If you still have questions, feel free to continue the discussion in the new thread or check out the FAQs and Builders’ Challenge documentation.
Hello Builders!
The Builders’ Challenge is back, and we know you have questions! We want to make sure you have all the information you need before the event kicks off, so we’re hosting a Q&A session on Monday, February 17 to address your most burning questions.
How It Works: Drop your questions in this thread – anything related to the event structure, rules, eligibility, rewards, or other aspects of the Builders’ Challenge. Our team will review the most relevant and frequently asked questions. We’ll answer them live during the Q&A on Discord this Monday!
What You Can Ask About: Event mechanics & structure Eligibility & participation requirements Engagement strategies & best practices Rewards and how they are distributed Fair play & anti-cheat policies Anything else related to the Builders’ Challenge!
Q&A Date: Monday, February 17, 1 PM UTC Where: Discord
Drop your questions below, and let’s get ready for an awesome event!
Rules dont address spammed copies of games in this bc3. This was a problem in bc2 where builder receieved rewards for dozens of copies of the same game, tainting the integrity of the challenge. Can the rules be adapted to account for this inevitability.
Each experience on a map should be unique, not a copy with a minor modification.
2 - how is the 50k sand cap determined. How are the payouts determined per experience? How does the math for a visit. / time spent in visit break down? Do players need to trigger a quest to have their results count? How can this be transparent to all participants?
Will there be an application form to participate (I think there should be)?
How can you guarantee that your Anti Cheat system will work correctly? For example, if an experience is unfairly banned and it is proven that the experience was not cheated, etc., will it still get its reward? How long will this process take?
How will you be able to identify a bot/third party player? For example, I can use a Macro program to make an approved account play itself in the experience and you won’t be able to tell unless someone from your team is inside and observing.
Exploiting gaming guilds or communities in a way that manipulates engagement unfairly. Can you explain this rule a bit more?
Investigation methods will not be disclosed to prevent exploitation. How will this behavior Creators trust in you? How do you intend to prove that your investigation management is not at fault?
Regarding guilds
For example: I have a guild of 30 people. We do Speed Run competition and we do it in more than 1 experience. While some people are playing, some people can take a break in between the game. they can go in the game and go out of an emergency and stay online but passive in the game. Since it is a group of friends, they can play for long periods of time.
These situations violate all the rules about guilds. so many experiences can be banned. How will you prevent this. (I am asking as an experienced FRP player and someone who has been in many guilds)
Guilds can intentionally spam experiences. The experience owner may not realize this. Also, he can’t prove to you that he didn’t know about it. (not everyone has the right research knowledge, database access and tools in such a situation.) In this case, the experience owner, who is not guilty of anything, will be banned and inactive. how do you plan to prevent this?
Will you give creators the time they need to update and test their experiences? There are already functions that don’t work with V11. They are used in many experiences.
For example, Crowd Event and Rules field can’t talk directly or indirectly with Objectives field. Climbable is problematic. Triggers that are SP do not work in MP experiences. Problems caused by the physics engine. etc.
The current Valentines Event experience has the same issues. When I was attacked by Rabbid in the parking lot in Love in Paris, I was thrown to the other corner of the map by rabbids collision. Some of the missions and possibly SP triggers are not working.
These issues won’t be fixed until the dev team releases a new version. Creators have 7 days if the update is released today. (Not enough time for Creators with more than one experience)
The reason I’m asking these questions is that we have 13 published experiences. We are updating because our experiences are buggy in v11. and these experiences are automatically included in the Builders Challenge because they meet the standards. we can’t check them all. I would like to know if this was done correctly on your side as well.
Will creators have any indication of the amount of SAND their experiences are earning during the 4 weeks?
Many creators do weekly competitions with fixed prizes, and if we have no data to show us the amount of SAND we are earning throughout the duration of the Builder’s Challenge, the creators take on a really high risk of giving out too much in rewards.
Equally, for those creators who offer a % of earnings to players, those players will have no indication of how much SAND they might be earning, and it could be demotivating for them.
If we get no data on earnings until payment on April 9th, it’s going to be incredibly difficult for any creators to plan events and competitions for players.
