Ballon Competition – Leaderboard refresh question

[r-l-l]

@gradientturtle – can you explain how the leaderboard is refreshed ? Reason I ask is I was in 1st by 24 points on the balloon challenge from a little over 8 minutes left. I would exit and come back in thinking the board was being refreshed.

Based on the my runs on the balloon challenge, the most I ever got in one run was 23. With that in mind, I am thinking my lead was safe.

I kept checking all the way down to 4 seconds and still had the same lead. Then the contest finished and now I was second. Knowing that a run takes at least 2 minutes ( based on my play times ), I thought I was safe and did not use 1 of the 2 remaining runs I had paid 40 coins for.

So, my question is, how can we know that the leaderboard standings are accurate as time counts down?

Thanks

Topic

[gradientturtle7]

@r-l-l

This has been a tricky one for us – obviously we would like everyone to see a clear picture of the standings at any given time. However, a very high number of requests to our servers not only gets expensive quite quickly, but can cause instability leading to failed requests or even corruption of event data.

The current setup works like this: Every time you finish a level, or when booting or resuming the game, the game checks to see if the leaderboard numbers have been refreshed in the past 5 minutes. If they haven’t, they get refreshed at that point.

We appreciate this isn’t ideal, and we’re trying to find a manageable solution that makes everything more transparent – at least a timestamp showing the last refresh time on the leaderboard, and possibly a manual refresh button with a cooldown. We are also conscious that seeing all of the final standings (rather than just your own score and position) would help give a better idea of what happened in the final minutes, and we’re looking into this.

I hope this helps give a better picture of things. Thanks for continuing to play Angry Birds Transformers, here’s hoping you’re the one that sneaks into first place next time!