- AnalogWeapon
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- Exalted Heroic Member
I think some people are missing the point about the size of the population being the reason that leader boards would be irrelevant. Notice the use of the word irrelevant, and not "stupid" or "boring", etc. I love data/stats as much as the next geek, and the only thing that makes data interesting is all the different ways you can analyze it; "Top" lists (i.e. leader boards) being one of those methods.
However, the greater the amount of data you have, the larger "top" lists need to be be to be relevant and show any interesting information. If there were only 10~1000 unique players (ever) on Halo 3, then leader boards would be interesting (To some). With as many unique players as there truly are though, the top 10 players would have the same number (As likely would the top 100, 200, etc). So it would just be pages and pages of the same number, and then pages and pages of the next lowest number, etc.
So, I'm not saying that the general concept of leader boards is uninteresting (Quite the opposite). But when the amount of data reaches large volumes like it does with Halo, then leader boards aren't really as interesting.
Yes, there are other ways of analyzing the data from a community perspective, but it seems like Bungie makes an effort to avoid that (I wasn't around b.net for the H2 leader board days). My guess as to why they do that is similar to most of yours': This community attracts a lot of individuals who take the game (And/or the game data) very seriously, and some take it way too seriously for some reason or another. You can see it in these forums from time to time: Some member trying to quantify how "good" they (Or some other people) are. The people who take the data too seriously will do anything they can (Including inappropriate things) to generate "good" stats. A leader board is an easy reference of comparison that has the potential to drive players to be too serious about their stats/data.
In any case, the data can certainly be viewed as a quantification of how "good" someone is. However, if there is any singular, overarching "skill" metric (It seems like that is what the rank strives to be) it still isn't a completely accurate measurement of the person's true skill (I'm not knocking the TrueSkill system, btw). So what data would a leader board even include? You would have to pick one data point for each leader board. So whoever had the most kills might also have the most deaths. The leader boards wouldn't be a way to measure anyone's true skill, but they would be an excuse to play the game differently (Or possibly even cheat).
[Edited on 10.24.2007 6:48 AM PDT]