Leaderboards gg

A (WIP) site to host leaderboards for games.

Open Source. Community Built. Community Kept.

About

What is Leaderboards.gg?

Leaderboards.gg is a site that hosts video game leaderboards. It has support for speedruns (fastest completion of a certain goal), high scores, and more.

What Kinds of Gameplay are on Leaderboards.gg?

The runs on our site are organized into different categories of competition in single player or coop videogames. This includes any way of playing a game with a clear way of comparing and ranking runs, e.g. playing a full game start to finish as fast as possible, trying to obtain a highscore, surviving for as many rounds as possible on a holdout game mode. Each category has the following elements:

  • a startpoint and an endpoint
    • "the run starts upon selecting a new file"
    • "the run ends when you press x to defeat the final boss"
    • "the run ends when you game over"
  • a set of goals - tasks or conditions that must be completed
    • "collect 100% of items"
  • a set of metrics - a way of measuring player performance used to compare runs
    • "total run time, ranked shortest to longest"
  • a set of restrictions - an aspect of gameplay that is either required or prohibited
    • "use Luigi"
    • "do not use invincibility glitch"

Motivation

Leaderboards.gg was born from a need for a website that values the user experience. The lack of an existing solution that incorporates changes based on user feedback, identifies and fixes bugs in a timely fashion, and delivers superior performance by leveraging modern web technology prompted us to create a website that would be proactive in providing these critical components of a user-focused website.

Our Promise

In order to best serve our users, Leaderboards.gg will remain free and open source, ad-free, and without paid features. This means that all the features of the website will be available to all users free of charge, and we will never put features behind a paywall. As a registered Open Collective, Leaderboards.gg is funded entirely by donations, all of which go directly towards site hosting and related costs. This funding model allows us to remain ad-free. Users will never see advertisements while browsing the website, and will not be bombarded with messages asking to disable ad-block. All expenses are listed publicly on our Open Collective profile so that supporters can see what the money that they've contributed is being used for.

Operating in such a way the people in change of the website do not receive compensation ensures that they cannot enact policies that benefit them monetarily, reducing the potential for conflicts of interest.

Our commitment to open source comes with many benefits. By making the tools powering the website available to all, users are able to build their own apps or websites for any competitively ranked activity, videogame-related or otherwise. One of our goals is to make it as easy as possible for anyone to host leaderboards using our software.

Additionally, Leaderboards.gg is committed to equal treatment in terms of both content and users. All games on the site will be treated as equal when it comes to presence and discoverability on the website, and we will not restrict access to or promote any games arbitrarily. We provide a clear and transparent set of rules governing content and conduct on the website that all moderator actions must adhere to.

Site Features

Ranking Systems

On our site you won't just be restricted to runs based on fastest time or highest score. Runs can be ranked any number of metrics in any order. For example, you can easily configure board for lowest completion percent first with ties broken by fastest time.

Run Categorization System

You can compete in your favorite games in multiple different ways. Leaderboards.gg has support for categorizing attempts by campaign, goal, restrictions, etc. For example, a game might have separate categories for beating the whole game with no restrictions, getting every item, new game+, and so on.

Each run in a category can have additional variables for factors like platform, difficulty, region, or game version. A category can be filtered by these variables. For example, if you only want to see who has the highest score on PS2, hard difficulty, NTSC, version 1.1, it's easy to do so with just a few clicks.

Categories don't just have to be divided into "Full Game Runs" and "Individual Level Runs." Leaderboards.gg will support customizable groupings of run categories. In order to support games with multiple modes of play, we will have a intuitive method of grouping logical categories. This can be used to separate runs by gamemode for a game like Kirby Super Star, by expansion for a game like GTAIV, or by scope (full game, chapter, level).

Public API

All website content will be available from a robust public API. This lets devs and community members create tools/apps/sites/etc. that extend the base functionality. You could build a twitch bio element that displays a user's top times across several games, a bot that posts updates when new runs are submitted, or even a custom automod.