Jalapeno Bootyhole Posted:

Hmm. Quite a lot more “hurt feelings” in this thread than even I expected, considering this the indisputably positive and frankly awesometastic nature of this development.

You confuse frustration with hurt feelings (for me at least anyway)

These changes are quite obviously disputed and far from ‘awesometastic’. The current crop of leaderboards are extremely poor judges of excellence, so instead of one badly designed goal, we have 5 badly designed goals. That’s not an improvement.

If the cake tastes like ****, you don’t improve the situation by giving everyone more cake.

Moar chances at Peen while addressing clbum discrepancies equals win, full stop. It’s easier to get some achievements as an Emo Kid? Well, maybe more people will start playing as Emo Kids and kick in some competition. (It really is the best clbum, you know!)

Nicco provided a good example as to why the new system for bumigning peen is unfair to many long term players.

That misses some other aspects of the problem though

Leaderboards are for players who’ve been repeating simplistic tasks over and over for a very long time e.g. job points (especially if you’re a troll) or forums pwned, even buildr and incit submissions. These are not a measure of skill, but of time served. A younger player cannot, ever, top any of these leaderboards, no matter their level of skill.

That or else players are encouraged to game the system e.g. auctions, or flamebate and friend peens. Have you noticed the ever increasingly spammy contests forums? So – a negative consequence of how you designed the reward, that will continue to get worse over time, until players just give up trying (as has already happened to a large extent for the flamebate peen)

These are not good metrics for judging excellence.

Please think about what players *actually have to do* to achieve the goals you set and check that these activities are not excessively OCD, make sense and won’t lead to negative consequences like, well, taking the fun out of the game. It seems obvious you haven’t taken this step so far, and have simply gone with ‘new leaderboard category, make a peen for it’ mostly out of habit.

As for incremental or “milestone” Peen: Relax, they’re coming. But I don’t see why we can’t have both milestones and leaderboard Peen.

First of all, as someone already mentioned, it’s bragging rights. Second, we can’t possibly foresee every milestone and we have more important things to do than endlessly churn out new Peen. And third, this is still a competition. If we just gave everyone a series of “Participant” medals, there’d be no incentive to excel. We can celebrate the leaders of each clbum while acknowledging other great players by awarding both Peen varietals.

Since the current crop of metrics are not a way of judging skill, but progress, they only make sense as milestone peen. The leaderboards for them were, are, and will remain a mistake. Awarding peen for performing the same simplistic set of tasks twice (through leaderboard and milestone) still discriminates against younger players.

If you want leaderboards, lets have them for something which actually does demonstrate skill in some regard. e.g. speedrunning (perhaps total number of speedrun times held at once for your clbum) or *cough* winning Incit the most within a set time period. That’s more of a measure of skill/talent/consistency/whatever, discounts the time served aspect, and doesn’t rely on a player being lucky enough to have chosen a player clbum a year ago that doesn’t have much competition.