Trophy Updates - September 2025

Leaderboards are here! Plus other new features and improvements...

Changelog

• 🥇Leaderboards
• 🥶 Streak freezes
• ⏪ Idempotency

Let's get straight to it.

🥇 Leaderboards

Leaderboards are traditionally a difficult technical problem to solve at scale.

Rankings can change tens of thousands of times a day based on millions of user interactions. Providing applications with accurate and consistent real time updates on leaderboard rankings gets harder and harder the more users you have.

Plus, supporting a global user base makes things even harder.

How do you create a fair competition when users finish days and weeks all at different times? When do you choose the cut-off point to stop updating rankings?

No more.

Leaderboards in Trophy handle all the nasty edge cases you could think of, helping you keep focused on the user experience.

Leaderboard types

Trophy supports perpetual leaderboards that never repeat (think 'all time rankings'), as well as recurring leaderboards that can be configured to repeat on a range of schedules (think 'weekly/monthly champions').

Leaderboards can also be scheduled to start on any arbitrary date in the future, and end automatically on a date of your choosing to support a wide variety of time-limited leaderboard use cases (think 'Halloween winners' or similar).

You can also set up leaderboards with a limited number of participants (think 'top 100 users') to make ranking in the top places more desirable and competitive.

Ranking Logic

Because of all the work we've put into building flexible infrastructure primitives like metrics, points and streaks earlier this year, what used to be a complex problem in structuring and implementing leaderboard ranking logic is now just a few clicks.

Leaderboards in Trophy can be configured to rank users based on:

• Trophy metrics
• Trophy points systems
• Trophy streaks

No matter the logic, Trophy manages all tracking and takes care of keeping rankings up to date automatically.

Easy Integration

We've added flexible APIs to help developers display leaderboard data in applications and are available now across all Trophy SDKs.

Analytics

The Trophy dashboard now includes built-in analytics to measure leaderboard engagement, competitiveness and balance to help product teams design leaderboards that lead to the greatest possible outcome for all users.

🥶 Streak Freezes

Streaks continue to be the bedrock of many of our customers strategies to increase retention, in some cases increasing retention by up to 22%.

As users earn streaks, they build personal equity with your product at the same time. This is what makes streaks such a retention-boosting feature in the first place, but is also their biggest downfall.

And a lot of times this isn't the users fault. After all everyone is busy...

Streak freezes solve this by giving users a little bit of breathing room before their streak is lost.

Here's how it works.

In Trophy you set up an arbitrary number of freezes to grant to each user, as well as optionally configuring a schedule on which additional freezes can be granted (e.g. 1 every 3 days or 2 a week).

If Trophy detects a user is about to lose their streak, instead of letting it happen, it steps in and freezes it for them, using up one streak freeze in the process.

Over time if users keep missing their streak, they'll use up more freezes until they run out, at which point they'll lose their streak for real.

We think this will be a game-changer for streaks and make them an even more powerful retention feature.

Streak freezes are available now for all customers to try, and we'll be working with customers to monitor user engagement over the next few months to see the impact on retention.

🔄 Idempotency

Yes it's a fancy word...but it's a surprisingly important concept when it comes to gamification and preventing users from 'gaming the system'.

Basically, to support idempotency in a gamification context means providing ways to prevent users from falsely claiming repeated rewards from the same action over and over again.

Think a user completing some milestone that rewards them with a coupon. If users find some way to complete that multiple times, they could in theory grant themselves hundreds of coupons.

Not ideal...

Trophy now solves this problem by providing a last line of defence for sneaky users with just one extra line of code.

When you track user interactions in Trophy, just send along an additional idempotencyKey with the data that is sufficiently unique to prevent duplicate actions.

Here's an example preventing rewards for completing the same 'lesson' multiple times:

trophy.metrics.event("lessons-completed",
  {
    user: {
      id: "18",
      email: "[email protected]",
      tz: "Europe/London",
    },
    value: 1,
    idempotencyKey: "lesson-123",
  }
);

When Trophy detects an idempotency key, it will then not process further interactions that are sent with the same key, preventing duplicate achievements, points, or rewards of any kind.

Coming Soon

Here's a few other things we have cooking...

• 🔋 Points Metering
  Enhancements to points to support feature-gating and activity-throttling use cases such as 'energy'/'lives' systems and similar.
• 🕸️ Webhooks
  Support for sending events to customer systems via webhooks to facilitate triggering custom workflows based on key events.
• 🥇 Aggregate Leaderboards
  Support for leaderboards that aggregate usage across user groups to model use cases such as city-, school- or organisation-specific leaderboards.

If you have anything you would love to see us build, or have any feedback for us just reply to this email and let us know!

Until next month...