Insights and Highlights from the ER Champ 2025 Qualifier
Here we are, approaching the 2025 ER Champ grand finale in Sofia. On October 20th - uniquely to this year - the top twelve teams will go head to head for the chance to be crowned world champions. However, there is still unfinished business with the qualifier round.
The ER Champ team takes great care in learning from the past. You might not notice it, but every year, there’s a shocking amount of behind the scenes effort to set up an event that runs smoothly, fairly, and with no interruption. While a lot of the most valuable information comes from direct player feedback, we can also look at the game data itself for answers on how to provide a satisfying and challenging experience.
Overall Results
Firstly, the bar chart race. While it provides little informational value as to how players enjoyed the game, it’s a fun way to relive the back-and-forth nature of the challenge.
6 Keys led impressively wire to wire, seizing a lead early and never giving it back. Great work from a perennial competitor; the challenge is very different every year, and it’s a remarkable feat to hit anywhere on the leaderboard twice, let alone the top mark.
Beyond the top position, hidden epic stories begin to emerge. Compare the leaderboard at the 60 minute mark against the end of the round. (Results shown are based on the original logged times, not factoring in adjustments for errors.)
Note how 60 minutes into the competition, we had a twelve way tie for 8th-19th place, with representatives across six different countries! For a competition for ten slots, this is remarkable, and it goes to show how every little moment counts.
Also note that two of the top ten finishers don’t appear in the top twenty teams at the 60 minute mark. Kudos to these teams (Comment est votre blanquette & Los Kotitos) for pressing forward and leapfrogging a huge number of competitors in spite of starting off a little behind. Comment est votre blanquette managed to climb all the way up into fifth place overall, in spite of first climbing into 20th place at the 71 minute mark! As for Los Kotitos, the team sat all the way back in 20th place at the 120 minute mark, at the same time 6 Keys finished the whole game. A strong push at the end of the game allowed them to claim the 10th and final spot. Moral of the story? Never give up!
The bar chart race is fun, but it’s also important to look at other views to understand the difficulty of our games, and how they offer every player a positive experience regardless of their eventual leaderboard spot. We expect not everyone to be able to finish the challenge in the allotted time or even without hints later on - it’s a timed competition after all - and so it’s important to understand where those fall-off points are.
Before moving onward, I have one more spotlight to shine. What do these teams have in common?
- Keep Escaping
- Fury
- Cinescape
- La Compagnie Keyhole
- 特级山芋
- The Riddle Fleet
- The Final Fit
- Try Hard
- 豆漿大王
- Word Alliance
- Chicken Wings
- Keymasters
- AeraDev
The answer? All of the above teams finished in under four hours and were the first teams from their respective countries to do so. While it might not earn a spot at the championship in Sofia, it’s still something to be extremely proud of!
Learning from Results
The next point to spotlight for how we use our data from the qualifiers is to evaluate our puzzles, to check if the game has the intended flow. For example, would you guess that there were nearly 70,000 distinct incorrect passwords guessed this year? Of those, about 53,000 were only guessed once. The other 17,000 tell us a lot about the game, though. For example, “4713927” was guessed a lot for a solution where the intended answer was “4753927.” We can examine which component created that confusion to ensure we design and test to avoid ambiguity and confusion next year.
We can also learn a lot about the flow of the game by looking at the percentage of teams that cleared each step. Here’s the number of teams that were stuck at each puzzle, as a percentage of teams who reached that puzzle.
By raw count, the stained glass puzzle in the music room kept the most teams stuck, but it was actually the bookshelf maze in the library that ensnared the highest percentage of teams who got to that point. It’s actually a healthy sign to have peaks and valleys throughout the course of the game – if we have a peak, it’s nice to give players a breather with a few easier challenges afterward. But it’s worth further consideration and review – if a spike is too high, it could be a sign that the experience isn’t pleasant for all competitors.
In Summary
While there’s novelty in looking at the qualifier results as fun facts, it’s also very important to take away meaningful lessons from what we observe every year. A big part of that is you, the player – the ER Champ program team is always listening for what parts of the challenge delight and what parts frustrate. There’s also a lot that goes on behind the scenes, and I hope today’s peek gave you a little insight into how the Program Team is always working to make the experience more rewarding.
Thousands of players participate in this competition every year, and it’s you, the players, that make this competition something special. We hope you enjoyed this year’s challenge, root for your favorite competitors in this year’s grand finale, and come back to take on the challenge next year!
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