Hi there! My name is Nate Long and I’m a web programmer on the leaderboards team. I’m excited to announce that we’re launching our first set of leaderboards today! Many of you have been asking for this feature for some time, and we can’t wait to show you what we’ve built.

If you’re just too excited to wait, go ahead and visit http://leaderboards.guildwars2.com to see them for yourself; otherwise, we’d like to give you a little overview of what we’re releasing to make sure you get the most out of the site.
Brief Overview

We want our leaderboards to be more than just a place to stare in awe at the top players in the game—we want to give you a place to see the pulse of the game as a whole and better understand your part in it. To start down this path, we’re launching leaderboards to cover three main categories of play in the game: Player vs. Player (PvP), World vs. World (WvW), and Achievements. We’re starting with the top 100 users in PvP and Achievements, but over the next few weeks we’ll ramp this number up and add some different ways to slice the data to help you get the most relevant information possible.

Player vs. Player

The PvP leaderboard is ordered by PvP rating. At this point, we’re not exposing the actual rating formula itself, but the leaderboard provides a way for you as a player to see where you stand in the hierarchy. We want to keep you as up-to-date as possible, so we’re going to be updating this leaderboard multiple times per day.

The PvP data is all based on single-round tournament play, so three-round tournaments and public matches that you enter via the in-game match browser will not count toward your position in the standings. In order to minimize how much players jump around the leaderboard, we’re also requiring that you take part in 10 matches before you can appear on the leaderboard.

Here’s a breakdown of the different metrics:

Rank – Current position in standings based on PvP rating
Wins – Total ranked PvP match wins
Losses – Total ranked PvP match losses
Win Percentage – Percentage of ranked PvP match wins out of total ranked PvP matches played

World vs. World

The WvW leaderboard shows every world in the game, ordered by WvW rating. This data has been available on the forums on a regular basis, but we hope that this new system is much more convenient and useful. This leaderboard will be updated once per week to reflect the results of the matchups in the game.

The metrics for WvW are pretty standard:

Rank – Current position in standings based on world’s rating
Rating – World rating based on our implementation of the Glicko-2 algorithm
Deviation – Degree of certainty for the current rating. Higher number means more confidence in the rating.
Volatility – Degree of expected fluctuation in rating. Lower numbers indicate stable ratings, while higher indicate erratic behavior.

Achievements

There are lots of different metrics to choose from, but we feel total achievement score is a good measure of overall progression. We’ll be updating this leaderboard fairly often, so we hope to see some (friendly) competition in ranking.
The Future

We have lots of plans for ways we can expand and enhance this data to include more information about more of the game—the current release is just the first taste of what we’re doing. As always, we love hearing what you have to say, so feel free to post any comments, suggestions, ideas, etc. on the forums. Thanks for taking the time to read through this overview, and we hope you enjoy the new Guild Wars 2 leaderboards!