Leaderboards Bucketing

Unity Services
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Hello, i’ve encountered bucketing option in Leaderboards and have some questions regarding its functionality in terms of matchmaking as it’s not described in Leaderboards Manual > Buckets nor in leaderboards admin API.

Practical info i found regadring buckets:

  • “[…] with a bucket size of 100, each player will only access the scores for the other 99 players assigned to the same bucket.”
  • (From UGS dashboard when creatning Leaderboard) “[…] In bucketed leaderboards, players don’t play against all other players but instead only see the players in their bucket.”
  • Players are assigned to buckets the moment they upload their score into leaderboard
  • “For methods that retrieve scores: if your player has not submitted a score and the leaderboard is bucketed, the player is not assigned a bucket. A failed score retrieval returns an error that has its Reason field set to ScoreSubmissionRequired” from get-player-score

So correct me if im wrong, but based on this information i can see problems and following questions arise:

  1. Does Matchmaker automatically matches players in same bucket or does it need to use custom functions using admin API? Or maybe Buckets purpose is simply for “displaying” scores, not matchmaking? In this case i got confused by “players don’t play against all other players […]”.
  2. If it does work with matchmaker, what about players that are not yet assigned to leaderboard? Does it create separate queue for “unranked” players or do i have to write that logic myself?
  3. Is it avaliable to assign players to buckets based on some rules? (couldnt find any in admin API) Or is it 100% automatic?
  4. If it is automatic, another problem arise: If i use bucket size of 100 and 101 players enter my game and start competing there is 1st bucket with 100 players and 2nd bucket with 1 player - that would be a big problem, how can we prevent it from happening?
  5. If we group Leaderboard players in Tiers and matchmake them based on their tier/score proximity, do we really need buckets? We can still display for example 10 players around our score so buckets dont really help in this case.
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Hey!

Thanks for reaching out.

The purpose of Leaderboard bucketing is primarily for displaying scores and giving players a sense of competition by reducing the number of others they see within the leaderboard.

  1. Matchmaker does not automatically match players in the same bucket. If you want to use leaderboard data for matchmaking, you’ll need to rely on custom matchmaking rules using the Unity Matchmaker’s integration with leaderboard data. Player scores and tiers can be accessed via Players.CustomData.ExternalData.Leaderboard.Score and Players.CustomData.ExternalData.Leaderboard.Tier.

  2. Buckets aren’t integrated with Matchmaker, but with the above option, if a player does not have a score in the leaderboard, they will be added with a default score of 0.

  3. Bucket allocation is automatic, and there’s no way to assign players based on custom rules.

  4. Buckets are not intended for matchmaking.

  5. If you’re already using tiers and score proximity for matchmaking, buckets may not be necessary. You can still display nearby players based on score without needing buckets, and tiers could provide a more effective way to group players for matchmaking purposes.

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