> Rankings in small team-based game communities tend to be pretty noisy.
PP wasn't talking about ranking stability. PP was talking about the "Why should I give a shit about the leaderboard when ten million people play the game, and I'm someone with life obligations that aren't 'playing this game, exclusively', so I'm always in the middle of a sea of strangers because I can never git particularly gud?".
You might argue that the solution to that is to have separate rankings for folks in your friends' (or whatever) list, and I agree... but I'd get the same thing as filtered-to-friends-only leaderboards with leaderboards that are restricted to the population of players on the private servers on which I play. Plus, private servers give you the option to benefit from active admins who ban cheaters and other shitheels forever. [0]
[0] Or encourage them to cheat and be godawful, if that's the sort of server that they want to run. All-cheats-all-the-time and/or vent-your-spleen-24/7 servers are fun, too... just so long as folks are informed of what they're getting into by joining.
PP wasn't talking about ranking stability. PP was talking about the "Why should I give a shit about the leaderboard when ten million people play the game, and I'm someone with life obligations that aren't 'playing this game, exclusively', so I'm always in the middle of a sea of strangers because I can never git particularly gud?".
You might argue that the solution to that is to have separate rankings for folks in your friends' (or whatever) list, and I agree... but I'd get the same thing as filtered-to-friends-only leaderboards with leaderboards that are restricted to the population of players on the private servers on which I play. Plus, private servers give you the option to benefit from active admins who ban cheaters and other shitheels forever. [0]
[0] Or encourage them to cheat and be godawful, if that's the sort of server that they want to run. All-cheats-all-the-time and/or vent-your-spleen-24/7 servers are fun, too... just so long as folks are informed of what they're getting into by joining.