Leaderboards

Overview

The AccelByte Leaderboard Service enables you to keep track of players’ scores and ranking in the game by collecting data from the Statistics service such as the number of matches played, the player’s matchmaking rating, and their experience points. The Leaderboard service will use this data to calculate each player’s rank. This service supports multiple leaderboards in one game, including a daily leaderboard for day to day player activities, a weekly leaderboard for a weekly player recap, a monthly leaderboard to record player activities every month, a seasonal leaderboard for seasonal player activities such as holiday events, and also an all-time leaderboard to record and player activities for all time. Each type of leaderboard is explained in greater detail below.

Leaderboard Cycles

• The Daily Leaderboard collects players' daily scores and ranking once the leaderboard has been created. When the leaderboard has been generated, players can start playing the game and the leaderboard service will collect their score and ranking until the daily reset time. Players have to keep playing to maintain their position on the daily leaderboard.
• The Weekly Leaderboard is similar to the Daily Leaderboard, but player scores and rankings will be updated every week. Players have to keep playing to maintain their position on the weekly leaderboard.
  The Monthly Leaderboard is also similar to the Daily and Weekly Leaderboards. The player's score and ranking will be updated every month.
• The All-Time Leaderboard doesn't have any time constraint; it will record the player’s score and ranking as long as the leaderboard exists in-game. As player scores continue to accumulate this leaderboard will be updated.
• The Season Leaderboard runs for a specific period of time that is set when the leaderboard is created. For example, if an event is running on the 1st of May between 00:30 AM and 2:30 AM, the season leaderboard will only record the rank and score of players who took part in that particular event. Once the event is over, the leaderboard will be reset.

How It Works

Single Leaderboard

Leaderboard Started

The leaderboard will start from the defined start time. At that time the leaderboard will retrieve the player’s current statistic scores, which will become the initial scores for the all-time leaderboard. If the leaderboard data also includes a daily, weekly, monthly, or seasonal suffix, it will also map to the statistic code.

Update a Player’s Statistic Score

The leaderboard consumes statistic events to collect a player’s latest score. Then, players' delta score will be added to the existing score in related leaderboards such as daily, weekly, monthly, or seasonal, and the all-time leaderboard score will be replaced with the latest score.

Reset a Leaderboard

A leaderboard will be reset based on its reset time that was calculated when the leaderboard started or when it is restarted.

Character Leaderboard

Update Character Leaderboard

When a player levels up or enters a new arena, the game client sends their score data to the Statistics service. There, the character event will be published with additional data, such as the character’s name and skills. On the other end, the Leaderboard service will fetch the character score data from Kafka and save the new score and rank data in its internal database.

Get Character Leaderboard

A game client call retrieves the leaderboard data from the Leaderboard service. It will return all related leaderboard data, including additional information such as character names and skills.

Permissions

Permissions are used to grant access to specific resources within our services. Make sure your account has the following permissions before you attempt to manage the leaderboard in the Admin Portal. For a full list of permissions that impact leaderboards management, see the Leaderboards tab of the permissions reference (opens new window).

Usage	Resource	Action
List All Leaderboards By Given Namespace	ADMIN:NAMESPACE:{namespace}:LEADERBOARD	Read
Create New Leaderboard	ADMIN:NAMESPACE:{namespace}:LEADERBOARD	Create
Get Leaderboard By Leaderboardcode	ADMIN:NAMESPACE:{namespace}:LEADERBOARD	Read
Get User Ranking	ADMIN:NAMESPACE:{namespace}:LEADERBOARD	Read
Delete User Ranking	ADMIN:NAMESPACE:{namespace}:LEADERBOARD:USER	Update

Permissions work slightly differently depending on whether they are assigned to IAM Clients or Roles assigned to users. For more information, read the Authentication and Authorization documentation.

Managing Leaderboards in the Admin Portal

Create a New Leaderboard Configuration

Before you create a leaderboard config, make sure you have created a statistic configuration in the same game namespace. Statistics configs are used to update a player's leaderboard rank.

