Are Online Rankings useless?

[Third Eye Lem]

This has been something that's been bothering me on and off, but reared its ugly head again when I decided to look at Mega Man 10's online rankings. I still see there's some random dude at the top of the rankings with a time of under ten minutes. AFAIK, unless there's a major glitching going on, this time cannot be obtained without some major cheating going on.


This is one problem I have with online leaderboards--they're easy to hack, and most of the time the game developers don't have the time or resources to devote to an anti-cheating system. This really discourages the legit players trying to cut down their time, especially those who submit runs to sites like Twin Galaxies or Speed Demos Archive. Although Mega Man 10 has a replay function in place, it only works on individual levels and not full runs. That, and I doubt Nintendo is going to give away sensitive information about a player's contact info and the like, so we can't get in touch with the player and have them replicate the feat to prove to us he wasn't cheating. It's not just Mega Man 10 or Wiiware, a lot of XBLA and PSN games are potentially guilty of this too.


Another thing that makes me wonder about online rankings is stat-tracking. It's nice if you're doing it personally, like in Super Smash Bros, but when they start making a big deal about minuscule things like how many enemies you killed with a certain attack or how many shots were fired over time, it gets a bit silly. Shadow Complex and Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time have leaderboards and profiles showing off these iffy stats that no one cares about; Shadow Complex in particular pops up a window showing you how many guys you punched or made scream at certain milestones--but for what purpose? Nothing, that's what. There's no reward for getting a certain number of headshots or melee attacks in on a bunch of goons outside of the regular achievements, so why the hell are Epic and Microsoft keeping track of such pointless stats?


It's nice to know you have a particular accomplishment, but it's kind of hard to back it up without proof. I have some Bejeweled 2 high scores saved for prosperity, but that's about it, and heaven forbid I try to get an insanely high score like on the XBLA boards, because that just takes an ungodly amount of time, luck, and maybe hacking to reach. A lot of MMORPGs have boards that show how high a player's level is...Why do we care that someone has reached level 200 in MapleStory? It's not like the player's suddenly gonna de-level and get knocked off their high perch, and with how easy it is to get massive amounts of EXP, becoming level 200 (or max level in just about any MMORPG) is about as impressive as winning 5 bucks in the lottery.


In conclusion, I feel online leaderboards should either keep track of something that actually have value in a video game, or should be omitted altogether, because from a casual standpoint I don't see leaderboards having a functional purpose. I'm not discounting leaderboards like the Touhou scoreboards where you can upload replays and let others see your hard work, I'm talking about the ones in games like Mega Man 10 and Shadow Complex, where all you get is a name and number to tell you how good a person is in that particular category, and no real proof if the achievement is real or not.


What do you guys think about this matter?

[MysTeariousYukari]

I didn't know games used such things :V

But seriously, why bother looking at them, they ARE pointless. To me at least.

[orinrin]

People like to inflate their ego I guess.  Just let them be I say, because they aren't doing much harm (or good) to the gaming communities.


That is my two cents.

[Suikama]

[nsfw]http://i40.tinypic.com/25rmhb9.jpg[/nsfw]

[Third Eye Lem]

[nsfw]http://i40.tinypic.com/25rmhb9.jpg[/nsfw]

Yeah, it's kinda like that, only part of the time the scores can be faked (hence, the Mega Man 10 example, at least on the Wii version).

[MysTeariousYukari]

Someone had Tales of Vesperia beaten within I think it was 5 minutes or something... apperently... according to the Online Rankings >_> Thats shorter then any decent and even good players time for the Final Battle, then toss in the credits... and the enitre f***ing game to, and you have about 40+ hours of game time...

[Chaotic Phoenixma]

It was worse than that. Try 0 seconds.

Someone hacked 999,999 on Tales of Draspi when the highest legit one was under 30,000.

Apparantly, Yuri can beat the 30 man melee in 16/1000 of a second. Yeah right.

And some, but not all of those 999,999 hit combos were hacked. I've seen someone mention million+ hit combos on there when the max hit is 999,999, though I never saw that when I played it.

[Third Eye Lem]

It was worse than that. Try 0 seconds.

Someone hacked 999,999 on Tales of Draspi when the highest legit one was under 30,000.

Apparantly, Yuri can beat the 30 man melee in 16/1000 of a second. Yeah right.

And some, but not all of those 999,999 hit combos were hacked. I've seen someone mention million+ hit combos on there when the max hit is 999,999, though I never saw that when I played it.

