How Leaderboards Work

Overview

ParseCard leaderboards rank characters by how consistently they earn awards across fights. The goal is to surface players who perform well repeatedly, not players who had one standout pull. The system is designed to be fair to players at all activity levels while still rewarding those who show up and perform fight after fight.

What Gets Tracked

Every time a card is generated, the awards on that card are recorded. Each award is linked to a specific character, fight, and award type. Over time, this builds up a history for every character that has appeared on a ParseCard.

Leaderboards use two key metrics for each character:

• Total awards — The number of awards the character has received across all tracked fights.
• Awards per fight — The average number of awards earned per fight, which measures consistency.

Bayesian Scoring

Raw averages are misleading when sample sizes vary. A character with 2 awards in 1 fight has a 2.0 average, which would outrank a character with 150 awards in 100 fights at a 1.5 average. But the second character has clearly demonstrated more consistent performance.

To handle this, ParseCard uses Bayesian scoring with a confidence parameter (k=15). The formula pulls characters with few fights toward the global average, and lets characters with many fights reflect their true performance. In practice:

• A character with 1 fight will have a score very close to the global average, regardless of how many awards they earned.
• A character with 15 or more fights will have a score that closely reflects their actual awards-per-fight average.
• A character with 50+ fights will have a score that is essentially their raw average.

This means you cannot game the leaderboard with a single lucky fight. Climbing the rankings requires sustained performance over many fights.

Volume Tiers

To give additional context about how much data backs each ranking, characters are tagged with volume tiers based on their fight count. These tiers are displayed alongside the ranking so you can see at a glance whether someone has been tracked for a handful of fights or hundreds.

Volume tiers are informational only. They do not affect the score calculation. A character in a lower volume tier can still outrank a character in a higher tier if their per-fight performance is strong enough.

Ranking Categories

Leaderboards can be viewed in three categories:

• All — Ranks characters by total awards across both praise and roast categories.
• Praise — Ranks characters only by praise awards. This highlights the most consistently strong performers.
• Roast — Ranks characters only by roast awards. This is the wall of shame, surfacing players who most frequently earn callouts for avoidable mistakes.

There is also an Award Leaders view that shows the top characters for each specific award type. This lets you see who earns a particular award most often across all tracked fights.

Filters

Leaderboards support several filters to narrow the view:

• Class — Filter by character class to compare within your class.
• Role — Filter by tank, healer, melee DPS, or ranged DPS.
• Region — Filter by server region (US, EU, KR, TW).
• Content type — Filter by raid or Mythic+ to separate the two types of content.
• Season — Filter by specific game season to see rankings for a particular tier.

Who Appears on the Leaderboard

Any character that has received at least one award can appear on the leaderboard. There is no minimum fight requirement to be listed. The Bayesian scoring system naturally handles fairness: characters with very few fights are pulled toward the average, so they will not dominate the top ranks despite potentially having high per-fight numbers.

Characters that have not been linked to a Battle.net account appear automatically. These are characters that show up in other players' logs but whose owners have not claimed them on ParseCard.

How to Climb

The best way to improve your leaderboard ranking is to perform well consistently. Since the scoring system rewards players who earn awards across many fights, the path to a high rank is:

1. Log your raids and M+ runs on Warcraftlogs regularly.
2. Have your guild or friends generate ParseCards for those fights.
3. Focus on the fundamentals that earn praise awards: strong DPS or HPS output, staying alive, handling mechanics cleanly, and using your toolkit effectively.
4. Avoid the things that earn roast awards: dying to avoidable damage, low activity, missing interrupts, and taking unnecessary hits.

Over time, your score will converge on your true average performance. Want to understand how the awards that feed into rankings are selected? See the Awards guide.