What actually scores

This lesson prepares you to: Explain what a scoring filter does and, more importantly, what it does not do.

The default is everything

By default, every paid gift sent to a side during a battle moves that side's score. Coins spent become battle points at one point per coin, before any multiplier.

A host can narrow that. Helm lets you name the only gifts that should count, which is useful if you want a battle fought over one specific gift rather than over raw spend. Leave it alone and everything counts, which is what every battle on Helm does today.

What a filter does not do

This is the part to be careful about, because it is easy to describe wrongly and the wrong description costs you money.

A gift outside the scoring list still charges the viewer in full and still credits you in full. It is a scoring filter, not a money filter. The gift is recorded, the diamonds land in your balance, and the only thing that changes is that it adds zero to the scoreboard.

So if you do use a filter, say so out loud on stream. A viewer who sends a big gift and watches the bar not move will assume something is broken or that they have been cheated. They have not been: you were paid every cent of it. But they cannot know that unless somebody tells them.

Counted once, and only once

Helm runs more than one copy of its API, and both copies score the same battle. That could easily mean a gift counted twice. It does not, for two reasons.

Every gift can be attributed to a battle at most once, enforced by the database rather than by hopeful code. And scores are recomputed as an absolute total rather than added to, so if both copies run the same tick they arrive at the identical number. There is no drift and no double counting.

You will never need to know that. It matters because it is the reason you can trust the number on the bar, and because it is why a battle can be recomputed and audited months later and produce exactly the same result.