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leaderboard finals statistics: Where are the top players? (or low levels ones?)

I will start a new thread with my latest leaderboards statistics, but would like to refer anyone to take a look at this thread from the music tournament last year. At the time I was wondering what had happened to the top players, by which I mean those near the end of the map.

https://community.king.com/en/candy-crush-saga/discussion/468984/where-are-all-the-top-level-players-in-the-music-tournament

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Comments

christinewupp

Some statistics from the prize palooza event. This was not a proper competitive leaderboard event as the prize was only 100 gold bars. But it gave some insight all the same.

Firstly on a tournament like this one (only two rounds, poor prize) it is worth entering late. This player entered late last night, played one episode plus a few old levels, and won easily this morning playing just two further episodes. All the others had stopped playing hours ago:

I also noted that almost 50% of late entrant players had lost their most recent episode race, which in my view is the best indicator of "strength/skill" in Candy Crush, as well as overall difficulty of that level range. (A good player should be able to win every episodes race, regardless of how much they play) . The two early starters faced only 20% of opponents who had lost their episode races, so in a competition like this one late entry is a good strategy.

For the statistics (levels at end of event) :

<1000 : 14%

1000-2000: 4.5%

2000-3000: 9%

3000-4000: 4.5%

4000-5000: 7%

5000-6000: 7%

6000-7000: 12%

7000-8000: 6%

8000-9000: 4%

9000-10,000: 2%

10,000-11,000: 5%

11,000-12,000: 3%

12,000-13,000: 2%

13,000-14,000: 2%

14,000-15,000: 1.5%

15,000-16,000: 4%

16,000-17,000: 5%

17,000-18,000: 1%

18,000-19,000: 1.5%

19,000-20,000: 3%

>20,000: 1%

Totals are 131 as I probably missed some players when I noted these down, but these are representative overall of what I saw. So not a huge sample, but:

I note that levels 1000-2000 are underrepresented, especially compared to the previous leaderboard event. This may be due to King allocating the event differently but quite possibly may be because they have made the early levels too hard and players have dropped out due to running out of gold too soon. This certainly would be supported by my own experience with the early levels and some reports here in the community. The Alien Invasion event especially is equally horrible and booster +gold hungry at all level ranges, and players in the early levels are not equipped to deal with such difficulty levels.

This doesn't bode well for the future of Candy Crush. Something's going to have to change. My guess is that the next round of new entrants will have a jolly easy time.

christinewupp

https://community.king.com/en/candy-crush-saga/discussion/comment/3406697#Comment_3406697

Exactly right. I found and linked that thread in my initial post, your excellent diagram on page 3 shows that the curve just goes down, no dip.

MannyFae

https://community.king.com/en/candy-crush-saga/discussion/comment/3406684#Comment_3406684

Interesting. It's more like option 3 then. Maybe it's something like 'demographic waves' in the player base. I remember you were doing research earlier, gathering data from several Qualifiers participants in the community (Music Tournament?) and there were no significant dips back then, as far as I recall.

christinewupp

https://community.king.com/en/candy-crush-saga/discussion/comment/3406551#Comment_3406551

Actually, now I come to think of it, I did write down similar data for the first knockout round, though that was just 80 players. I found that there were 30% below level 2000, 15% between levels 2000-4000, 7.5% at levels 4000-6000, 20% at levels 6000-8000, 7% at 8000-10,000 and the remaining 20.5% at the levels above 10,000. I didn't break it down more than that as it's such a small sample, but the dip was visible at that stage as well. So I think maybe there really is a wall causing a lot of drop out. It's a smaller sample but the dip seems even more prominent in this early round.

christinewupp

https://community.king.com/en/candy-crush-saga/discussion/comment/3406551#Comment_3406551

Yes I agree with that. Unfortunately the qualifiers don't give us enough data as there are only 10 players per leaderboard these days.

The fact that we all seem to again see the same level difficulty would suggest that we could assess where the wall is just by scrolling back…. if only I could be bothered.

MannyFae

Thanks for tagging and thanks for the very interesting data.

The ranges of 1000-2000, 4000-5000, and 7000-8000 seem to be special. The reason is probably due to a combination of factors, but out of the three options above, I would choose option two as the most plausible, I think.

I believe that Qualifiers are more representative of a player base as a whole, while Finals are more representative of how capable players at a particular range are in leaderboard events. And the latter depends on both the difficulty of levels and how much those levels yield. Levels 1000-2000 certainly were very easy when I passed them not long ago, and it was possible to zoom through them without spending any resources at all. I quite like the concept of multiple 'walls' placed at various ranges. Interestingly, when I passed levels 4000-5000 years ago, the wall was there, at least for me. It's possible that the wall is at that range again, which leads players in that range to either quit or struggle in leaderboards (and the game in general).

christinewupp

What is of note is that there is a dip around level 4000-5000 and that there are very few players above level 10,000.

I can think of three possible causes:

King excluded 5% of players. This is unlikely to be done randomly. It could be that players at certain levels were excluded
Levels that saw more players, such as 7000-8000 may be easier or give better scores so allowing more players in these groups to get to the final. Players at 4000s or above 10,000 may struggle to play fast enough to compete
These distributions may be representative of the player base as a hole and may reflect drop-out rates.

