One of the other key reasons why I don’t care about the leaderboards in Reaper of Souls is not only because of how I feel about the competition/skill aspect of the game, but it is also because the solo leaderboards aren’t truly solo-legitimate because the game does not isolate that particular leaderboard for characters that have truly soloed.
What I mean is that since multiplayer co-op provides such huge benefits when it comes to progressing through higher G-rifts, that one can get their gems ranked higher compared to perfoming that task completely solo. And once that objective has taken place in co-op, the player can then play solo and complete G-rifts that are difficulties higher due to the benefits of being able to level their gems from that co-op play.
A true solo leaderboard would be just that; for characters that have never grouped up. And when you just briefly look through the profiles of the top 10 on the solo leaderboards, you don’t see players with records that are solo only. There is always 2-4 player records associated with play dates before the highest solo.
It’s mixing different modes. This would be like allowing softcore and hardcore to mix where one can use their softcore progress, to suddenly push their hardcore progress. This design (with the solo leaderboard) is of course ok with the designers because they’ve always had to push the ulterior motive of the multiplayer co-op being a key part of the gaming experience for Diablo 3 to sell the always online requirement (which made sense when there was a real money auction house, but no longer does given the near total use of account binding and restrictive trading; as I’ve written before, the online only requirement eventually fulfilled the role of DRM to prevent piracy of the game).
This is also yet another contradiction of design philosophy by this dev team. Trading (except for the restricted 2-hour co-op group trading window) was removed and the majority of items were made soul bound because the rationale is that it short-circuited the reward loop and robbing the player of an x-amount of hours of game play had they earned those items on their own. Similarly, progressing through Greater Rifts via co-op by using its multiple benefits, short circuits the general progression involved with leveling gems and earning those ranks truly on ones own solo progress. Thus the solo leaderboards don’t even accurately represent that aspect.
