Rivals: Actually Good Leaderboards

If you clicked on my last blog, you read me relating how video games slowly fell out of love with leaderboards, but the mechanic and the medium don't have to be on bad terms. Player rankings aren't right for every game, but they might be right for you, and when I see a drab implementation of them, it's not because the concept is universally bad. It's that games have priorities that don't always mesh with those of traditional player podiums. Potential clashing priorities include the drive of modern games to implement frictionless UI and sophisticated social integration with the screen-consuming and blunt nature of the retro leaderboard. There's a difference between how information was exchanged in local venues like arcades and how it's traded on the internet, and the leaderboards that impress in the online age are the ones cognisant of those differences and that evolve with the format.

Division

The later Rock Band games had some slick solutions for ensconcing leaderboards in online play. Rock Band 3 was the first title I saw that would foreground not your numbered placement among the fans of the game, but what percentile of the player ladder you ended up on. After you hit the final note on a track, the game shows your score, and below it, there's a ribbon that will read something like, "You are in the top 52% of the leaderboard" or "you are in the top 34%". When the old score jumbotron started throwing large, unparseable numbers at players (e.g. You are no. 149287 in the world), Harmonix gave users a new perspective on where they stood relative to the competition. Mini Metro and the Zachtronics puzzlers achieve the same clarity but through visual instead of numeric communication. Their leaderboards are joined by bar charts that show where various players' scores fall along the x-axis, and the UI points out the bar you fell within.

On to the Rock Band 4 expansion, Rivals, in which players can join "crews". Crews race against each other for the most "leaderboard points" each week. Every seven days, Harmonix selects a set of songs it calls "LP tracks" and gives each of those tracks a temporary leaderboard. The higher you score on an LP track's leaderboard, the more leaderboard points you contribute to your team for that week. Higher-scoring crews get promoted to upper divisions, while those that can't leap the bar are locked in place.

Rock Band 3 and Rivals both tensed at leaderboards becoming too long for players to wrap their heads around and wracked their brains for a solution. That solution was to subdivide the players on the winners' steps into a small number of readily-understood categories. In Rock Band 3, those categories are percentiles. Rivals makes it less explicit what its categories mean but flavours them. Firstly, it compresses its huge player base down into crews and then brackets crews, and by extension, players, into divisions. "1708" would be an ambiguous leaderboard placement; "Gold League" less so.

Flashback

Rivals also toys with a schema that RB3 doesn't. It resets its leaderboards at the end of the week, so the next time they come around, you don't have to worry about overcoming the total set of opponents who've ever played the game. You just jostle with the active participants for that week.

Enemy At the Gates

Any game with a "friends" leaderboard nailed onto it is also solving the problem of you getting diluted into the vast sea of online players. On a friends ladder, the names are people you care about. One better: they're people you care more about than those on the average cabinet. Friends ladders operate on the logic that while the player can't solidify an identifiable foe out of the morass of the typical leaderboard, the game can pick one or a few names from the pool for you to shake your fist at. In this case, your buddies. The rivals mode in Forza Horizon is another application of this idea. A lot of stuff is named "rivals", huh?

Horizon's rivals employs the leaderboard, but it's not an untrackable free-for-all between every player at once. Instead, each time you take to the roads, the program will pick a competitor from that list for you to burn rubber against in a time trial. Its selection is always someone it believes will be challenging but surpassable for you. Many designers assume they have to present leaderboards to the players as a raw dataset, and when they do, the towering volume of stuff on the leaderboard becomes a weakness for the game. The designers at Playground Games consider how they can turn the abundance of information on the leaderboard into a strength rather than a weakness, using it as an expansive dataset from which to find the ideal adversary.

Horizon also has "crews", the damn plagiarists. Regrettably, if you join one, the game can lapse back into old leaderboard habits. It makes your next rival on any course the person in your crew with the nearest score above yours. There's no guarantee that target score sits in a Goldilocks zone of difficulty. I ended up abandoning my crew for this reason. This blunder goes to show how crucial it is for games to ensure the next mountain the player conquers on the leaderboard is only a little higher than the one they're currently atop.

Specialisation

In Forza Horizon and Rock Band, we also have examples of games renouncing one overall tally for performance and instead producing scoreboards for a plethora of activities across their expanse. In doing so, they increase their accessibility. Not all players are going to accel at the same tasks, and ideally, when a player gets something right, you want the game to be specific about what they succeeded at. It makes the award more personalised and allows the player to feel seen. To expand further, the more leaderboards there are in a game, the more chances a player has to notch a respectable figure on one of them and the more nuts there are for them to crack.

Sub-division of leaderboards had been happening for a long time in that games with multiple modes would tabulate rankings for each of those modes. One leaderboard for story mode and another for endless, for example. Other games would assign leaderboards to each stage, but Rock Band and Forza Horizon apply leaderboards even more specifically than that. In Rock Band's case, every song gets a leaderboard, but in some open-world games like Forza Horizon, you see them applied to activities in the sandbox. For Horizon, that includes speed traps and drift zones.

