The subject has been on everyone’s lips lately: a new league system is coming. Players of the Smash the Code contest have already experienced it, but some questions remain. We thought we’d give you some more details about it to help you become a Legend!

Aiming For the Fun

The tech team has been working on this project for more than a month now. After the last contest (Coders Strike Back), we all agreed we could make the bot programming contests even more fun than they were already. The main idea was to provide you with intermediate objectives and a progressive difficulty. With this new system, players gradually discover more rules and challenges as they progress in the game.

Who Wants to Become a Legend?

We’ve thus introduced 5 leagues: Wood, Bronze, Silver, Gold and Legend.

Every player starts in Wood and can be promoted to the upper leagues. Every league has an AI Boss: you beat it, you get promoted. Rank system is still the same though: so to beat the boss, you actually need to have a better score. Calculation of your score remains roughly the same than before (still based on TrueSkill system), except that this time your battles are against players from your league.

Once all your battles have been computed, if your score is better than the Boss, you’ll be quickly promoted to the next league and you will be able to discover its new challenges. Good to know: you cannot be demoted from a league!

Game Evolution

The game rules can be different depending on the league you’re in. The idea behind this is to offer a progression in the difficulty of the game. The rules don’t always change though, because it remains difficult for us to change the rules without changing the input or output needed, and you don’t want your code to be erased when being promoted…

Smash the Boss

In the current contest Smash the Code, there are three Bosses: “Boss” in Bronze league, “Negaboss” in Silver league and “Robossnik” in Gold league. To add a bit more challenge and excitement for the best players we’ve finally opened the Legend league! Are you ready to beat Robossnik and become a Legend?

Where are the Jedis?

As you might have noticed, the previous contest Coders Strike Back is not available in the bot programming page: we’re working on it to add the League system to it and a few other surprises as well. The idea is to improve the progression in the difficulty of the game by providing more levels and changes of rules! Any feedback you may have on Smash the Code will be useful to improve the League system. So don’t hesitate to tell us what you think!