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The Tattered Notebook: The problem with leaderboards
If there's one thing you can say about EverQuest II, it's that it has a community that's as varied as cogs in a Gnomish do-hickey. There's a substantial and long-time community of hardcore players, made up of people who must also be math majors because the number crunching that's involved is impressive. There's also a good-sized portion of the playerbase that prefers the non-combat features, like crafting, decorating, and more recently, dungeon designing. (Some players have made a fortune hiring themselves out to decorate others' homes, for example.) In a previous column, I talked about whether there will be a strain on the team to continue making quality content for the broad spectrum of players, but this week, I'd like to look at it from a different perspective. Two of EverQuest II's newest features, the housing leaderboards and the dungeon maker leaderboards, are both designed similarly, with rankings, a hall of fame, and a voting system for various categories. But the leaderboard listings for each system look very different, and while the housing directory tends to be a good representation of EQII players' creative genius, the dungeon maker boards haven't reflected that as much. Read on to see why, and to look at what, if anything, should be done about it.
