Daily Entries and Much Bigger Leaderboards

Daily entry windows

We shipped daily entries and reworked the leaderboard backend to hold far larger fields. A daily entry is a time-scoped window: each player's scores are bucketed by day, so the board you see is "today's board" rather than an all-time wall that early movers calcified at the top of years ago. The window resets on a fixed daily boundary, which means every player gets a clean shot at rank one without us deleting or hiding the historical record underneath.

Scoping scores by day is also what makes the rest of the competition stack possible. Once entries carry a time bucket, tournaments and seasons are just different window sizes layered on the same primitive instead of separate scoring systems. We built the daily window first because it is the smallest unit everything else composes from.

Scaling the boards

The old boards were small enough that ranking a deep field was never tested. To make leaderboards meaningful we had to make them fast at size. That meant scoping every query to a window and a game, then adding the composite indexes that let Postgres satisfy a top-N-by-score-within-window read without scanning the whole score table. Ranking is computed against the scoped set, so the cost of a board lookup tracks the size of the window, not the lifetime volume of plays.

We also made the boards zoomable: instead of returning a fixed top ten, the surface pages around your own position, so you can see the players two rungs above and below you. That paging rides the same indexed, window-scoped query, which is why it stays cheap even as a game accumulates a serious competitive field.

Why this and not a timer

None of this is an energy meter or a lives system. Those exist to manufacture scarcity around a free-to-play game so the publisher can sell you out of the trap. A daily window pulls you back for the opposite reason: there is a new board, a new score to beat, and real people ranked around you. For creators, a game with a daily contest attached turns every session into a row on a living scoreboard instead of an evaporating play, and the feed surfaces what people are actually competing over.