ALPHA SEASON 3 LEADERBOARD UPDATE — October 2022

Time flies, and we are already entering the final weeks of our Alpha Season 3! We wish to thank you all for the support and time spent in the 90+ experiences featured in our biggest-yet live event!

If you don’t know already, there are many ways to earn SAND throughout the season, all of which are listed in this post. Among those, many of you have taken on the challenge of climbing up our leaderboard.

In order to provide a fair playing field for all, we wanted to share with you an update and clarification on this topic, following some feedback we have received from the community.

TL;DR

• Exploiting is not cheating
• However exploiting needs to be done on an even playing field
• To make it fair, we will cancel EP progress (for the leaderboard only) on selected experiences that were affected by patching glitches. This will give players the opportunity to play these experiences again.
• The update will go live on 17 October
• Look at your leaderboard status to see what quests you will need to do over
• Your Alpha Pass progress as tracked in the “Rewards” tab on the website will NOT be affected

Exploiting vs Cheating

We understand that the leaderboard takes into consideration completion time of all the quests, and that many participants in the contest have been doing their best to get high scores. First, we wish to say we really appreciate how much effort is being put into shaving off every second of your completion time, and we understand that many participants have found ways to exploit speed glitches, such as double jumps, etc. in order to get ahead. We do not consider this “glitching” approach to be cheating. Glitching is a well-known practice in speedrunning, and always has been. It takes advantage of available exploits within the framework of the game as it has been released, and the fact that we are still in the Alpha phase of our development means that some loopholes were to be expected from the beginning.

Cheating involves going beyond the actual scope of the game and includes such malevolent practices as using third party software to macro actions, speed hack, etc. We do not condone such behavior and have put into place systems and processes to prevent such activity from ever being rewarded.

While we do consider glitching to be an acceptable practice, certain conditions need to be met in order to make its use fair. The most important of all is to have consistency in the access to the glitches themselves in order to provide a level playing field for all. It has been brought to our attention through community feedback that some of the well-used glitches originally used to optimize completion time have been patched at different points throughout the season, compromising that consistency and putting players who tackled the challenges post-patch at a disadvantage. That is why we have decided, after careful consideration of community feedback, to implement an update in order to level the playing field regarding the leaderboard.

Details on the Update

The update will take place on 17 October, and will have the following effects:

• Reset EP count for certain quests for which the balance has been compromised. These will include all EPs earned through quests affected by patches that provided an unfair disadvantage to certain players.
• This means that if you check your total amount of EPs on the leaderboard after the update, you will see a decrease in the total amount of EPs you have earned. But fret not, you will have the chance to redo the quests in order to earn those EPs again, this time with the same conditions for everyone! Just click on your name and you’ll see quests where it says “invalid time”. Those are the quests you will have to complete again.
• Please note that this update will not affect the EPs earned to level up throughout the Alpha Season 3 in the rewards tab. In short, this will not affect your progress to reach level 5.

Thanks and May the Best Player Win!

We are communicating directly with our community, including our top speedrunners and most engaged players to make sure we maintain a fair environment for everyone to play and challenge themselves in.

We pay very careful attention to the fairness of all the challenges and reward systems we roll out, and we would like to thank you for taking the time to bring bugs, glitches, and other issues to our attention! You can find more information about all the challenge rules here

Thanks again for your patiences, enjoy the last few weeks of Alpha Season 3, and see you soon in the metaverse!