The part that makes it all so discouraging is the exponential curve towards the top of almost every leaderboard. You could reach the top 100, even the top 50, and still be an order of magnitude behind the leader’s score.

Example: I’m currently 30th for best bidder, score of 225. JayZJay… 2167, and the gap’s probably only growing. The only realistic way I’m ever getting that peen is for JayZJay (along with a bunch of other people) to decide he’s got better things to be doing with his life, and frankly I’m not sure I’d outlast him on that (keeping yourself at the head of a leaderboard is probably a better motivator to continue putting effort in, than what feels like fruitlessly chasing an impossible target)

I don’t know what the solution is, but it happens with every online leaderboard I’ve seen, even in one-off games… although it’s made worse in ongoing games like Fwz – no matter how hard you’ve tried or how well you’ve done, there’s always someone who’s done it 10 times better. When the scores are just there for the sake of scores that’s not so bad, but when there’s a reward for the top spot it leaves a lot of people feeling cheated because they didn’t get their score in before the other guy.

It’s really just an unavoidable part of awarding peens to the one single person on top of a board, when it’s entirely possible for them to stay in an unreachable position at the top, perpetually extending their lead. Other players’ reward for their successes shouldn’t depend on the previous leader getting bored and quitting… you can mitigate it by (for example) awarding peens to more people at the top than the single leader… say the top percentile, but that just moves the line between the haves and the have-nots. Or you can avoid the issue entirely by making it milestone based, but that loses the player-against-player competitive aspect. Or you can retire people after some period, which results in (eventually) everyone getting it.

You can take the edge off the downside of each, maybe combine the 3 to try and get a best of all worlds… maybe hand out small peens for milestones, and a bigger peen for being the leader, with a periodic retirement of the leader (but retention of their score at retirement as a target). But in the end I think peens-for-leaderboards is broken by the number of players wanting to get the peens. However you do it, someone’s going to be ****y (either the hordes of people who can’t get the peen, or the guy on the top who wants the rest to have to beat him for the peen).