Zachtronics games also reward a multitude of skills through an abundance of leader stacks. However, instead of coming up with a lot of different levels or activities, all with their own score towers, the developer takes the puzzles it does have and measures players according to multiple metrics of success for each. Zachtronics' MOLEK-SYNTEZ is typical of this design. It is a system construction game in which we must create and program machines to click together molecules.

Each level asks us to synthesise a new chemical and has three leaderboards: One that scores how many "cycles" our machine takes to finish its job, one that scores how many "modules" the device is made from, and one that assesses how many commands the machine uses to construct its molecule. A MOLEK-SYNTEZ level won't just pat you on the back at the end; it can be more attentive in its praise, telling you that your machine was most efficient by time or parts. It also allows for multiple players of the same puzzle to feel that they are all crushing it. One could be blazing a path up the "cycles" leaderboard while another has taken the belt on the friends leaderboard for "modules".

In rhythm games that attach leaderboards to songs, open-world games that tape them to speed or distance challenges, or puzzle games that score types of productivity, the design acknowledges which achievements are special to players. And, of course, if an achievement is remarkable, players will want to show it off to the public or friends. Social status is a reward vector that can return the audience's efforts without dispensing them a new implement or currency. That can be useful for the designer because better tools or the opportunity to obtain better tools can leave a player overpowered.

Interfaced

In Forza Horizon, Rock Band 3, the Zachtronics puzzlers, and Rock Band Rivals, we also see UIs that envelop ranks into the overall gestalt instead of secreting them behind menu options. Some games display the leaderboard after every "run", giving them more publicity. Doing so means that the player doesn't have to click on a button every time they want to check their standing. However, most modern games are not run-based, so they cannot support leaderboards that pop up at the end of a session. It was a different story in the arcade era, but we can look at Forza to study how the mechanic can exist in a genre with continuous play.

When you complete a "PR stunt" in Horizon's open world, the game does not interrupt your driving to display the leaderboard. Instead, the play continues seamlessly. A plate appears at the bottom of the screen, showing your next friend up on the leaderboards for that stunt, you and that friend's scores, and whether you overtook that friend. The UI then displays the percentage bracket of the friend leaderboard that you fall within for that stunt, with the option to press another button to view the complete leaderboard. Like Rock Band 3's bylines, Horizon's will read something along the lines of "You are in the top 33% of the leaderboard" or "You are in the top 50% of the leaderboard". Just as the danger signs and trailblazers of Horizon are meant to integrate contiguously into the world, instead of being instanced off, the leaderboards also appear as part of the overall play experience instead of yanking you away to an annexed screen. As a driving game, this smooth inclusion of the rankings also aligns with its vision of uninterrupted momentum.

My only criticism of Horizon's presentation would be that when it tells you what percentage range you fall within, it always posts the lower bound instead of the upper bound for that range. For example, if you had two friends who'd posted a score for a speed trap and you beat them both, the UI would tell you you're in the top 33% of the leaderboard. Even though you're effectively at the top, you can never get that 1% label; "the top 33%" is the highest you could achieve. The only route to achieving "top 1%" is to have ≥ a hundred people on your friends list and surpass all of them.

For Rock Band, it might seem like you don't have to stitch the leaderboard carefully into the UI. After all, Rock Band already cuts to a score screen at the end of every track where you can dump all the stats. However, it's possible to include more or less information on that score screen and to write your ranking into the margins with a parseable or an unintelligible hand. In Rock Band 3, the information about the percentile of the leaderboard we sit in appears right under the score. Like any good interface, this one places associated elements next to each other: "Here are the points you earned, here's where that puts you relative to other players". In Rock Band Rivals, when you scroll over one of the featured tracks on the menu, the standings for that track pop into the screen from the side.

Horizon and Rock Band are living examples that the appropriate presentation style for a leaderboard is the presentational style of the rest of the interface. The RB3 score screen is already packed with tidbits about what players achieved, so to display the full rankings there would create an information overload for the player. However, as the score screen is reserved exclusively for information about player performance, the game can display another line of information about the band's placement at the top centre of the screen without it being obtrusive. In Rock Band's song library, however, data appears in a list format, and song selection is the primary purpose of the menu. Therefore, the leaderboard can be comfortably displayed there in a list format, but jamming scores or percentiles into the middle of the UI would overwrite important information about which bangers you could be annoying your neighbours with. Again, the motto is that the leaderboard is shown not instead of or after other relevant data but alongside it.

Review

Now we're at the end of this blog, what techniques have we learned to get the most out of leaderboards? Well, I literally just told you, but to review:

1. Breaking the player rankings down into digestible sub-groups.
2. Contextualising where the player falls relative to the community overall.
3. Picking single competitors from the leaderboard that the player can fight against.
4. Creating leaderboards for different areas of play.
5. Presenting leaderboards in a manner congruent with the rest of the UI.

You are now the new Shigeru Miyamoto. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Minecraft Font by Crafton Gaming.