For some time now, the New World team has been promising Leaderboards. They’ve acknowledged that it was on the roadmap for last year, and that they hadn’t gotten to it yet. The latest episode of Forged in Aeternum is out and the devs talk about why the delay and why this is coming now, ahead of other requested features.
This new episode follows the announcement that Leaderboards are launching tomorrow, February 7th, in New World. There's a deep dive into all the details about this feature, and how it will work. There are a number of categories and subcategories within those that you can aim for in order to make your mark on Aeternum.
For example, there are potential leaderboards in 3v3 arenas, Outpost Rush, open world PVP for players and factions, invasion, Mutated Expeditions, and more. These leaderboards are divided between feature types PvE, PvP, and things like Faction War (including Territory Control). Among all of these categories are 50 subcategories. So if you're a fan of setting goals to make your mark and rank up for rewards, now's your time to shine.
As for the question of why now, a lot of it comes down to what they are working on for the future. Future content releases will be helped by setting the foundations now by adding the Leaderboards. Or as Lead Engineer Scott Geiser puts it, this will “help enrich the content that we’re going to be pushing out”.
They’re also working to keep things fun, but fair. After community feedback and data, Geiser also notes that through the PTR, they worked to figure out what leaderboards might be most likely to potentially have some people trying to game the system a little bit. The Amazon team actively made those less rewarding. They could be fun and still offer reward, but without the incentive to try and game things.
As a long-promised feature that looks to be integrated into a lot going forward, tomorrow’s launch is an important one for the team.
You can read much more details about Leaderboards over at New World.
