Looking at the daimyo world boss results for today, I think it's striking how there are basically three different games going on. 50th place is 9586, so for simplicity, I'll assume that only 50 people participated at all, as the few people who did less damage than that surely didn't contribute very much. With that caveat, the total score across the entire server was 677161318.

At the top end, there are people trying to get into the top three. Usually finishing in the top 3 gives you a considerably better reward than finishing 4th, typically giving you an extra 5 standard rations or 50 fast battle tickets, and depending on the day, also extra koban, souls, kizuna, or copper. Today, third place took a little over 141 million troops. The top 3 combined for 481113244 points, or a little over 71% of the server-wide total.

The next tier down is people just trying to finish in the top 10 but not aiming for the top 3. 10th place commonly gives you considerably better rewards than 11th place. Today, there were 8 people trying to finish in that tier, with scores ranging from a little over 12 million for 11th place up to a little under 34 million for 4th place. Those 8 people combined for 170504966 points, or a little over 25% of the server-wide total.

Below that is people just trying to attack once to finish in the top 50 and get their 100k copper. 12th place was a little over 4.2 million, and the total score for everyone not in the top 11 was 25543108, or under 4% of the server total. If you add the scores of everyone not in the top 11 and attribute that to a single person, that would have been good for 7th place today. If you add the scores of everyone not in the top 3 and attribute that to a single person, it would have been good for first place, but by less than 1 million points.

Sometimes when Temp goes nuts running up an enormous score, he might come away with more points than the entire rest of the server added together. But one person or a few people running up huge scores at the top is what opens up the later convoys for everyone. I think it's interesting that the world bosses are built to rely so heavily on that.