While adding "continue where you left off" to our games, we hit an unexpected design question: if continues can be bought, is the leaderboard still fair? This post follows that question to the design we landed on — useful notes for anyone building a similar system.
The problem: infinite wallet, infinite score
The naive setup goes: you die, you pay coins, you continue. Sounds innocent — until the top of the board belongs not to whoever plays best but to whoever continues most. The arcade era had a name for it: credit feeding. Keep inserting coins and the score isn't earned, it's purchased. We didn't want that.
Options we tried
- Reset the score on continue — fair but brutal; it makes the feature pointless.
- A separate board for continued runs — technically clean, but a two-board experience confuses players.
- Cap the number of continues — works, but alone it treats a "3-continue run" and a "clean run" as equals.
The design we landed on: a decay multiplier
Our solution is a configurable continue score penalty. The logic is simple: after a set number of continues, each additional continue multiplies your score by a factor (say 0.75). One continue rescues your run and preserves your score; leaning on continues makes record-chasing inefficient. As a result:
- Casual players extend their runs and keep having fun;
- Competitive players know the clean run is still the most valuable path;
- The board keeps measuring skill.
And one critical decision: the multiplier is managed per game. A short single-run game may keep the penalty on; a long, chaptered experience may disable it entirely. There is no single right answer — there are per-genre right answers.
The security layer: the game doesn't decide
On the technical side, the key principle: the platform, not the game, validates the continue. The game merely says "I'd like to continue"; whether you're entitled (membership allowance, coin balance) is decided server-side. Otherwise anyone with a browser console could grant themselves free continues.
Membership allowances and balance
Plus members earn a limited number of free continues per day — limited, because unlimited allowances would resurrect the original problem. Once the allowance runs out, the standard coin cost applies to everyone equally. Paying buys convenience, but it can't buy the ceiling; the ceiling is still drawn by skill.
A leaderboard is a contract: everyone must trust that the numbers on it were earned. Want to join our design debates? Write to us. 🎯