Yeah, see, it's this crap that makes leaderboards pointless. It'd be awesome if someone actually pulled off a combo like that...I'm not a Tales fan, but hey, who wouldn't wanna see someone slaughter a boss with a million-hit combo?!

[MysTeariousYukari]

Million-hit combos involve lots of repeating, that is for certain. Largest combo using each move once only gets into the mid-hundreds at best, 120-sumthin at worst I think.

[Chaotic Phoenixma]

Gold Cat + Lightning Dog spam = infinite combo until the enemy dies. You would generally use this on a Giganto Monster. You can throw in one of Estelle's spells(don't remember which) to help too.

Of course, there's also the infinite Tidal Wave spam that everyone uses to farm grade.

[MysTeariousYukari]

Gold Cat + Lightning Dog spam = infinite combo until the enemy dies. You would generally use this on a Giganto Monster.

Wat... No, I am sorry but no. I think you mean...

Yuri's Mystic, then Shining Fang>Shining Eagle> Shining Fang until everything dies

Or maybe you meant the PS3 version which would be "long-winded combo>Yuri's 2nd Mystic>Victory Screen" but Rita and Repede are not Giganto killers... Unless a certain someone counts as a Giganto >_>

[Garlyle]

Eh, they're moderately fun.

MM10 has had a bit of hacker issues (Strangely MM9 didn't), but for the most part there's still a crapload of honest competition going on.  Especially for Mega Man games, there's a great deal of speed run competition going on for pretty much any Mega Man platformer title that isn't Zero/ZX/Legends/Battle Network/Star Force series - but even then there's still some there.

Also there is a little bit of pride I still keep from being the first person to have his name on the MM10 Wily Castle 4 scoreboard >_>;

Anyway though, calling them "useless" just because they get hacked once in a while (or glitched out, as was the case with Vesperia's original 0:00:00 time) doesn't make sense to me.  If you don't particularly want 'in' to the competition, well, that's really up to you.  But on the other hand, for a lot of people, it's a nice little sense of pride or an extra goal to achieve, to try to get your name showing on a high score board.  To just try to do that little extra bit better, etc. etc.; for some people, the spirit of competition is an excellent motivator to play a game they might not otherwise put quite so much time into.

On a related note to MM10, I defended my original MM9 Wily's Castle 4 leaderboard first place score for four or five days after the game's release.  The time has dropped significantly beyond anything I could do at this point (People have figured out some ridiculous tricks that very few people were even beginning to realise could be done), but it was a lot of fun and really did keep me going to try to keep improving and get just that little bit better.

In some cases, it can be a very interesting part of the game.  Banjo-Kazooie Nuts n' Bolts had a scoreboard for every mission.  Here, it wasn't just "how well you played", but because you had fully customizable vehicles, it constantly inspired people to tweak and innovate to try to find new, better ways to handle any challenge the game had set out, long after they'd cleared it to the game's trophy standards.  The difference between "getting a trophy for a challenge" and "getting in the top 100 for a challenge" is now an absolutely huge difference in challenge.

So, yeah.  They might be useless to some gamers, but to others, they're an extra way to test and measure their own skills.

[MysTeariousYukari]

Good point Garlyle... I guess when people aren't hacking them, or they aren't glitching or whatever, they can be fun. But then the hardcore people come in and all odds of "I play for fun, but try to do good" people getting within the top 100250 drop to next to 0.

[Tonepoet]

I think the better of these questions is what sort of statistics are truly capable of determining skill? I'm of the opinion that not even raw win:lose ratios are have true validity, since they're relative to the caliber of your opponents.

If person A bowls at at an average of 250, they'll generally be beaten by person B who bowls an average of 270.  At the same time, if person A bowls within a range of 220-280 and person B always bowls 270, person A will beat person B sometimes, which is by no means is necessarily an indicator of skill. Now so far everything should be alright here because person B should have more wins overall, indicating their skill. However when I introduce you to person C who never bowls anything other than 280-290 and has never played anybody but person D who bowls a perfect 300, it changes everything. Person C is theoretically better than person B but never wins because he only played person D. The win/loss ratios might look something like this:

Person A: Wins = 3 Losses = 7
Person B: Wins = 7 Losses = 3
Person C: Wins = 0 Losses = 10
Person D: Wins = 10 Losses = 0

Which would lead you to believe that the ranking scores should something like this:

1st Place D
2nd Place B
3rd Place A
4th Place C

Yet despite being ranked lower, person C would beat persons A and B every single time. In single round elimination tournaments it can be even worse because of people like person A do sometimes beat people like Person B and people like D would eliminate Cs on entry. This means you could theoretically end up with:

