Best design for leaderboards?

This seems like a trivial part of game design, but I'm finding it surprisingly thorny: designing the leaderboards.

Our game (Beatron 2000) is a rhythm game. A single play is one song, so 2-4 minutes of play, at the end of which you have a score. People want leaderboards. But how exactly do they want them?

• Geographic scope: local, regional, or global?
• Time scope: daily, weekly, 30-day, or all-time?

I can see different use cases. This is a game that's very easy to pass around to friends, bust out at a party, etc. In that context, you'd probably want each player to put in their name, and keep a leaderboard of just those local players, and just for the evening.

But another use case is the player with the fierce competitive streak, who wants to see that their play-through was the 4953rd all-time highest score, and are driven to try to get as close to the top as they can.

On the other hand, if we limit it to (say) the highest scores in the last week, then people have a much better chance of actually reaching the top (or close to it).

What do you all think? What is normal/expected for a game like this, and what would be best?

 

I would do the worldwide, as thats the real prize if you can be "the best in the world" at a game, but also have a leaderboard that is entirely offline, just people who play with that same device/computer - so you can do the old "take turns" at beating friends scores, and anything on top of that is just gravy. Local (geographically) would be neat, as that isn't something I think I've seen done before, and maybe a per-country leaderboard might even be cool.

Of course doing time based ones could be fun too, try and be the best all time player or try and be the best just today...

Now that you got me thinking about it I can see how this gets tricky

Makes me more grateful that GPGS on Android basically handles all this for me

 

A few friends list-based leaderboards can be nice too. Friend scores for each level, a separate one for farthest in if you unlock levels by completing previous ones, and maybe a score totals list (highest scores for each level added together).

For global lists you could rank each country by average score based on all players who reached the farthest.

tl;dr: Some players secretly want a spreadsheet, not a game

 

Hmph. I was hoping you guys would make my life simpler, not more complex!

 

You're asking too much - especially programmers WILL over-engineer things