For a long time, I've wanted a competitive element in the game to encourage players to find optimal strategies for speed-running. So I've added leaderboards for the fastest times for beating each level with each character. I think it will encourage some friendly competition and, hopefully, some debate about how to optimise runs for each player.
I had to make some design changes to make this workable. There are two elements to this:
In Hand Almighty, enemies randomly drop treasure chests that can contain huge rewards like 1000s of gold or multiple upgrade level-ups. I didn't want players that got these treasure chests and cruised to an easy win to dominate the leaderboards. It's important that players with the best strategies and skills get rewarded
At the end of a successful run, you are rewarded with a medal. Bronze and Silver are rewarded when you lose a life. Gold, Platinum and Diamond are rewarded for no-death runs with increasingly difficult times
To make leaderboards more fair, I added the following rule: treasure chests are disabled until you either die or take longer than the Diamond time (9 minutes). In other words, if you have no hope of getting a Diamond performance, you are given the game-breaking treasure chests. This makes it impossible for treasure chest luck to give someone a crazy-fast run with a faster time than someone who worked hard to earn their time.
This has one side effect that I'm still not happy with. Leaderboard submissions are currently limited to players that get a Gold medal (no deaths, any time) or better. If I allowed Bronze and Silver runs to submit times, then someone with deaths and some decent treasure chests could post a world record. You can still submit Gold or Platinum times with treasure chests, but they will by definition be below legitimate Diamond times.
This does make the definition of "leaderboard" slightly confusing. People who get Bronze or Silver runs will rightly be confused when they don't get added to the leaderboard. I'm open to elegant solutions that either allow every run to be eligible for leaderboard submission, or make it clearer that as soon as you die you lose the chance to submit your time.
Some small related changes:
Platinum and Diamond times are now easier to get: 10m30s and 9m respectively
To compensate for the periods where they're disabled, treasure chest drop rate is increased from 0.2% to 0.25%
The Thief is invisible when near the base, making it difficult to aim. The trade-off? 5x gold from enemies, making this the easiest character to make obscene amounts of money with. There are still hints about where the hand is, such as coins being pulled towards it and enemies looking at it.