Survival Leaderboard (Time w/o respawn)
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There have been a number of requests for an additional leaderboard:
https://screeps.com/forum/topic/2330/warfare-ranking https://screeps.com/forum/topic/2305/a-third-leaderboard https://screeps.com/forum/topic/257/npc-strongholds https://screeps.com/forum/topic/200/leaderboard-by-unique-code https://screeps.com/forum/topic/183/credits-overview-leaderboards
and many of these would be great to have. Each leaderboard gives players one more thing to strive for. Something else at which they can try to be "the best." It also gives potential reasons for competition which I think is also healthy for the game.
I think it would be cool to add a Survival Leaderboard that would show how long a player has been in the world without having respawned. This leaderboard would not reset every month like the current leaderboards and a player's rank would only reset when they respawn (or are completely wiped out, maybe determined by having spawns?).
I would like this because I believe it would encourage people to target and attack those at the highest ranks much for the same reason that children feel the need to knock down a lego or block tower.
It would also encourage active players at high ranks to work on their defense code to prepare for such attacks.
In my mind, players would reach high ranks using one of the following methods:
- Strong or clever combat code such that defeating them is difficult and they have therefore survived.
- Creativity. Perhaps they have rooms spread out across the whole shard(s) and are therefore difficult to extinguish without coordination and portals. Maybe they have good "cockroach" code that automatically rebuilds quickly and is difficult to fully destroy.
- Luck. They have not been attacked or are in a fairly inactive or peaceful area.
I myself have never respawned in the now 2+ years that i have "played" the game and i have little to no combat code whatsoever. I've (almost) never needed it. I started in a semi-peaceful area and then ended up joining forces with other players and was eventually surrounded by allies (and now dead sectors in shard0). I believe this was a bad way to play. I want to be attacked more and to have the need to work towards better combat code.
There isn't a high enough incentive to attack people. Its expensive. Unless they have territory you want or have angered you in some way, whats the point? This leaderboard wouldn't solve the incentive problem but it may help in some way.
If this leaderboard did encourage attacks in the way that I hope it would then it would also end up encouraging the killing of "zombie players" who are not actively playing or working on their code but whose empires continue to take up space and scare new players away from spawning near them for no good reason.
Any active players that are targeted would just be given reason to improve their code.
There could even be incentives/rewards for reaching certain amounts of time without respawning or for defeating players who have reached certain amounts of time without respawning.
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I don't really like the idea. IMO the point of a leaderboard is that you can relatively easily rise and fall in it.The only way to rise on this leaderboard would be somebody else respawning, which you have very little control over.
It may be an interesting stat to be visible somewhere, just as highes GCL or highest total power processed might be, but I don't think it'd make a good leaderboard.
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It feels too difficult and destructive to drop in this ranking proposal.
I would suggest focusing this on a smaller level, the room.
The leaderboard is that of the oldest room owned by a player.
This makes the ranking more dynamic since destroying and de-leveling a single room is easier the a complete wipe. It also makes losing rank a lot less terminal since it doesn't require you to be completely wiped.
It also adds additional attachment to a specific room (your oldest).
Although personally, I prefer my proposal of a warfare rank.
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I am strongly against basing anything around holding onto a room long term for the simple fact that it can be quite crippling to hold onto a room that you simply don't need.
I'm also not convinced a survival leader-board is all that informative and feel it might even be counterproductive. New shard opened up? Boxed in by the next dissi? Too bad you have a 3 year survival high score!
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@Atavus what would be difficult or destructive about it? Really i kind of just want something to encourage people to attack, and if the targets of those attacks are people who have not been attacked in a long time i feel like that is a really good thing. In the 2 years i've been playing you are really the only person to have attacked me. If there was something saying that player [insert player name] had not been killed for 2 years, it might encourage people to attack them.
Even if it was in the form of stats. Like if there was a sortable stats page that showed different stats about all players and one of those stats was how long it has been since their last respawn that would be pretty cool. Could add lots of different interesting stats.
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The trouble about this leaderboard is that while you can knock people down a long way from a single attack, you can only push yourself up 0 or 1 position per room you attack. If it turns out that none of the people ahead of you are anywhere near you, perhaps not even on the same shard, there is nothing you can do to affect your position (unless you respawn/migrate to another shard, which may involve giving up your long-held room and place in the ranking)! So overall this leaderboard provides almost no incentive to attack other players.
Therefore, although I think it would be an interesting stat to have around, the leaderboard would usually fail to achieve its stated goal of additional combat.
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The "get knocked down a lot in a single attack" isn't the big issue imo. That just means that every target is an incredibly high value that players want to attack. The whole "unable to rise in rankings" is what makes this a lot less engaging. Maybe if you had a leaderboard for the kills of these rooms. Still, your ability to attack a single specific room is very limited by location and portals, so a motivated player would have to wait a long time for an opportunity to attack.
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I guess really i'm more interested in something to paint a target on players who've been alive for a long time rather than something in which you can "rise in the rankings." Granted whoever ends up at the top of it would have something to brag about if they can stay there, but i thought of it less as something you can quickly rise in and more of a prioritized list of targets