Personally I would not discount option 3: I have noted that some level ranges are ridiculously easy. In fact @GiggzZz commented on such an experience as well recently, and I have seen some of my games with just lucky board after lucky board if playing starting boosters. Other games have been hellish, including my game at level 4000-5000. King appear to try to breed new enthusiastic players in certain level ranges to then block them at a point later on in the game. So players would be allowed to gather gold and boosters and then hit a wall to make them spend their gold, and hopefully then pay money to carry on playing. Difficulty of episodes is being changes all the time now that the AI is in charge and so "the wall" that players hit moves about. So I wonder if the dips in player numbers might be where "the Wall" is at right now. Levels above 4000 and above 8000. The cleverest players would then stop playing when they note the wall and wait for King to move it.

christinewupp

These are my findings from the finals of the Candy Cup. This is slightly different of course as you would expect the finalists to not be entirely representative of players as a whole. I won't use the word "best" players, since that is not correct in my view. The finalists were the keenest players, the ones that spent the most time crushing candies, which is not a sign of skill.

I have data from 4 leaderboards. I excluded myself, so have data from 296 players. Joining time was at different times during the final, which did affect countries of participants, but all four leaderboards were similar in player distribution so country or time of entry probably did not affect figures.

These were players levels at the start of the final round:

Levels under 1000 : 5%

1000-2000: 18%

2000-3000: 7%

3000-4000: 9%

4000-5000: 5%

5000-6000: 12%

6000-7000: 6%

7000-8000: 14.5%

8000-9000: 4%

9000-10,000: 5%

10,000-11,000: 2%

11,000-12,000: 2%

12,000-13,000: 2%

13,000-14,000: 3%

14,000-15,000: 2%

15,000-16,000: 2.5%

16,000-17,000: 1%

17,000-18,000: 0.6%

18,000-19,000: none

19,000-20,000: none

20,000 + : 0.4% (one player at end of map)

(This comes to over 100% because of rounding up)

Tagging @MannyFae and @Nobody1 as you might be interested.

Comments

christinewupp

Some statistics from the prize palooza event. This was not a proper competitive leaderboard event as the prize was only 100 gold bars. But it gave some insight all the same.

For the statistics (levels at end of event) :

<1000 : 14%

1000-2000: 4.5%

2000-3000: 9%

3000-4000: 4.5%

4000-5000: 7%

5000-6000: 7%

6000-7000: 12%

7000-8000: 6%

8000-9000: 4%

9000-10,000: 2%

10,000-11,000: 5%

11,000-12,000: 3%

12,000-13,000: 2%

13,000-14,000: 2%

14,000-15,000: 1.5%

15,000-16,000: 4%

16,000-17,000: 5%

17,000-18,000: 1%

18,000-19,000: 1.5%

19,000-20,000: 3%

>20,000: 1%

Totals are 131 as I probably missed some players when I noted these down, but these are representative overall of what I saw. So not a huge sample, but:

This doesn't bode well for the future of Candy Crush. Something's going to have to change. My guess is that the next round of new entrants will have a jolly easy time.

christinewupp

https://community.king.com/en/candy-crush-saga/discussion/comment/3406697#Comment_3406697

Exactly right. I found and linked that thread in my initial post, your excellent diagram on page 3 shows that the curve just goes down, no dip.

MannyFae

https://community.king.com/en/candy-crush-saga/discussion/comment/3406684#Comment_3406684

christinewupp

https://community.king.com/en/candy-crush-saga/discussion/comment/3406551#Comment_3406551

christinewupp

https://community.king.com/en/candy-crush-saga/discussion/comment/3406551#Comment_3406551

Yes I agree with that. Unfortunately the qualifiers don't give us enough data as there are only 10 players per leaderboard these days.

The fact that we all seem to again see the same level difficulty would suggest that we could assess where the wall is just by scrolling back…. if only I could be bothered.

MannyFae

Thanks for tagging and thanks for the very interesting data.

christinewupp

What is of note is that there is a dip around level 4000-5000 and that there are very few players above level 10,000.

I can think of three possible causes:

King excluded 5% of players. This is unlikely to be done randomly. It could be that players at certain levels were excluded
Levels that saw more players, such as 7000-8000 may be easier or give better scores so allowing more players in these groups to get to the final. Players at 4000s or above 10,000 may struggle to play fast enough to compete
These distributions may be representative of the player base as a hole and may reflect drop-out rates.

christinewupp

These were players levels at the start of the final round:

Levels under 1000 : 5%

1000-2000: 18%

2000-3000: 7%

3000-4000: 9%

4000-5000: 5%

5000-6000: 12%

6000-7000: 6%

7000-8000: 14.5%

8000-9000: 4%

9000-10,000: 5%

10,000-11,000: 2%

11,000-12,000: 2%

12,000-13,000: 2%

13,000-14,000: 3%

14,000-15,000: 2%

15,000-16,000: 2.5%

16,000-17,000: 1%

17,000-18,000: 0.6%

18,000-19,000: none

19,000-20,000: none

20,000 + : 0.4% (one player at end of map)

(This comes to over 100% because of rounding up)

Tagging @MannyFae and @Nobody1 as you might be interested.