Pacers are pre-set leaderboard scores that allow players without friends to have someone(i.e. bots) to compete against and are useful for motivating players at the beginning of the reset period (before enough new scores have been posted).
Design
Recommendations for pacers:
Pacers are very useful on leaderboards that reset frequently (weekly - biweekly). Having pacers ensures there are player goals to compete for, even in the first moments after the leaderboard resets.
If your Pacers are going to be mingled in with live players, it is advisable to make the top pacer score lower than the average score of your live players: It is less fun to compete on a leaderboard topped with a Pacer score than to compete for the top score of a real player.
Set pacer scores low enough that they are not in contention for the top spots on your leaderboard in the last 25% of your season.
Personifying the pacer and reusing characters from your game's lore increases the fun of beating the Pacer's score.
Attaching some nominal payouts to each pacer that a player beats is an effective way of driving up engagement in the early hours of your season.
Creating Pacers:
To create Pacers, go to the dashboard screen:
Click the [New Pacer] button with the plus icon.
Enter the Name and add an image.
[Save] the Pacer.
You define a global pacer list here and then configure which pacers should appear in which leaderboards via the individual leaderboard configuration.
Configuring Pacers to the individual Leaderboards:
You enable individual pacers and set their leaderboard-specific scores here.
Select the Leaderboard from the list.
Go to the [Pacers] tab.
Check the [Pacer] that you want to configure in the selected Leaderboard.
Hit the [Apply] button.
Then, after posting scores to the leaderboard that has pacers configured, you can check the pacers' score on this leaderboard by calling getMultiSocialLeaderboard() API. You will get players' and pacers' score returns that are similar to those below:
{
"data": {
"server_time": 1602265066723,
"leaderboards": [
{
"leaderboard": [
{
"score": 1200,
"createdAt": null,
"data": {
"pacerLeaderboardTag": {
"skill": "110"
},
"pacerTag": null
},
"playerName": "pacer1",
"pictureUrl": "https://api.braincloudservers.com/files/portal/g/13229/metadata/pacers/1.png",
"summaryFriendData": null,
"playerId": "1",
"updatedAt": null
}
],
"self": {
"score": 50,
"createdAt": 1602263909156,
"data": {
"nickname": "batman"
},
"playerName": "",
"pictureUrl": null,
"summaryFriendData": {
"xp": 16,
"attributeName": "value",
"newkey": "newvalue"
},
"playerId": "8bd564a7-3f91-4a98-a4b3-43cd7d266133",
"updatedAt": 1602263932913
},
"selfIndex": 1,
"leaderboardId": "MonthlyRankLadder"
}
]
},
"status": 200
}