I was talking to one of my friends that studied game design and he said highscores were an outdated way of challenging the player. Thats it its now all about "Achievements", meaning that there is no competitive atmosphere (which seems kind of silly to me especially for arcade games). The problems I think with highscores apart from hacking is that because there is such a large talent pool meaning that your highscore will be knocked it fairly quickly or perhaps never even make it on the scoreboard. So what do you think of an achievement based high score system. There could be the hardcore highscores, and the more casual achievements based on high scores. If the user was willing to give data we could have the high scores by region, city, town, race, age and even gender.

I had an idea once where you'd have different high score boards for different levels of proficiency. This would only work based on the type of game it would be implemented in.

Let's take for example, a simple online board game, like the ones on Yahoo:

You'd have different lounges for different proficiency levels. Each filled with it's own players, who would start at level "Beginner" when they first sign up. Depending on the score, the players would then shoot up to a new level, and be eligible to play in more advanced lounges.

The score would also be modified based on the lounge where the game is being played. The reasoning being that an advanced player doesn't need to know that he's awesome; He/she only needs to know how he/she measures up to advanced players.

It's the same for beginners.

Also, the score boards would filter out (Or have the option of filtering out) players who are too advanced to play in that lounge. So beginners will not be unfairly judged against someone who's been playing the game much longer than them, or someone who plays it more frequently.

I don't know if this is the actual system on Yahoo, it's been ages since I played a game there.

Isn't this done already on the Xbox? Each achievement has a scores associated with it. I assume that the total is visible to other users looking for people to play with online. Not sure how I'd feel about scores being sorted and displayed by race or gender although I'm sure it'd be valuable marketing info.

I don't mind that my score is knocked off an online scoreboard quickly. If the score was earned by hundreds of other people in the two or three seconds between refreshes, so be it. I know I'm competing against a lot of people. I tend to wonder more if the recorded scores are fair. I'd like assurances that the scores displayed weren't from hacked score submissions or from a bot playing the game. I tend to feel better about that sort of thing when a game displays both all-time high scores and daily high scores. I would probably feel even better yet if I had some indication of where it is I rank amongst all the people that play.