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Lesson 3.4The three you can only win
Lightning, Shield and the long Anchor are not for sale. They are handed to four viewers on the winning side and they expire in five days.
Prefer to listen? This is the same lesson, word for word. The text below is the transcript.
This lesson prepares you to: Explain who receives an earned power up, what the odds are, and why they cannot be bought.
The earned shelf
Three power ups cannot be bought at any price. There is no bundle, no discount and no premium tier that unlocks them.
| Power up | Runs for | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Lightning | 30s | Roughly one gift in three scores 5x |
| Shield | 15s | Your side cannot be anchored |
| Anchor, the long one | 30s | The other side cannot start a new power up |
The reason they are unbuyable is a design decision worth naming. An earned item that can also be bought is not a different door, it is a discount, and the wallet wins again. A viewer with no money at all holds these, and nobody can buy past them.
How they are handed out
When a battle ends, four viewers on the winning side receive one each:
- The top three by battle points contributed to that side.
- One more, drawn from everyone else on that side who gave anything at all.
That fourth one is the important one. It means backing a winner is worth something even if you are not the biggest spender in the room, and it is the difference between a reward system and a leaderboard.
Which power up each person gets is decided by the same reproducible method used everywhere else in battles, derived from the battle and the viewer rather than from chance. The three come up in roughly equal proportion.
Handed out exactly once
However many copies of the API process the end of a battle, and however many times, a battle awards its grants once. The database enforces it rather than the code hoping.
Five days, then they are gone
An earned power up expires 5 days after it is won. That is deliberate. An item with no expiry gets hoarded for a moment that never comes, and a viewer who is holding six Lightnings is not using any of them. Five days is long enough to catch your next live and short enough that using it beats saving it.
Shield is the answer to Anchor
The rules for what can be used when are short, and there is one exception worth remembering.
- The same power up cannot be stacked on itself.
- An anchored side cannot start anything new.
- Except a Shield. A Shield can always be raised, even while anchored.
That exception exists because a Shield is the answer to being anchored. Letting an anchor block it would make the Shield useless at exactly the moment it is needed, which is a rule that reads fine and plays terribly.
A Shield beats an Anchor outright. While a Shield is up, your side simply is not anchored, whatever anyone else just spent.
Tap Out is in the catalog and cannot be won
You may see a seventh power up named Tap Out. It is a tap contest, and the contest itself has not been built. Until it is, Tap Out cannot be awarded by a battle, because a reward you cannot use is not a reward. It stays in the catalog so the shape is ready, and it goes back into the prize pool the day it does something.
Next: the one thing to understand about battles: the scoreboard is not your earnings.