Rankings

Frozen Synapse is, above all, a game about competition. And for competition to be effective in a game, you have to have a way of measuring yourself against your opponents. Just winning one game is all very well, but not until that win becomes part of a larger structure of scoring do people really get hooked.

Since the very beginning I’ve wanted the Synapse rankings to be a very important part of the game. My first move in that direction is to have the rankings visible whenever you’re in a menu. Not just when you press the “Rankings” button, but all the time. Like this, as I finally implemented today: (GRAPHICS WILL CHANGE)

(I put Malakian at number 2 there, just so there was no confusion that this is a debug shot)

This sidebar is visible at all times when you’re in the menus.  The idea is that I want people to really aspire to be at the top of this list.  An awful lot of work has gone into the scoring in Synapse (and there’s plenty left to do), and the focus has been on a system which always motivates you to play.  Thus, the focus on Daily rankings.  Every day is a new day, which means every day is an opportunity to top this list.  Having played terribly yesterday doesn’t matter – the slate is wiped clean.  The daily winners will be posted on the blog at all times, and we’ll announce them in the podcast each week.  There will be prizes for particularly unusual achievements (I’m not going to tell you what a “Global Top” is, but I will tell you it’s a particularly unusual achievement) and, hopefully, some kind of celebrity among the community.  Every game you play in the core game mode will matter to these rankings.

(We have Global rankings too – they come at the bottom of this list – for the more hardcore)

But that’s not all this sidebar does.  After the Daily Rankings, we have several useful things, two of which are shown here:

If you click on a person’s name in the sidebar you’ll immediately challenge him to a game.  In fact, I’m hoping that the “People Online” section spurs a lot of spontaneous games.  If you click on any of the “Recent Results” entries, you’ll load the game and see how it went.

In general, the competition side of Synapse is all about ease.  Having a game with someone is one click away, and you can start playing your first turn before your opponent has even accepted.  If you don’t want to play with someone right now, or at all, you don’t have to – just ignore their request.  You can (and often will) be playing more than one game at once so they won’t mind much.

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 17th, 2009 at 4:42 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Rankings”

1. Xeno:

   § August 18th, 2009 at 1:18 am

   Question: Is there any possibility of the game working on a mac os?

2. Ian:

   § August 18th, 2009 at 11:19 am

   Hey Xeno. It’s totally the plan to have this out on the Mac shortly after the PC.

3. Xeno:

   § August 18th, 2009 at 8:39 pm

   Nice.

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