Opinion: Black Ops 4 Leaderboards need to be upgraded following changes to Treyarch’s API
Leaderboards are a common feature in gaming and provide an easy way for players to track performance among all players. Black Ops 4’s have been found lacking.
The Leaderboards in Black Ops 4 have been quite the mess from the beginning. While other games in the industry regularly release with full playerbase leaderboard functions or APIs for third-party sites, Black Ops 4 now lacks both.
The API was recently changed and disabled support for third-party tracking sites. You can find the full article on the subject here: Call of Duty API changes kill third party statistic tracking websites and services
The Leaderboards with the Black Ops 4 game are very lackluster to say the least. Call of Duty titles in the past have tracked two sets of players within the leaderboards: friends and “all players.” This should be, but is no longer the case in Black Ops 4.
Black Ops 4 now uses a “Player List” which can be populated using your friends list or recent players. It is up to the player to go and remove/add players to the list before they are gone from “recent players.”
The list showing current players is often broken and displays blank names. Removing names can also be glitched. Adding names to the list does work as of now, but the Leaderboards may or may not update accordingly.
This is, in our opinion, just unacceptable from a triple A game. The Leaderboards should show all players on the player’s current platform of choice. All friends should be automatically shown using PSN or Xbox Live as a database.
In addition, the information shown in the leaderboards is barebones. Search and Destroy for League Play is a great example. The menu shows Kills & Deaths, Avg. Objectives, Score/Min, and Avg Damage. While K/D is nice, Avg. Objectives means nothing. The leaderboard should show plants/defuses along with the other stats.
Overall, the feature is drawn back from other Call of Duty games and lacks real depth. We need Treyarch to truly implement leaderboard support for all gamemodes and give us all the proper stats. It should not be too much to ask as Call of Duty did this well for over a decade.
