I like the Leader Boards. I like trying to at least see my character on them. There are however a few things I don’t like and would like to see avoided in the future.
Categories in the past have rewarded players for using “cheesy” tactics rather then do the challenge as intended. By this I mean activities such as alt farming to get an awesome K/D or Power Leveling and alt to 80 to quickly get 79 expertise points and/or Level 80 Unconquered with little risk. When creating the categories, Funcom should think like the player base and avoid any “How can I cheat the system” tactics.
Rewarding Shards seems nice at first, but deeper it seems like a bad idea. The people that tend to with them are people who really don’t “need” them and will just use them on alt #12 or whatever. Myself I would rather see unique Titles or badges as any reward.
Speaking of Titles, I would really like to see a breakdown of how many players have earned each title.
Can’t agree with your perspective about shards on alts, as people wouldn’t take the challenge if they wouldn’t need the shards.
But i fully agree with you about the “shortcuts” for leaderboards.
I think leaderboards for titles and stuff would encourage the same people that go for the 20k+ achievements. But rewards like shards/tokens encourage people who dont care about cosmetics, but still want to improve their toons.
I wouldn’t have participated on Saga of Zath, if it weren’t for the T6 weapon, as the grind for those can take “forever”. Also without shards i wouldn’t have participated on the latest leaderboard “challenge” as both weren’t content I’d cared about, but the reward value was high enough to still do it. (I really don’t like RF, but my toons really like those rings and gems…)
I did not participate for the leaderboards for unconq…because the quest from Khitai to assassinate Conan where your character dies in a cutscene removed my lvl 80 unconquered status.
Which is not something that should have happened. Why would a cutscene ‘death’ negate my work to get to lvl 80 unconquered?
You would think Funcom would think thru these “loopholes” and plan around them, Or at least contact some veterans about possible “loopholes” before releasing into the game. This would require NDA for all but still.