In a recent interview about their upcoming racing title Blur, Bizarre Creations Design Manager Gareth Wilson mirrored something that we at GameSpy have been preaching for some time now to our customers: leader boards have evolved from an epic, and for most people, ultimately doomed struggle to hit the top 100 of tens or hundreds of thousands of players to a personal, contextual battle against your friends. Rather than advancing from rank 54,237 to 53,867 out of 253,941, it’s much more satisfying to know that you have the best time on a given track among your friends.

I don’t think the majority of people really care that much about being number one in the world.

Don’t get me wrong, [in Blur] we’re still going to have leaderboards of who’s the best on certain tracks. But PGR3 was a good example of this; you could download the world’s best ghost, and you could race against it and at the first corner, it’s gone. Mere mortals such as me couldn’t keep up with that sort of thing.

I think the whole leader board thing is a bit of a red herring… What’s going to be much more interesting is in time attack, if you’re in my friends list and you do a best lap, [Blur’s inbuilt] social network will inform me that you’ve just done a fastest lap on this particular track.

Using GameSpy’s own ATLAS competition system, developers are free to both track stats in a greater amount of detail and then later create a friends only view of that data, finely boiled down to specific scenarios. The more detail you capture, the easier it becomes for someone to excel in at least one specialty and dominate their friends. They may not have the highest score on a map, but their accuracy ratio may be the highest amongst their online buddies, or they excel at knife battles.

Leader boards shouldn’t just be restricted to the traditional leader board view either. When a match is over, tell players right then and there (while they’re waiting for the next map to load) if they’ve just leapfrogged buddies for that particular map or game mode. That way if they’re online, taunts can fly over a GameSpy powered in-game buddy list with our Presence & Messaging system.

Another fantastic example of this is Valve Software’s use of stats in Team Fortress 2, where the same concept is applied to single player usage. The game forgoes ranked leader boards altogether, opting instead to encourage the player by reminding them of their progress in certain class or weapon based scoring over time. A good player would continue to see reports of incremental improvements months after month, giving them warm fuzzies that will keep them playing. You’re also reminded when your score is up to par with a previous record high, which will drive you to continue to play, so you can finally set a new record. For more of their thoughts on this, see one of their developer commentaries included with the game.

Bottom line, developers are seeing the value in next generation statistical analysis that takes into account psychological player motivations and their social network. If you’ve got ideas of your own for your game that you consider ‘crazy, far out stuff’, contact us. Chances are, we’ve already been thinking about it too, and it’s not as hard as you may think to implement with GameSpy tech.