Originally Posted by
Scruffy McGuffy
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You too? The base game is either "practically useless" or "completely useless"? Give me a break. The base game is still fine. Can we please dispense with that melodramatic nonsense?
You are ignoring the substance of the complaint. The people requesting a base game leaderboard want to compete on a global leaderboard that doesn't require the DLC, so their position that the game feels worthless to them is an expression of the fact that there is no such leaderboard and they can't do what they want. The complaint does not extend beyond that, so pointing out that the rest of the game still works and dismissing the position as melodramatic is not helpful.
Meanwhile, even in this topic, 100% of the players super concerned about their leaderboard position have or will own the DLC.
You are suggesting that the extent of this issue is that people are sad their rank has gone down. The lack of the base game leaderboard is much more obnoxious than that, it's that your rank is not meaningful. This manifests in two ways. First, obviously, if you don't buy all the DLC, your points are capped lower than if you do. Secondly, even if you do buy the DLC, it adds to the time burden to grind every track to compete, and artificially removes opponents who either haven't bought the DLC themselves, or haven't had the time or desire to return to the game with every DLC.
This also creates a self fulfilling prophecy where everyone is saying "the only people who care about leaderboards buy the DLC anyway" and then the people that don't buy the DLC don't care about leaderboards because they don't have one.
Strangely, none of them are concerned about the leaderboards having non-active players, or players who sold or refunded the game after an hour, or bugs which prevent scores being added, all of which may inflate their position in the leaderboard and make their percentile seem better than it really is. I guess the sanctity of the leaderboards only matters when it comes to players above them.
This is nonsensical. The point of a leaderboard is to give you an idea of your skill relative to other players. Of course this is never 100% accurate, it only measures your real world performance on the tracks that are included in the leaderboard and it is possible that you have bad times on some of the tracks and your score is lower than it "should" be, or that you got some lucky runs and your score is higher than it "should" be. But the hope is to play every track to the best of your ability, and for your opponents to do the same, so that you can get an idea of how you stack up.
So yes, I am explicitly concerned about the leaderboard having non-active players, which is why I want a base game leaderboard. In Fusion, I would return to the career tracks over the years to improve my times when I felt that my skill level had increased. I wanted to know how good I was compared to the rest of the playerbase, but I knew my global rank would only be meaningful if I put in my best effort on every single track in the game. Until I felt that every run on every track reflected my best ability, I would know that my "true" score would be higher. But as I went through all the tracks that were in Fusion, I noticed a stark drop off on my friends leaderboard of people who were consistently better than me on the base game tracks, but either stopped playing or stopped putting in the effort at some point in the DLC. So the reason I wanted a base game global leaderboard was that my rank would be worse on it, but would be more meaningful because a greater portion of the playerbase both had access to, and had taken the time to grind, the tracks in the base game, and the only thing I stood to prove by improving my times was that I had stuck around longer than them, not that I was any better.
And treating this like something that only the hardcore will ever care about is counter productive to building the Trials community. Any new player who is starting out in the game and might be curious about their global rank will not be able to get any meaningful information from the global leaderboards until they have bought and played every piece of DLC, but the global leaderboards are a fun feature, and can play a huge role in converting someone from a casual player to someone who's interested in the competitive aspect of the game and might want to eventually buy the DLC. If Trials Rising wants to be a game that welcomes new players, teaches them to play the game, and shows them why it's a game worth sticking with and treating seriously, it would do well to make those engaging competitive features available to everyone who is curious enough to give the game a try.
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