I agree with many of the points mentioned here. Additionally,
I have a question: in the previous event, some creators were banned for sending rewards to accounts flagged by you. Has anything been planned to address this issue, considering we have no way of knowing which accounts are flagged?
Have you considered limiting the counting of playtime and visits to accounts with KYC? In the previous BC2, some experiences had numbers that didn’t match the actual number of players.
One last question: given the discussions around BC2, has there been any thought about favoring experiences with many short visits over those that are longer but with fewer players?
Let’s take the Speed Run or the highest score in organized events. You do the parkour or score in 4 minutes. Your average play time is 4 minutes, maybe less, but your experience was played 20K times.
The other experience has an average duration of 20 minutes but 100 times played.
Is the player more valuable or the time spent inside? I think it’s both. But one attracted 20K people to his experience while the other attracted 100. In this case, the one who attracted 20K people is arguably more valuable.
one of them spent 80K minutes in total time. The other spent 2K minutes.
Yes mine is a question, not a discussion in favor of anyone of them. This question for today meeting and it is just to avoid the discussions had in the bc2.
Since there will be no leaderboard to show position and earnings for all games, will we know how much each experience earned? Some of us have games we made on our own but also games that were made in collaboration with other creators. For those collab games, we would need to have transparent data in order to share earnings with our team. The same goes for anyone who offers a share of earnings to players. Making ranking and visits/avg. time data public like last time would be preferable. If that is not possible, we would at least need a breakdown of our earnings per experience.
Can you please give more info about the rewards system and ammount? To be able to plan the players rewards and events budgets we need to know how much we can invest in the rewards pool and marketing to be realistically able to cover these investments. Thx
Could you please give us more time next time from the announcement to the start date in order to have time to get used to new GM and do quality playtest/fix our games? More time will result in better games for sure.
Yep, updating multiple games to
11 is going to take time and adjusting mechanics considerably to get in line with the new objective update. Not possible for many of us to be ready in time without being able to iodate and test properly.
+1. This is a super fast ask on turn around time. Quality will suffer and runs the risk of alienating and annoying players as they come across inevitable bugs
It is what it is, and is a level playing field for all developers, just a super tight turnaround with little to no qa time.
6 to 8 weeks would be more in the ballpark for future events like this to allow games time to squash inevitable issues after a major version update like this, especially considering the core objective system update.
Unfortunately, we were unable to attend the Town Hall, as we assumed it would be streamed and available for replay. We would like to ask if any clarity was provided regarding how the reward system will be managed.
As creators, we have the following concerns:
According to the document, experience trending during the event will be taken into account. This worries us because, if a situation arises where cheaters manage to double the engagement compared to the previous rank, it could mean that, as creators in an scenario with half the engagement of the cheater, we would only receive 50% of the possible reward. Without transparency in the reward system, such cases could arise, negatively impacting other creators.
If this is not the case, our other concern is that the maximum reward of 50K SAND may turn out to be an unattainable goal, and that there might be a predefined internal formula where, for example, if 500 active players per day with an average of 10 minutes of gameplay are not reached, the maximum reward can never be achieved.
All the other conditions seem great, as in previous events, only a few studios were struggling to survive in a system with limited reward spots. However, this uncertainty around the reward system leaves us with concerns and risks. We fear that, even by putting in our best effort, we might still end up with rewards that put us in a difficult position.
We would really appreciate any clarification on these points.
Thanks to everyone who participated in the discussion and submitted questions! We’ve now posted a full summary of the Q&A session with all key answers.
UPDATE (Feb 18, 2025): The full Q&A Summary has been posted!
Read the full Q&A Summary here
How It Works:
Drop your questions in this thread – anything related to the event structure, rules, eligibility, rewards, or other aspects of the Builders’ Challenge.
Our team will review the most relevant and frequently asked questions.
We’ll answer them live during the Q&A on Discord this Monday!
What You Can Ask About:
Event mechanics & structure
Q&A Date: Monday, February 17, 1 PM UTC
Where: Discord
Q&A Summary Now Available!