Leaderboards

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What are Leaderboards?

Leaderboards are social competitions between users of your application. Use leaderboards to increase engagement and foster social interaction.

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Types of Leaderboards

Leaderboards in Trophy can be one of a few different types.

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Perpetual Leaderboards

Perpetual leaderboards never reset. Once started they continually track and rank users progress over time forever, or until the configured end date.

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Repeating Leaderboards

Repeating leaderboards can be configured to reset after any arbitrary number of days, months or years. In Trophy each instance of a repeating leaderboard is called a ‘run’. For example, a monthly leaderboard would have 12 runs in a year, but a daily leaderboard would have n runs in a month where n is the number of days in a given month. Repeating leaderboards reset all ranks at the start of each run giving new users an equal chance to compete with existing users. Trophy tracks the rankings in each run of a repeating leaderboard individually and provides APIs to fetch ranking data on historical runs.

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Handling Time Zones

If you have tracked users’ time zones with Trophy, these will be used to ensure that each user has an equal chance of winning no matter where they are in the world. In practice this means leaderboards are finalized and winners chosen about 12 hours after they naturally finish in UTC to allow time for users in all time zones to make their final push.

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Tips for Weekly Leaderboards

As the start of the week can be different in different countries, there is some debate about how to manage weekly leaderboards correctly and consistently. We’ll be adding better support for weekly leaderboards in the future based on customer requests, so if that’s you let us know! However Trophy leaderboards will cover 90% of weekly use cases, so here’s what we suggest if you want to set one up. To create a weekly leaderboard, set up a repeating leaderboard on a 7 day schedule and set the start date to be the next occuring first day of the week. While you wait for the start date to come around, the leaderboard will be in scheduled status and will automatically go live on the start date. This will make sure each run of the leaderboard consistently tracks the start and end of each week that your users are familiar with.

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Ranking Method

Leaderboards in Trophy can be configured to rank users in a few different ways.

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Metric Rankings

Metric leaderboards are linked to an existing Trophy Metric and rank users based on their progress against it. Use metric leaderboards if you just want to rank users based on a single interaction.

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Points Rankings

Points leaderboards are linked to an existing Trophy Points System and automatically rank users according to their total points. Use a points leaderboard if you want to rank users based on a combination of metrics, achievements or other Trophy features.

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Streak Rankings

Streak leaderboards rank users based on their current streak length.

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Start & End Dates

Use start and end dates to control the window within which leaderboards are actively ranking users.

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Start Dates

Leaderboards in Trophy can be set to start at a future date of your choice. This is often useful to allow some time for last minute changes or adjustments before leaderboards start ranking users. Leaderboards with a start date in the future are scheduled and automatically go live on the start date you choose.

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End Dates

Leaderboards in Trophy can have end dates. If you set an end date on a leaderboard then after that date it will enter finished status and rankings will be be finalized and winners chosen.

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Participant Limits

Leaderboards in Trophy have a maximum number of participants of 1,000. However a leaderboard can be configured to have any arbitrary number of participants to support use cases like Top 100 or similar. If a leaderboard already has a number of participants that matches its configured maximum, new users will have to surpass the score of the lowest rank to join the leaderboard. We plan to test increasing participant limits, however as computing leaderboard rankings can be resource intensive, there is always a tradeoff between correctness and scale. Read on for more information on how we think about this.

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Tradeoffs

As leaderboards increase in size, the time required to compute a user’s new rank based on a state change increases as O(n log n). If applications rely on each state change needing to know the users new rank in realtime, then this added latency can lead to a poor user experience. If however you don’t care about realtime updates and are happy to accept eventual correctness, then leaderboards can increase in size without much impact. We chose to favor a more engaging, realtime experience where applications can trust Trophy to communicate changes in rank immediately and correctly, rather than supporting arbitrarily large numbers of participants but without the correctness that enables a richer user experience.

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Our Vision

Our long term vision for leaderboards is centered around facilitating smaller, more socially-relevant interactions more akin to ‘leagues’ than longer, platform-wide rankings that often fail to engage users outside the top 10%. We hope you agree this is the right approach but if you have any thoughts then let us know!.

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Creating Leaderboards

To create a leaderboard, head to the leaderboards page in the Trophy dashboard and hit the New Leaderboard button.

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Managing Leaderboards

Leaderboards in Trophy have a number of statuses to help you control when users and how users can join them.

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Leaderboard Statuses

Leaderboards can have one of the following statuses:

• Inactive
• Scheduled
• Active
• Finished
• Archived

All new leaderboards are created as Inactive. While inactive, any properties or settings of the leaderboard can be changed, they won’t be visible to users and users can’t join them. Once you’re ready for users to start participating, you can make it Active. This means Trophy will start tracking users’ activity and entering them into leaderboards. Leaderboards that have been configured with a start date in the future can’t be made active, they can only be Scheduled. Once the start date is past, Trophy will automatically make them Active and start accepting participants. If a leaderboard has an end date, then once it has past Trophy will automatically move it to Finished status and stop monitoring user activity. Once a leaderboard has finished it won’t be visible to users but you can still query APIs to get rankings for historical runs. If you decide you no longer need a leaderboard, you can move it to Archived status.

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Leaderboard Analytics

Trophy has built-in analytics to help you understand how users are engaging with your leaderboards. ### Total Unique Participants This chart shows how many unique users have participated in any run of a leaderboard over time. This is useful to understand how many of your users actually take part in leaderboards and how participant limits are affecting this.

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Active Users

This chart show the number of users who have changed rank at least once in a given leaderboard. This is useful to get a sense of how competitive the average user is in a particular leaderboard.

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Rank Changes

This chart shows the total number of rank changes in a particular leaderboard over time. This is useful to understand how competitive users are across the board.

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Score Distribution

This chart is a histogram of users’ scores in a particular leaderboard. This is useful to get a sense of how bunched up or spread out users are, and what sections of the rankings are the most competitive.

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Frequently Asked Questions

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Get Support

Want to get in touch with the Trophy team? Reach out to us via email. We’re here to help!