hello

In a side step from the usual BG forum posting, I'd like to make a case for personal battleground match history and a visual expansion to BG leaderboards.

For context, I have (just yesterday) released my first addon, Battleboard, which is honestly a poor approximation of these two features. I have been completely blown away by the overwhelming demand and support I’ve received from the BG community in just 24 hours, especially in areas I completely didn’t expect. There’s a real interest here, regardless of game mode preference. I came to write about it, because if I’m honest, I don’t think Battleboard needs to exist. The base game captures all of this information and more, it just isn't displayed to us.

My addon is simple. It rips data from static end-of-match scoreboards and turns it into a pretty dashboard: one for you, and one for what you have seen. That’s it. It’s basically a spreadsheet with funky presentation. But people have been hungry for this information, they want to see themselves represented. And I think there's something to that.

Take my “observatory” page:


The initial response to showing this around convinced me that engagement with the monthly leaderboards would change overnight if they highlighted interesting things like this. Random things, things that are actually fun about BGs. Curiosity metrics! The first question I get asked is, “is it on minion”, and the narrow second is “is this connected to everyone else’s? If we all have the addon, do we share our stats?”

I am a complete novice addon maker, this is my first. But I can extrapolate some really cool things just from scoreboard data alone. I can't even imagine what could be done with all the other fun stuff behind the scenes, or the passion and engagement it could drive. I wanna know who ran the most relics in a month, and honestly, of all time. Who got the most kills, who capped the most flags, what class is most popular. You can’t tell any of that information from the current system. (Of course you can kinda infer based on the ranking but it isn’t … fun. )

(My game design teacher would be disappointed at me if I didn’t scream, WHERE IS THE FEEDBACK)

I am a bit of a sweaty nerd, so my addon focuses heavily on combat metrics that are primarily of use to that kind of community. But I don’t think a match history has to be that in depth to bring value to anyone with an interest in BGs. Small things, like knowing your own win-loss, your round about average numbers, even how many ticks of a chaosball you've taken, just in general how you are doing over the month could be really interesting to most people, I think.

As a developer myself, I’m well aware of the behavioral risks inherent to releasing certain types of data to the general playerbase. But I do believe there are ways to highlight information that celebrates good performance without amplifying that behavior. I don't want to toot my own horn here but I'd use my own sweetroll system as an example: I exposed personal combat contribution with this addon, but I didn't want people to fixate on those teammates who don't have a good game. So, I hid them all, except your own and the top players. I wanted to incentivize eyes at the top of the stack rather than the bottom (due to the imbalance debate, which I'm not touching) so I offset it with an MVP system. And it's been... fun? I've had a week of watching adult, competitive players banter about who stole what sweetroll, their own performance, and even intense debate on the algorithm behind it. Maybe it's personal bias, but I've found it much more pleasant to watch jostling over that sweet, sweet, sweetroll dopamine than wallowing in the usual complaints about team balance, size, and mmr. I created something that adds that soft competition without the formal pressure of rank, I guess.



To be clear, I'm not asking for more systems, nor do i think every single thing should be exposed. I just think better framing and feedback loops would hold a genuine place in BG land. I’ll be real, the inception of Battleboard was just personal curiosity on my part... I originally set out to make a personal addon so I could gather data on what I personally see in my timeslot. It evolved entirely into what it is now because of people being interested in what i was doing, and in doing so, I think I’ve stumbled on a real gap. And I think that gap could be filled with very little refactoring, for a surprisingly high return. (especially for our poor console brothers)

I would be happy to not have Battleboard, if it meant that something like this didn't need to exist.

TLDR: I am startled by the initial success of my Battleboard addon and believe it points to an underlying desire for match history and interesting battleground leaderboards. And also, there's a lot of discussion on the lack of meaningful reward to BGs regularly, and I think the inherent reward in personal visibility (across roles, playstyles and preferences) is often overlooked

I've love to hear what others think

Thanks for reading