poor approach to leaderboards

Hi!

My friend and I love Pinball Arcade and we try to beat each others highscore on each table. As soon as one beats the highscore of the other we are playing like crazy to get the highscore back. Playing alone without the possibility to compare to each other is only half the fun. And that's the point: playing pinball is about beating highscores, I think everybody here agrees to that.

Unfortunatelly Fairsights approach to leaderboards in Pinball Arcade is very poor (I'm only playing on iOS, so not everything may be valid for your system, but I guess most of the points are valid for every system):

-) Cirqus Voltaires outlanes went from "too forgiving" to "brutally hard" (killing all the fun playing this table if you ask me, but this is another topic) but they didn't care to reset the highscores: the result is that it's pretty impossible to beat the highscore with the easy outlanes (unless you are willing to spend countless hours hoping to finally have a very lucky game)

-) the rules of Black Hole were changed more than once (I'm talking about the gate-closing-rule) and again the highscores were not reseted, so the highscores achieved with the "easy" ruleset are not compareable to the ones you achieve now

-) the balance of the hall of fame score is totally wrong across the tables (see http://digitalpinballfans.com/showt...f-fame-scores-not-well-balanced-across-tables ) and the only way this can be fixed is to reset the scores again and introduce a more balanced way to calculate the score

-) when the hall of fame score was introduced it started with zero, the highscores you already achieved were not being taken into account - why? was it really so hard to calculate the hall of fame score based on the highscores we already had?

-) the leaderboard of black hole shows the highscores of theatre of magic and vice versa, also the leaderboards of Cirquis Voltaire and Fun House are swapped... we already got an (iOS-)update but this was not fixed (and I might be wrong, but I believe it takes just a few minutes to fix such an issue)

-) there's a big mess with all the different logins we need to access the leaderboards

-) gamecenter-support is very limited, you only have the hall of fame score there

-) the ui for the leaderboards is pretty poor, it's almost impossible to scroll through a longer list because there is some kind of paging involved that doesn't allow you to scroll down the list, at some point you only jump back and forth between two "pages" of the list (try to scroll through the total list to see what I mean)

I would really love to see some more love for the leaderboards.

What do you think?

Greetings

MJFox

does nobody care for leaderboard-related problems?

Greetings

MJFox

I dont. Just compare with your friends.

Online rankings are always full of cheats, so i dont care about them.

The hall of fame scores are for comparing your skill in general in the game and are not unbalanced because everyone is playing the same table with the same difficulty. I agree with you that there is at least one table that is extremely difficult to ever get 1000 points that is Tales of the Arabian Night, but this can fixed easily without resetting the high score, simply reducing the score to get 1000 points in a table is enough. If a table ever get mores difficult because of a rule, fix or physics change then its going to be unfair for the newer players getting scores but it will be even more unfair reseting the leaderboards for the older players who already put the effort and time getting scores.

I also agree with Dutch Pinball online leaderboards are only worth something to compare with friends or group of people. There is always someone trying to hack the leaderboards or taking advantage of some bug or exploit to get the highest score.

I'm not thrilled with the leaderboard implementation either, but mostly I care about tracking my own score. As long as the local high scores are retained that's good enough for me. Gamecentre scores are a nice extra, but nothing I take seriously.

I don't care for global leaderboards either, but most of the problems from the first post are also present when you just want to compare with your friends scores!

greetings

MJFox

Personally, I think this is a BIG disappointment-Sadly
The way they've used Gane Center is NOT-what I believe-most envisaged.
And the Pinball Analytics I can't even log into (Reported as soon as launched-and was advised the LAST update would've fixed....No such luck. As for FB...

SORT IT OUT!

HOW said:

The way they've used Gane Center is NOT-what I believe-most envisaged.

Click to expand...

It's odd right? I can understand other games using a system that requires certain achievements be translated to points, but pinball HAS points.

Fungi said:

It's odd right? I can understand other games using a system that requires certain achievements be translated to points, but pinball HAS points.

Click to expand...

Hall of fame scores, ie wizard scores that are cumulative across tables, are incentives to buy and play all tables and make sense from that angle.

The easiest way to do it is to take, say, the millions of your score and add those up ( so if you get 243.456.786 hiscore, you receive 243 points).

This works for Zen because most tables are within a certain score amount, so each table contributes aproximately the same.

FS's tables have to differentiate between Gorgar (where 1 million is a pretty high score) and Tom (where 100 million is a pretty BAD score), so this system doesnt work and they have to translate the score to show that 1 million on Gorgar is GOOD and 100 million on TOM is BAD. IF you want a system that represents all tables, I don't see another option then the one they went for.

However, by doing this you add in a variable that makes the process less transparant and open to discussion. Because to do this you need to set the 100% limit (worth a 1000 points in this case) at a level that represents each tables difficulty objectively, and also you kinda want noone to get the max HOF, but approach it. Most of these scores come close (considering the platform) of reaching this, but TOTAN (Way too hard)and Gorgar(way too easy) miss the mark. http://digitalpinballfans.com/showthread.php/1651-Hall-of-Fame-Scores

With the system they went for, I believe they should've remove the upper limit of a 1000 points (if gamecenter allows such a system) and put that 1000 point mark at a level thats just below the scores obtainable by the very best of players at the time of determining that level.