Geometry Wars 2 online leaderboards are live!

Above: Windforce Izumo unmasked?

Finally! This makes my armchair analysis of the Geometry Wars high scores much easier.

A week ago, I looked at the top scores in Pacifism to try to get an idea of ! how they were distributed. Today, using the current Pacifism high scores, I'm interested in how much they might have changed in a week. Surprisingly, they haven't changed much.

Number 1 a week ago was Xbox Live user Windforce Izumo.* Today, Windforce Izumo is still the best, although he's added 245,942,250 points to his score. He now sets the standard at 1,678,190,200.

Our number 2 guy, Leaping, has the same score he did before. But in the interim, he's dropped to 4th place.

The 5th-ranked player last week, Evil Mask, hasn't topped his best score yet either. The difference is that he's now 10th. And the guy who was 10th last week, Tyrak Stinger? Now he's 25th.

What's happening here? It's similar in principle to the inequity we saw with the total distribution of scores. There seems to be more churn in the rankings the closer you get to the m! iddle, but your relative ranking matters less. Dropping from 5! th to 10 th seems like a catastrophic decline, particularly as Evil Mask is now staring up at Windforce Izumo from a distance of over 660 million points. On the other hand, jumping hundreds or even thousands of spots in the line may be a matter of a few thousand points.

For myself, last week I was ranked 15,236th. I blew away my high score, and as of this writing I'm ranked 2,591st, with a high score of 124,994,600. That's a big jump. But since I reached that personal high water mark, I've been steadily sliding back down the rankings. At first, my score was good for around 1,800th place. I've dropped over 700 spots without doing anything. There is this entire mushy middle ground on the leaderboards where success is even more relative than usual.

I wonder if anyone else is having the same problem I am: I've stopped improving. For the first week or so, every session brought higher and higher scores. At some point, I hit a wall. The game no longer seems as fun when! I feel like I should be posting better results with the same frequency I was before. Which is a shame, but it's the nature of the beast. Somebody needs to provide a platform for Windforce Izumo to stand on.

*Last week, I referred to this user as "Windforce Azumo." I could have sworn that was what it said when I checked through Xbox Live, but at the time I was switching inputs on my monitor between the Xbox 360 and my PC in order to write the post. My apologies to him!

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