Leaderboards have been a regular part of many escape room companies dating back a decade, and here at Room Escape Artist we have long questioned their value.
We recently had an interesting conversation with owners and players about escape room leaderboards in our Patreon Discord, and that chat produced a number of ways to augment leaderboards.
Before we get to how leaderboards can be improved, let's start with the case against them.
The Case Against Escape Room Leaderboards
This may come as a surprise, but the reason that we have been anti-leaderboard is because we top them so often. Players like us and many of the people in our community can easily set unreasonable times in escape rooms... and we frequently do this by accident. We are functionally professional escape room players and leaderboards are ranking us against newbies. We don't love that the times we're setting in games could discourage a newer player.
And we know that insanely fast times listed on leaderboards can discourage less experienced players because we eavesdrop on other teams in escape room lobbies.
For more competitive, but less skilled teams, leaderboards can create a sort of second, much more challenging win condition that is likely unachievable. They might emerge from the game feeling great that they won, but then go out into the lobby and see just how far away they were from making the leaderboard, let alone topping it. We've watched winning teams walk out of escape room companies talking as if they'd failed. It feels like an unnecessary feel bad... especially when you factor in that very few teams will ever get the high of making or topping the leaderboard.
All of this is compounded by the diminishing returns of landing on leaderboards. It turns out that savoring a game is frequently better than rushing through it. Over time it seems that many experienced players become disinterested in ranking on a leaderboard... so the players who are most likely to take up this space are the least interested in the reward.
We stand by this reasoning, but our Patrons pointed out that there are a number of ways to get more highs out of the leaderboards and limit the lows.
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