XP, Leaderboards, and Performance

As we continue our march towards a new Xbox Insider Hub experience, we’re going to make changes that will affect what the current Xbox Insider Hub looks like and how it behaves. Like we mentioned in our previous post, some of those pieces are going to be much more visible than others. This includes a change you’ll see starting tomorrow.

We Value Your Participation

We know that Xbox Insiders value XP, and we do too! XP is a public reward to you for giving feedback to the feature teams and game developers for saying what you like and what can be improved. We’ve granted XP for completing Surveys, Quests, and for filing good bugs! Many of you even noticed when we humorously hinted that we were aware that some folks were bypassing our system just to get the XP reward.

Making this XP so public was driving an incentive that we did not intend. And this created an artificially wide gap between users with the most XP, versus those who are perfectly well-engaged but with a lower point total. Because Xbox Insiders are the highest—and longest—engaged members of the Xbox community, it became clear that a years-long member of the program had an insurmountable XP advantage compared to a more recent Xbox Insider.

The change we’re making today involves how we record XP and show Leaderboards. Most of these changes are happening under the hood in the services layer and are improvements to the overall performance of the app itself. However, these changes will disrupt the Leaderboards because of the way we make a service call for that data. As we’re shifting XP and future incentive systems in the Xbox Insider Hub, we felt this was the right time to retire the XP Leaderboard in the current version of the app.

XP is Not Going Away

You can still earn points through Quests, Surveys, and bug filing! There are many of you who earned your place on the global leaderboard’s top slots through frequent engagement, quality feedback, and have been with us for many years. To you, a very sincere thank you. There are also many newer Xbox Insiders who are active in the Xbox Insider Hub nearly every day and give high quality feedback. We thank you, as well. The impact you have on Xbox is just as important.

We want you to be a part of the journey towards the new Xbox Insider Hub. Stay up to date on other changes we’re making here on the Xbox Insider Blog, the r/XboxInsiders subreddit, and @XboxInsider on Twitter. We are very close to having a build ready to give to Xbox Insiders to try out and let us know what you think. Stay tuned!