1. In the Leaderboard menu of the Admin Portal, click the Create Leaderboard button.

   

2. Fill in the required fields.

   • Input the Leaderboard Code with the appropriate format.
   • Input the Stat Code with the related statistic code that you’ve created. This will be the statistic that the leaderboard draws from.
   • Input the Start Date with RFC3339 standard format, e.g. 2020-10-02T15:00:00.05Z.
   • Input the Daily reset time for a daily leaderboard.
   • Input a day and time for the Weekly reset time for a weekly leaderboard.
   • Input the day and time for the Monthly reset time for a monthly leaderboard. For example, if you input 1st in the date field and 12:00 AM in the time field, the reset time will be the first day of the month at 12:00AM.
   • If you select the Seasonal option, you must input the number of days it will take for the leaderboard to reset in the Season Period Days field.
   • Choose the Order of the Leaderboard.
   • Select an Icon for your leaderboard config.

   When you’re done, click the Add button to create your new leaderboard.

   

   The new leaderboard will appear in the Leaderboard List.

   

Get Leaderboard Rankings

1. In the Leaderboard List of the Admin Portal, choose the leaderboard you want to see ranking data for by clicking on the Action column and selecting View.

   

2. In this example, we choose to see the all-time leaderboard rankings. You can view the rankings for all types of leaderboards.

   

Delete or Archive a Leaderboard

1. In the AccelByte Admin Portal, go to the Game Management section and open the Leaderboard page.

   

2. In the Leaderboard List tab, choose the leaderboard that you want to delete. Then click Delete in the Action menu next to that leaderboard.

   

3. The Delete Leaderboard form appears. Select the Take a Snapshot Before Deletion box if you want to archive the first 1000 records of the leaderboard and type DELETE in the available fields.

   

4. Click the Delete button to delete the leaderboard.

View Archived Leaderboard Data

1. In the AccelByte Admin Portal, go to the Game Management section and open the Leaderboard page.

   

2. On the Leaderboard page, open the Snapshots tab.

   

3. In the Snapshot tab, you can see all of the archived leaderboards. To open a leaderboard, click View in the leaderboard’s Action menu.

   

4. The archived data appears

   

Implementing Leaderboards using the SDK

Get Rankings

Retrieve all player rankings using a specific leaderboard code. The data is presented in descending order.

Get User Ranking

Get a specific player’s ranking using their User ID and the desired leaderboard code.

Connecting Custom Services to the Leaderboard using the Server SDK

SDK Initialization

Before using the Leaderboard service from the SDK, you will need to initialize your server-side SDK to make you authorized and able to perform create, read, update, and delete actions.

Golang SDK Initialization

Before using the Leaderboard service from the Golang SDK, you will need to initialize the SDK by following the steps below:

• Create your OAuth Client and assign the necessary permissions to access the IAM service.
• Log in as a Client using the SDK.
• Initialize the OAuth 2.0 service using the following function (opens new window):

Once completed, you can use the Golang SDK to create, read, update, or delete the Leaderboard (opens new window) service from your serverless app.

Python SDK Initialization

Before using the Leaderboard service from the Python SDK, you will need to initialize the SDK by following the steps below:

• Create your OAuth Client and assign the necessary permissions to access the Matchmaking service.
• Log in as a Client using the SDK.

Once completed, you can use the Python SDK to create, read, update, or delete the Leaderboard (opens new window) service from your serverless app.

.NET (C#) SDK Initialization

Before using the Leaderboard service, you will need to set some permissions. Use the following .NET namespaces:

using AccelByte.Sdk.Api.Leaderboard.Model;
using AccelByte.Sdk.Api.Leaderboard.Operation;
using AccelByte.Sdk.Api.Leaderboard.Wrapper;

Java SDK Initialization

Before using the Leaderboard service, you will need to set some permissions. Initialize the LeaderboardConfiguration wrapper from the Leaderboard service using the following code:

LeaderboardConfiguration wLeaderboard = new LeaderboardConfiguration(sdk);

Once completed, you can use the SDK to create, read, update, or delete leaderboards.

Create a Leaderboard

Use the following function to create a leaderboard (opens new window):

Delete a Leaderboard

Use the following function to delete a leaderboard (opens new window):

Retrieve a Leaderboard

Use the following function to retrieve a leaderboard (opens new window):

Update a Leaderboard

Use the following function to update a leaderboard (opens new window):

Related Concepts

• Leaderboards rely on player statistics to work, so check out our guide on our Statistics service.
• In addition to Leaderboards, Achievements can also be a great way to increase player engagement.
• Golang test case files (opens new window)
• Python test case files (opens new window)
• .NET (C#) test case files (opens new window)
• Java test case files (opens new window)