1st Place D
2nd Place A
3rd Place B
4th Place C

And that's assuming D always bowls perfectly. If he doesn't, let's say that one out of every 100,000 games he bowls a perfect zero for whatever reason, with some luck it might sometimes look like:

1st Place A
2nd Place B
3rd Place D
4th Place C

Yet A and B simply aren't as talented as C and D. So if you're not keeping track of their overall game results, you might be in for a bit of a surprise. Unfortunately even this method isn't valid for all games. If we change the setting to something where the goal isn't a constantly the same, even the results themselves can be skewed, based upon the changing difficulty of achieving the best potential score. I won't go into the details but what this means is that at least for head-to-head competitions, is that all statistics are essentially futile, as scoring a flawless victory against a newbie is infinitely easier than scoring one against a seasoned vet. Without knowing which fight was which, you don't have a stable basis by which to judge the results by and hence we have missing data...

Time trials and scoreboards are tricky too because we don't keep track of scoring averages of failed attempts, we simply judge based upon best results. This means we'll never get to see who does best on average, only who does best that one time. Theoretically somebody could score the very highest score possible in a game once and without ever getting past the starting gate on any given attempt before or after. Practically speaking, such things just never happen but this doesn't necessarily mean that it can't. Does getting the highest score once make this guy a better player or just incredibly lucky? It's just some food for thought.

[MysTeariousYukari]

Time trials and scoreboards are tricky too because we don't keep track of scoring averages of failed attempts, we simply judge based upon best results. This means we'll never get to see who does best on average, only who does best that one time. Theoretically somebody could score the very highest score possible in a game once and without ever getting past the starting gate on any given attempt before or after. Practically speaking, such things just never happen but this doesn't necessarily mean that it can't. Does getting the highest score once make this guy a better player or just incredibly lucky? It's just some food for thought.

That is a great way to look at it... I like it

[beaver1231]

Time trials and scoreboards are tricky too because we don't keep track of scoring averages of failed attempts, we simply judge based upon best results. This means we'll never get to see who does best on average, only who does best that one time. Theoretically somebody could score the very highest score possible in a game once and without ever getting past the starting gate on any given attempt before or after. Practically speaking, such things just never happen but this doesn't necessarily mean that it can't. Does getting the highest score once make this guy a better player or just incredibly lucky? It's just some food for thought.

I don't think anyone can beat the scoring leaderboards on Dodonpachi or Ikaruga by just luck...
However leaderboards are best applied to arcade games.

For time trials, yes I can see that happening.

However though leaderboards exist to fill our egos. Not necessarily against the world, but against friends as well.
True hacking and modding these days have made that redundant, but it at least feels good to be better than your friends.

[Third Eye Lem]

Ahhh, it makes me feel fuzzy inside when a meaningful discussion blooms like this. I don't hate leaderboards, but I wish people would do more to keep people from cheating on them, and not waste time keeping track of stuff we barely care about. Thanks for putting your two cents in, everyone. Keep it comin' (for as long as you can, that is).

[MysTeariousYukari]

I actually recently found a few games with Online Rankings that rate you based on the overall performance, not the end result. I think one of them was a Touhou-based game... I think...

It had attacks Touhou fans would notice though... such as "Kindness Sign ~True Blast~" which looks oddly familiar in name to something and on top of that, the song playing at the time was called "Kindness-Colored True Blast"... I laughed for a while and I'm still laughing xD

[Mushyrulez]

...Yeah, me being an only-flash gamer, hackers rule 98% of leaderboards...
...Indeed, there are whole websites, forums, even organizations teaching you how to hack things...

..In that respect, these leaderboards are pointless; the hackers get the top spots and they don't get more ego (which is probably the only point of leaderboards anyways), as they know that they got it through not legit means. The actual players get much lower spots, and thus lose respect for themselves.
At the end, I suppose beaver is right; nobody really cares about how random strangers in the world are, but rather you can compare against your friends, who (to the best of your knowledge) don't hack. Better to boast to your friends than to boast to random people in the world that you don't know...

Wait, did that even make sense?

[Sen]

I remember when, in Trauma Center: New Blood, I got the #1 score for Episodes 6-5, 6-6, three X-Missions (X-1, X-5, and X-6 to be specific), and Challenge-4. All of those took hours of grinding and I cannot describe how incredibly satisfying it was to look at the leaderboards and see my name at the top.

Then I looked back a few months later and saw I wasn't even in the top twenty in any of them :V


Basically, they're nice if you're good at the game, but they're not anything special.