Back To Rush event

In order to hype the release and oil the wheels of players coming on the new servers, Dofus Unity comes with an event, called Back To Rush.

It basically is a free for all competition between four eSport teams and Ankama, where all players will be able to help their team to win.

You can read the official post about Back to Rush here : https://www.dofus.com/fr/mmorpg/actualites/news/1754004-back-rush-manquez-depart-dofus-3

Data snapshots

Among the four different ways to earn points, I've been in charge of the "large scale" one. The idea of this one is to reward dedicated teams as a whole rather than powerful individuals.

I came up with the idea of data snapshots, inspired by eSport elo snapshots. The idea is to "take a picture" of the game state every week, calculate each team progression, and reward accordingly. But how do we measure progression ?

Dofus players are quite dedicated, and they're ready to take absolutely no fun if that's the way to succeed. So I had to find a way to achieve my goal while keeping it fun and simple to communicate about.

Progression criterions

Snapshots are meant to be for everyone. My progression index hence had to be very broad, but still had to fit in a player progression. After some tests and technical discussions with the data team, I came up with 14 criterions.

These criterions follow the folowing properties :

Diversity : Even if some are close from each other, these criterions cover a wide palette of content, so everyone may find their niche.
Relevance : All of these criterions are related to something valuable during a server rush, so everyone's progression may be taken into account, even if one dosen't really care about the snapshot.
Overwhelmance : There are too much things to do, so people won't try to do everything to win, and rather play their way.
Extensivity : Each criterion is essentially infinite, at least for most people, and for the duration of the event.

Scoring system

The key ideas of the scoring system are motivated by balance :

Dedicated teams shall win over massive teams
Generalist teams shall win against hyper carried teams
Snapshots must not create a great gap between teams.

This led me to the following :

For each criterion, take the top 500 scores of each team
Take the sum these scores, and rank the teams
Give a given amount of points accordingly to the rank

An example with the leveling criterion and a top 3 to make it easier

We've chosen 500 as a happy medium between elistism and helping the mass. This way, as long as every team has 500 characters registered on a criterion, the competition is fair. But on the other hand, 500 players times 14 criterions times 24 servers, that's a lot of opportunities for everyone to be considered !

Then, the ranking system is there to cap points. For example, consider an unlimited criterion such as harvested ressources : Let's say you've dedicated all your time to harvest and you've collected 10 times more ressources than anyone else. Ok, you make your team win on this one, but your team is "only" first. Then, as ranking converts to points, you would be a bit ahead the second. This discourages hyper focus strategies.

Finally, the point repartition is though to be stacked enough so the last team is not super behind the first one. This has typically been balanced with other sources of points, such as world events and pioneer achievements : If a team is the worst at snapshots, but really good at something else, it sould be able to compete with the best snapshot team.

Conclusion

Designing snapshots was an interesting experience. It required a lot thinking about player's motivations, paths, and strategies. It was also a great challenge to keep it simple, and I really like how subtle numerical values can induce a lot of behaviour without having to explain it to the players.