't score keeping become a popular feature in MMO gaming?

 

Anything You Can Do...

*sings* I can do better! Okay, well, that's not likely true for me since I'm one of the least competitive gamers out there. However, I have noticed an interesting trend on the EQ2 PvP forums that tells me that while keeping score hasn't seriously caught on just yet, it may just be on its way in.

People want to know who does what better, and beyond that, they want to argue about it, so it's really not all that surprising to see threads pop up noting what guilds have nailed server firsts and which players have the best kill vs death ratio and the post upon post of aftermath arguing whether or not the posted stats are accurate or credible.

Take a look at our own Venekor's guild rankings as posted by one of the forum regulars. This says to me that MMO gamers do desire the ability to keep track of the in game score. And in fact EverQuest II does happen to have the EQ2Players site that keeps track of basics in game, such as discoveries, kills vs. death, and wealth that can be listed by world wide or server wide. I never check them, but I'm sure some people do or they wouldn't be there.

So since clearly some players do care about whether or not they are the most envied player on their server or play with the coolest guild, why don't we have more user-friendly, non-biased player and guild rankings?

 

Just Because You Can, Doesn't Mean You Should

Okay, so it seems that certain types of players have real use for keeping score. PvPers, and high-end raiding guilds that take pride in making server firsts and taking down those particularly tough mobs both have good reason for wanting to have a way to compare themselves and their guilds to others on their own servers, and across all servers. So should something like this be implemented? And if so, how would it be done?

The first thing to address is fairness and bias. When you see posts on the EQ2 forums "ranking" guilds, are they using a method that doesn't allow for bias, and does bias sneak in anyway?

Quite honestly, even if bias doesn't make it's way into these threads (after all, it's likely someone on the server that cares about this sort of thing that post the rankings to begin with) some of the other players are going to argue it and accuse of bias anyway. So really, the only real legit answer would be game generated rankings based on hard guild and player stats. But should it really be done? I see a whole lot of bickering over things like this, I'd think that it would be very much adding to the flames if EQ2 did have these sorts of scoreboards. Gamers tend to be a competitive bunch anyway, why make it worse by actually pitting people, guild to guild and player to player? I think it would cause more general unrest, but since it's human nature to grind a good thing into the ground, I think we should at least toss around the idea of what it would take to get something like this put together. How would SOE manage to implement scoreboards for EQ2?

 

Making it a Reality

I've already (in all my great wisdom) established that the best way to do any scoreboards for EQ2 would be if it were done by a completely neutral third party. Since SOE has most of the information anyway, it'd make sense that perhaps if something like this were desired, that they might want to be the ones to put it into effect. Seriously though, I doubt this is anything that they would do, it would take more work than I suspect they are willing to dish out for this game at the moment...or ever.

Stats are easy to keep track of and generate. The EQ2Players site tells us that they are capable of following this information in game and sharing it in a understandable manner. So could things like server firsts, player kills, well done raids, etc be posted as well? Eh, well most of it could I think. Things that would be harder to generate would be overall guild rankings, I'm not sure what would need to be taken into account, or what stats would be important enough to be included in the decision making process of uberest player or guild evar. I'm betting that someone vastly more game savvy than I could come up with a list of stats that would be a must have for a system such as this one. If I had power over something like this you'd see rankings of "Hawest Females in Game" which would rank my guild first (obviously), so I might not have the greatest ideas here.

 

In fact, please share your thoughts on whether or not this is something that SOE should seriously consider adding to the game. And if they did, how would it be done? Please pop on over to the Ten Ton Hammer forums (brand spankin' new and soo ready to be broken in) to let your voice be heard, ya just never know who might be listening. *wink*

 

Questions? Comments? Marriage proposals? Send 'em here!