Leaderboard

[berpdreyfuss]

I was wondering if there is a good way to determine who did "best" on a run because the things the leaderboard measures right now are not really good each on their own. Time may be the best marker if you want to compete, but there are different playstyles and DD isn't really about making fast decisions.

Maybe it would be an idea to take your rank on each of the leaderboards and somehow combine them to your total rank? (and maybe add leaderboards for badges or other things). That way, somebody who did the fastest run might be below someone who came last for time but did really good on piety and damage.

What other possibilities can you think of?

[Lujo]

Time's good, but creates brackets. Badges are terrible. Piety creates a lot of metagaming, and is no measure of anything. Experience is also somewhat metagamey, but it and damage work ok to combine with time and set brackets apart.

Thinking about this would be a lot easier if the devs happened to share their view of these stats, but fat chance of that hapening.

I do think 4 preps is too much, though. That might be adding a bit too much variety to possible outcomes.

[Tinker]

Well, I guess if map completion time is the most accurate measure of skill, I'm the worst possible DD player there is.

[Darvin]

Time is really the only good one that doesn't result in a skewed metagame. It's entirely possible to play for badges and compete according to that (we did that as a forum game a while back) but it leads to some things being heavily overvalued and other things being quite undervalued.

[Lujo]

Time itself isn't a measure of individual skill, but the only way you can in theory compare anything is with times close to each other. It's not about how much time you took, it's about what one did with whatever ammount of time they took. You can't even compare say, Tinker's, Darvns and my score because we're not effectively playing the same game - if I'm going for 12 minutes, and Tinker's going for 30, and Darvin's going for 4 it's apples and oranges and grapes. But if you compare thre guys who all went for 12 minutes, then you can get some sensible laddering.

[Darvin]

[Sidestepper]

My preferred metric would be (games won) - (games lost). That lets you play any which way you want. It does reward frequent play, but I think that's better than using a ratio system, since the "best" score would be playing and winning one game and then never coming back.

[berpdreyfuss]

Yes, games won - games lost and the streak are good measures overall but not for a single run.

I agree with everybody, time isn't the right thing.

But what about something where you add your rank in each of the categories (time, piety, experience...maybe even more?) and the player with the lowest score is the "best" in that dungeon? Would that change the metagame too much?

[TheSchachter]

I think the overall leaderboard does a fairly good job with its win streak, longest win streak, and overall wins count. While I don't personally care much for getting the best time (not to mention I don't have what it takes to compete for that anyway), I definitely agree that as far as individual runs go there isn't really any metric that skews the gameplay less than time spent.

Having thought about it, I think it'd be pretty amusing for the individual runs leaderboards to have, aside from one or two "basic" ranking categories ( I think time and perhaps total exp are the least slanting ones), some other randomly assigned category that could vary anywhere from piety spent to gold taken out of the dungeon, weird stats like number of walls destroyed or anything the game would somehow be able to track. You could either have it known in advance to add a little extra challenge to a run (beat this dungeon while also getting the most piety, or while carrying out as many potions as possible!), or have it as a random element of the daily so that people find out what the game has been secretly tracking about their playing after their run is done, at which point they find out that despite many accidents they're ranked no. 1 for "most irritating worshipper" or something. (Is that weird? I don't know why it sounds amusing to me, but as I write it it sounds creepy XD)

Of course, I doubt that any of that is within the scope of the game, but the thought was fun enough I thought I ought to share it. And that being said, even if it's not within the game, we could still create little community challenges for some dailies (for instance, every week someone does the daily as soon as it goes up, then comes up with a special challenge for everyone to compete).

[flap]