Brighter Shores Creator Andrew Gower On Catering An Update To Top Leaderboard Players: "Won't Make That Mistake Again"

Whether it's MMORPG high-end raiders, PvP champions, or the "Top 1%" of any gaming leaderboard, these groups tend to be very vocal about things they'd like to see changed in their game of choice. They may not represent the largest portion of your game's audience, but they can often be the loudest. There's also a good sub-section of that "louder" audience that helps drive your game sometimes. These are often the players streaming, making videos, or creating other content based on your title. It's sometimes a delicate juggling situation for devs. Obviously you can't spend all your development time and resources on addressing every issue this group yells about, but you can't totally ignore them because the group may be "small" in the grand scheme either.

Brighter Shores creator Andrew Gower is a bit frustrated at exactly how delicate that line seems to be and at this point isn't down to be part of it anymore. Obviously Gower is likely already well-versed in this public dance given his creation of RuneScape, an MMO that also features leaderboards. Putting leaderboards into Brighter Shores, Gower likely knew this would be a feature talked about very vocally as early access continued.

In early access, the Brighter Shores leaderboard had a large problem according to players. While being marked as "True" leaderboards tracking various skill levels, they weren't technically "True." Why? Well, you could opt out of them. This meant not only could players trying to climb the fishing leaderboard never really be SURE they were number one (as a higher level fisher could just be opting out), but they could even be sniped. Someone leveling could opt out and hide themselves, watch the leaderboards, and then opt in out of nowhere pushing others down the list.

Those leaderboard topping players obviously hated this and asked for improvements. Gower and team had a delicate line to tread here given they cited "privacy laws" they had to abide by when showing information related to other players. What exact laws they are trying to abide by wasn't shared, but personally I would think it's something GDPR related in Europe. That's just a personal guess though.

Yesterday, Gower was happy to announce that the team had reworked the leaderboards a bit. The update made it so that players couldn't "opt in" anymore. Instead, you could toggle yourself to be shown as "Anonymous Player" on the boards. This means players could at least see that SOMEONE was ahead of them on the board, they just didn't see their name. Also, the anonymous player couldn't view the leaderboards themselves which addressed the sniping.

That seemed to address the major initial leaderboard concerns, besides the toggle for being anonymous not saving its state between logins.

However, the team must be getting some negative feedback from leaderboard players from somewhere, and the feedback has Gower a bit disheartened. "I am rather disappointed that we put considerable work into improving the leaderboards for the top players (who are the only ones really affected by anonymous players) and in response they just complained and boycotted the leaderboards even more! Makes me feel we totally wasted out time trying to improve the leaderboards for them, certainly won’t make that mistake again. We will focus on improving the game for everyone else instead," Gower tweeted.

Gower later clarified that he didn't mean they wouldn't listen to players, he meant that he won't make the mistake of catering any more updates to the leaderboard for now.

I guess it's back to making more broad-scale updates for the Brighter Shores team.