game-design-leaderboard-audit
Game Design Leaderboard Audit
Audit a leaderboard or competitive ranking system as a metagame feature — not just as a list, but as a system that generates goals, competition, and emotional investment for the majority of players.
Use this skill to evaluate whether a leaderboard is actually doing its job. A leaderboard that only matters to the top 10 players has failed. The audit focuses on seven dimensions: stagnation, scale, goal density, motivation, reward brackets, group composition, and the top-of-ladder problem.
Core principle
A leaderboard is the start of a metagame. Its quality is not measured by whether it ranks players — it is measured by whether it generates meaningful, emotionally resonant competition for the majority of the player base, from the player at the very top to the player sitting in the middle of a group of 100.