Fortunato Posted:

What about milestone peens for getting to the first page of the leaderboard? That’s about where you need to get if you care about that peen, in my opinion.

100% signed. This + occasional removing inactive players from top positions would be a wonderful system.

Pretty much everything else not gonna work.

A good reward system for a large (and growing) playerbase would have nothing to do with percentiles, except if time since you joined can be completely discounted, and it truly is some kind of measure of pure talent or excellence. Any time based reward scheme has to be milestone based, as otherwise, only us older players will ever see any of them.

Agreed, as long as it’s first page, imo.

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Fortunato Posted:

This would be true if there weren’t a large percentage of people who decide to stop. There are also several boards (buildr and flezz) where the holder’s position can go down.

Short of people no longer wanting to top the leaderboards, I find it hard to believe that even the flezz and buildr leaderboards can have significant volatility among truly active players. If two equally good players start the game with a season’s difference in timing, and both stay equally active, the first to hit the ground will always have the advantage based on nothing more than hearing about the game first. Given a significant headstart, players of less skill can still maintain a lead over good ones. This, of course, isn’t really even corrected by my suggestion, it’s nature-of-the-beast material – I’m just not sure your examples are that good.

I also don’t think I follow why the “large percentage of people who decide to stop” is a factor. If we’re going to reward performance as compared to the rest of the community (which seems to be what the leaderboard peen is for), why shouldn’t it be based on actual participating members of the community? What’s the qualitative or philosophical distance between removing 10 inactive players or 10,000?

Fortunato Posted:

Let’s do a little bit of math. there’s around 170000 characters right now. That means that the top 10% is seventeen thousand characters. The top 1% is 1700. I don’t know about anyone else, but that would qualify me for just about every percentage-based milestone peen around. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that describes practically every active player in the game. This would seriously devalue a leaderboard milestone peen if everyone who played for a week got it. What about milestone peens for getting to the second page or the first page of the leaderboard? That’s about where you need to get if you care about that peen, in my opinion.

The flaw with your math is that while there are over 170k characters, the leaderboards are only made up of characters who are eligible for that E-Peen™ and who are active within the last 30 days.

meeeeeeeeee Posted:

I think what CZ were trying to avoid with the percentile thing, was needing to constantly add more peens, as players reach each goal in turn.

I think you’re right, and also the fact that “I’m better at foo than almost everyone!” is more peenworthy than “I’ve done a lot of foo.” It’s more in keeping with the original idea that peens were for topping the leaderboard, with the acknowledgement of things like “nobody’s ever going to get on top of the “most forums pwned” leaderboard unless everybody ahead of them gets hit by a bus.

Ideally, peens should not only be desirable and meaningful, but reasonably acquirable.

Samildanach Posted:

Short of people no longer wanting to top the leaderboards, I find it hard to believe that even the flezz and buildr leaderboards can have significant volatility among truly active players. If two equally good players start the game with a season’s difference in timing, and both stay equally active, the first to hit the ground will always have the advantage based on nothing more than hearing about the game first. Given a significant headstart, players of less skill can still maintain a lead over good ones. This, of course, isn’t really even corrected by my suggestion, it’s nature-of-the-beast material – I’m just not sure your examples are that good.

I also don’t think I follow why the “large percentage of people who decide to stop” is a factor. If we’re going to reward performance as compared to the rest of the community (which seems to be what the leaderboard peen is for), why shouldn’t it be based on actual participating members of the community? What’s the qualitative or philosophical distance between removing 10 inactive players or 10,000?

if 1 plpayter wants to grind flezz or valuable moar files

and the plaer who started a seaspn befpre him wants to win ay dom

player grinding flezz catches up on flezz baord

you cant play every part of the game at 100% at the smae time

There is a clear difference between a milestone and an effort based achievement peen. Milestones are intended to represent longevity and pure continuation in a game. The idea is simply if you keep on plugging you will achieve those things. Spider-man is a milestone peen. It will simply happen. Veteran is a milestone peen.

The job board peens are hybrid peens. A player must be very focused to earn them quickly, but a player using minimal effort (clicking to accept a job when running one of those forums) will eventually earn those peens.

I think milestone peens are cool. They give a “hey, I’ve been doing this for awhile!” reward. They also have the ability to encourage players to look further as to what is available goal wise.