Make Your Leaderboards More Engaging

If your game has leaderboards, adding details to each row entry about the player's strategy can help you balance your game and engage your community. Just sharing a small success we've had with our game!

Initially posted this on Reddit and people seemed to like the post there so I'm sharing here too.

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Crop Squares revolves around buying crops that have unique abilities and arranging them next to each other strategically to score points. We have levels, weekly challenges, and a sandbox mode. All have individual leaderboards.

When we first made the game public, we had no leaderboards. Some players asked for some way to determine if their scores were "good" as the game is single player and had no real objectives at the time. So we used the standard leaderboard format - name and score. 

Eventually, I also added the player's top 3 crops that they used next to the score, inspired by autobattlers like TFT and Underlords that show team comps at the end of the game. For instance:

• https://i.imgur.com/sHLZjmo.png
• https://i.imgur.com/C4ejTIh.png

I thought this would just be a cool feature to make, but it has turned out to be a really helpful and fun feature for these reasons:

• Easy to see which crops need to be balanced. In early patches we saw the same set of crops in the top 50. We then made tweaks so that more strategies became viable. Gameplay analytics can accomplish the same thing, but I can look this up in our own game quickly.
• Engaged community! Our players like to look at the top scores and reverse engineer them, and it sparks discussions in our Discord about how to pull them off or improve.
• It makes high scores feel more attainable. Prior to this change, the basic leaderboard actually discouraged some players who saw the high scores and gave up because they had no idea how to beat them. Now players have some "hints" of things to try before giving up, though this is still an area we need to improve.

Public leaderboard info may not be desired for every game, but consider trying it if you have leaderboards that you want to make more interesting. Any game where players use unique chosen abilities, paths, items, characters, etc. should work. Any additional metric beyond points or moves could also be fun to look at if it's relevant to the strategy (time taken, steps traveled, number of deaths, etc.).

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We use React Native for the game's framework and our leaderboard is our own implementation. We use Firebase for the database and cache leaderboard data for previous weeks/patches so only the current week/patch updates live for the players. At the moment it's about $0.03/mo we'd consider something more cost effective if it gets out of hand.