Having a compelling competitive piece in your game will take your game to newer heights. A leaderboard system is a tried and tested system that allows the players to compete against other players in the game.
Types of Leaderboards
Leaderboards can be setup in many different ways in your product, but this post is specifically only going to discuss Time Limited Leaderboard versus Persistent Leaderboard.
Time Limited Leaderboards
Time Limited Leaderboards are leaderboards that have a start and end date and usually yield rewards for players that participate in these events.
Probably considered the next step in evolution of the leaderboard system are Pooled Leaderboards.
What are Pooled Leaderboards?
Pooled leaderboards is a system that allows for multiple leaderboards of the same event to run simultaneously as the designers can set the player cap for each leaderboard event.
One method on how these systems are implemented is to start with an initial leaderboard with <x> condition and as players fill in, by meeting "this" condition, a new leaderboard will be created when the player cap is reached and the new leaderboard will be filled up with the new incoming players, this process is repeated until a cut off point for Event entry is reached.
Other methods of creating pools of leaderboards can utilize a tag system that groups users in buckets. This is a more intricate way to make sure that you have similar types of players in the same pool but i’ll discuss this strategy another day.
What are the benefits of Pooled Leaderboards?
Pooled Leaderboards allows for the more players to be competitive in any given tournament. There’s nothing worse than being plotted into a leaderboard only to find you in the top 200,000th place. Demotivating the player and possibly leading to less engagement of this actual tournament.
Whereas if you were plopped into a leaderboard with only a 100 players and display some compelling rewards this will provide players the motivation to potentially compete for this and dig around to see how they can meta the event or just plain pay2win to the top. The concept here leans on provide value and the motivation to compete as players see the possibility of reaching one of the top rewards, versus starting in the top 200,000 place.
Pooled Leaderboard Expectations
What you will commonly find in leaderboard events are near the end of the tournament, the last few minutes are the most hectic time where players are doing anything and everything they can to maintain or take over someone elses position so they can slide in a higher position. This most notably happens in the top 10 spots.
Therefore the theory with the Pooled Leaderboard is re-creating this experience with multiple leaderboards engaging not just 10 players but 10 * <X> Leaderboards that were created in the event can and will maximize your potential for that specific event. Also depending on how strong your back end team is, you can set up a tag system where you pool cohorts of user bases ie:
Spenders
Engagements
Player levels
Whatever will yield a group of competitive play is what I recommend with this leaderboard system.
After that, you test, test, test and see which event type yields the best revenue outcome and rinse and repeat.
For more information regarding Pooled Leaderboard Design, follow my FB page in the link below or message me at team@lixobags.com
FB: The Casual Meta Page: https://www.facebook.com/The-Casual-Meta-2546661912028872/
Good Luck