NSMB 2 features a "Coin Rush" mode where you're thrown into a three-level gauntlet and tasked with amassing as many coins as you can before time runs out. While there has been talk of your coin total in the game being shared on a regional and worldwide level—added indistinguishably to a pile that represents your geographical area—the StreetPass-enabled Coin Rush mode is your only option for actually sharing your individual accomplishments with others. Brandon has been going on about it for ages now, the excitement of maximizing these coin scores. The game is designed to share those numbers, and hey we're in each others' 3DS friend lists, so it seems like a no-brainer that a friend-exclusive leaderboard would be included so bros could compete. Right? Right???
This is not an isolated incident.
We need look no further back than Super Mario 3D Land for another score-exchange system limited exclusively to StreetPass. In 3D Land you could see the level-completion times for people you tagged, little numbers beneath each level, with the face of the Mii who got the score. It gave you a little something to shoot for, that knowledge that you didn't hold the "high score" on your own game. But where's the technical hurdle that prevents my online friends from appearing there as well? Competing with strangers I will never tag again is sorta fun, but you know what's even more fun? Competing with someone I KNOW.
Mario Kart 7 is an even bigger offender. A MK7 StreetPass tag will often include a ghost to race, so you can pit yourself against that erstwhile vagabond's best times. Again, it's sometimes fun to challenge a stranger, but is it that unreasonable to assume I'd like to race against my friends' ghosts? Oh wait, it's not unreasonable at all, because Mario Kart Wii was replete with perhaps the most fully-featured ghost-racing featureset ever. Not only could you race against ghosts from strangers, but you could see every single one of your Mario-Kart-owning friends plotted out on a bell-curve for every time-trial course in the game, and you could download and race against a ghost for every single one of them. You could even send explicit challenge ghosts to a friend at any time. Sure, Mario Kart 7 innovated with its "Communities" feature, but that doesn't make up for the complete lack of ghost-racing with friends.
It's something innate in the nature of score challenge, that you want to show it off, that you want to compete with your friends, not just your own achievements, or strangers that might as well be AI-constructs. Since the 80s people have been scrawling their filthy initials in the leaderboards of arcade machines, battling with regulars, playing king of the mountain until the wee hours. There's not even any point to a high score if you can't show it to your friends!
Third-party games aren't exempt, either. I've been pouring hours into Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy like... something into something else, and I've been rubbing Brandon's nose in my progress on a regular basis. If only he could just see my Proficard, a customized score-tallying card that gets shared with StreetPassers! But once again, only strangers are fit to follow my progress, and my friends are relegated to second-class citizens. This sort of "access to my stats" is something I'd love to see standardized some day—you get a similar feel via Trophies and Achievements on the PS3 and Xbox360, but a more passive system where you can just follow along with your friends' progress without them being forced to complete arbitrary tasks would be a nice compromise.
So what is the issue here? Friend-centric leaderboards aren't an unprecedented idea, Mario Kart Wii proves that. (Really, a billion pre-MKWii games also prove that.) Is it because they're handheld games? It hardly seems like a valid excuse, considering the firmware-level friend list integration, and plenty of games featuring heavy online components. It seems like exactly the kind of thing we should expect from SpotPass, and it's something that would really help out those people that don't live in Japan, and are lucky if they get even a single StreetPass tag a month.
But it's not even about StreetPass frequency. It's that they're strangers, and I want to compete with my friends—the people I talk to all the time about these games, the people to whom I'm left no recourse but to IM my high scores. Whatever "oh you'll never be at the top, it's disheartening" logic Nintendo cites to remove competitive elements does not apply to friend leaderboards. Drop the worldwide, the regional, whatever. But let me compete with my friends, for christ's sake!