The Tap Out contest and BOOST

This lesson prepares you to: Run a tap contest, explain why the smaller room can win it, and describe a BOOST accurately enough that a parent would be satisfied.

Tap Out is not a multiplier you hold

Every other power up in this track is a thing one viewer spends on a number. Tap Out is different: a viewer spends theirs and it opens a contest for every room in the battle at once, which in a gauntlet can be as many as eight. For 20 seconds every signed in viewer can tap, and the room that taps hardest wins its creator a multiplier for 30 seconds.

Each viewer can land up to 150 taps. That is roughly seven and a half a second held for the whole contest, which is about the ceiling of a human thumb. It is there to stop a script, not a person: nobody tapping by hand will meet it, so the contest reads as uncapped to everyone actually playing it.

The rule that decides it, and why

The winner is not the room with the most taps. It is the room with the most taps per viewer present.

That single choice is the whole design. On raw taps the bigger audience wins every single time, which would hand the already larger creator a multiplier on top of being larger. Normalising means a room of fifty where everybody taps beats a room of five thousand where three percent bother.

Room	Signed in and present	Taps	Per viewer	Result
Yours	50	1,500	30.0	Wins
Theirs	5,000	4,500	0.9	Loses

The number it divides by is not the viewer count on the stream. It counts signed in accounts seen in the last thirty seconds, and never fewer than the number of people who actually tapped. Logged out viewers cannot tap and are not counted either way, so a room full of signed out watchers neither helps nor hurts.

It is the only rule in the battle system a smaller creator can look at and believe they can win. If you are the smaller room, this is your power up, and it is worth saying so out loud when one starts.

You can only tap for the room you are actually in, and only while you are actually watching it. A draw pays nobody, and there is no tiebreak on raw taps, because reaching for raw taps the moment normalising is inconvenient would hand the bigger room the close ones.

What it pays

Prize	How often
2x for 30s	75%
3x for 30s	20%
5x for 30s	5%

Those are long run shares rather than a promise about any one contest. The prize is worked out from the final tap counts, so nobody can know what it is worth until the tapping is over. That is on purpose: a prize you could look up at the start is a prize people would decide not to bother with.

One contest per battle, ever. A battle runs for 180 seconds by default and can be set anywhere from 60 to 600. Twenty seconds of tapping plus thirty of reward is fifty of them, sixty if the boost lands, and two contests would leave no battle at all, only meta game. The BOOST runs inside the first ten seconds of the reward rather than after it, so those windows overlap rather than adding up.

BOOST, and the sentence that matters

A room that wins the tap while the battle is still running gets one more thing: 10 seconds to hit a gift goal. Hit it and the multiplier they just won runs ten seconds longer. A contest that finishes on the final whistle still pays its multiplier and is not offered a boost, because there would be no battle left for the extra ten seconds to happen in.

The goal is fixed before anybody can act on it, and shown in full, with a live bar. That is not a design flourish and it is the most important sentence in this lesson. A goal you cannot see, that you spend into hoping to reach, with a real chance of getting nothing, is a loot box in everything but name, and it is the one idea in this whole feature set that would cost Helm the position the rest of the product is built on. Showing the number loses none of the urgency either: "4,800 to go, 9 seconds" is sharper than a mystery, because people can tell whether they can make it.

It is worked out the same reproducible way as every other roll in this track, from the contest and what the room has already given, rather than from dice. Nobody at Helm picks it and nobody can lean on it.

The goal is between 12 and 28 percent of what your room has already given in that battle, with a floor of 500 coins. So a busy room gets a real stretch and the quietest room is still asked for 500, which is the honest version: it scales, it does not vanish. It is fixed the instant it appears, and nothing that happens in the ten seconds moves it.

What a kid or a teen sees

A minor watching a BOOST sees the bar filling and nothing else. No countdown, no amount left to raise, no urgency language. They can see the room is doing something, which is the part of this that belongs in front of a child; the clock and the number to chase are the parts that do not.

Worth being precise about who that covers. A kid account cannot send a gift at all, so for them the bar is purely something to watch. A teen with a parent's approval can gift, and their gifts do count toward the goal, calmly and with no clock.

That is decided by Helm's servers rather than by the app, so it cannot be turned off, worked around or got wrong by a bad update. If you have minors in your room, and on a family safe platform you do, this is worth knowing before a parent asks you.