How to Fix Broken Leaderboard Loading and Pagination

Broken leaderboard pagination is offset-based paging over changing data. Cursors fix it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Page with cursors

Use a stable cursor (a key or rank anchor) to page rather than a numeric offset. Offsets shift when scores change between requests, causing entries to be skipped or shown twice.

2. Load incrementally

Load the leaderboard a page at a time on demand (infinite scroll or paging) rather than fetching all entries at once, which is slow and memory-heavy for large boards.

3. Handle data changing

Leaderboards update constantly. Handle the case where the data shifts between page loads — dedupe by entry id and tolerate rank changes — so the displayed list stays coherent as it loads.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.