To Frogboy about overall score calculation

Is this what you are proposing? Take the Max of the following set
Max {S1/1, S1+s2/root2, S1+s2+s3/root3,......Sn/rootn}

I would imagine that as tons of scores start coming in, that could take up alot of processing.


I for one think we ought to give scoring a rest awhile. It just changed, lets see how it goes awhile.

Difficulty is not weighted heavily enough. I'm playing at Crippling + 2 Incredible AI's (i.e. half a difficulty level down from Maso), and I got outscored by a player on NORMAL. By a good 1000 points even.

And it's not like I skewed my settings. I played Large/abundant, and won in 2188.

Scores will never be to everyone's taste. At least now, they are always postitive.
I don't think old scores hurt that much because we all have a few of them. I think they'd better keep the current formula, flawed as it is, because none will be evennear perfect.

The old scores dont hurt people who have them with
respect to each other. You just want for the next
hot Sergey to come along that started with 1.05 to
whip out 10 high scoring games leaving all the weighted
old folks like us in the dust, then maybe you might
see the problem.

The perception of being drug down is much worse than the reality in my opinion. Due to resubmitting games I had on my HD, I've got 9 1.05 scores, if that was all I had, I would have 23.6K for my score. With the 15 older games, some of which are, shudder, only three digits, my score is 21.4K.

So, for all the wailing and gnashing that's been going on, I'm being drug down a whole 2000 points by my older scores. I would prefer it if Brad would agree to recalculate all scores on the metaverse to prevent even that sort of "agism", but if 2K makes or breaks my spot on the metaverse, a recalc or a fresh start isn't going to help me that much.

Fix the basement for the score decay (which Brad actually seems amenable to) and you've got a "good enough" system for any but the most anal retentive.

DOH! 2X Post!
[Message Edited]

My 2 cents worth: I thought the new scoring system for the Metaverse sounded OK when Frogboy described it. I was wrong. I don't need to say what its faults are: you only have to look at the current Metaverse rankings to see. Since the new version came out, of the top 3 players: one has re-started; one has apparently quit playing; and the other has re-started AND apparently decided not to submit to the Metaverse.
The idea of inflating new version scores out of all proportion to old version scores is...demoralising. The idea of rewarding lower difficulty games over the higher difficulty games is...demoralising. The idea that one's scores will degrade with time and become an increasingly dead weight is...demoralising.

The Metaverse is a *great* idea, BUT (in my opinion) its current form is NOT the way to build a Galciv community.

All other things about Galciv I like. Sorry if this sounds narky: but its how I feel.

Well I'm fed up. My accomplishments with this game have been relatively minor, I'm enjoying playing it but my level of difficulty took time going from beginner to normal. I'm now 14 or so games in and the metaverse scores have started to be a significant prompt to play more games.
Until that is I saw someone in the top 20 after 2 games.. (1 simple & 1 beginner!)
Now it's very clear that my scores are not being compared in a fair manner to those of my fellow players so this will be less of an incentive to play in future.

I don't know if this a good suggestion...but im gonna suggest it anyway...

Why not split the scoring system according to the level of defficulty you play?

Thus, you have separate ranking for different of level of players...

I.E. you have a rank for Masochistic players only, separate rank for normal level etc etc...

This way, it will solve a lot problems...

Well, I'm one of the fairly older players. So you newbies can catch me with my ball and chain rather easily. But I am neither restarting, nor quitting.

However, I am going on vacation for a week. Already scheduled. And when I come back I'm gonna kick your behinds!!!!

When you see the guy who winds up in the upper ranks with some relatively low diff games there's some things you need to think about before breaking out the pitchforks and torches for the devs. While I'm sure it's conceivable that somewhere out in the world there is someone sad enough to try and dominate the metaverse by submitting a slew of low difficulty games, I assume that most of these people are some new players who've been learning the ropes and finally got some games they're proud to submit.

These people are either going to move on to higher difficulty games, or they're going to get tired of the game and move on. Even for the buttmunch who sets out to dominate through cheese, I expect that most would get tired before getting very far. Easy diff or not, this game takes a lot of time, and if you're not having fun, who the heck wants to sit around doing boring work just to reach some largely meaningless spot on the metaverse?

I see it. I just finished a score worth around 11600 Mpoints. I'll submit it on week end when I can connect my play computer to the web. If I submitted it now I'd be ranked 48th. If a newbie submitted it, he'd be 31st. Yes, it's weird. And yes, I see that my last games are worth all my score and I'd be way upper if I hadn't a few 75 or 500 scores in my bag. I still think it is not too much of a concern. I prefer to play 10 games on maso and win once than play 10 games on crippling and win 9. So I'll never be in the top, thus it doesn't really bothers me.

I probably not the person to be championing this as I realize I've had a huge advantage over those who started earlier in the metaverse, though I am probably a more typical case for a newbie than the newbie who cranks off 10k+ games.

My score is inflated compared to more experienced players, but I am hardly dominating the metaverse.

I'm coming up the difficulty levels -- I am currently playing a Huge/Normal game, so my score might be higher for this one game, but I'm also getting bored at Normal, so I'll continue to go up in difficulty and my scores will go down.

The people who are interested in the Metaverse are also quite active on the Forum Boards. If I kept submitting at normal, I'd expect peer pressure and mocking.

There probably will be some people will one or two anomalies who end up ranked quite high for a short period of time, but that should not be the norm.

I know I'm not as good as most of the people on the boards. How? I can look at the games they beat. It took me 3 days of playing to beat a small game on tough and I barely managed it. I have no illusions about being better than someone who can beat the game on a higher difficulty level - regardless of my scores.

If you are really concerned, you could start over and probably destroy everyone else. Anyone doubt that Sergey will be No. 1 soon will a new nick?

I don't think this is a new idea, but we could also create a straw poll to determine best players? Anyone who care enough about the Metaverse to try to rank is going to be reading the Forum.

Do we need the Metavers ranking to know that Staffa dominates every aspect of this game?
Granted Staffa has accumulated enough points to be rated in the top 10 as a GUILD. If you put that aside and look at the difficulties of the games he's played outside of the points he's gotten - he should be a benchmark against which to measure players, regardless to whether or not he continues playing or his scores look lower over time.

In any case, trying to create a form ranking would be a more interesting thread that constantly complaining about the scoring. The automatic scoring will always be subjective.... so would it matter if the forum ratings were as well.

If I were to take a stab at rating players, I would look at victories by difficulty and galaxy size - and deemphasis the 'game' score. Difficulty is the first weighing factor and size is the second as bigger galaxies will always take longer to complete...

Any thoughts?

To add to my prior comment, how about this as an informal scoring system?

A win is a win. People have argued about which victories is harder or easier. People are also always unhappy about the College Football BCS system which has millions and millions of dollars riding on its results -- if they cannot come up with a fool proof system it is unfair for us to expect Stardock to do so.
The a win is a win principal eliminates the case for playing the game past when it was 'won' for the sake of a score.

Galaxy size provides one point per sector. A Tiny galaxy is worth 16 base points, a small galaxy is worth 25 points and so on.

Difficulty level provides a multipier that becomes more signficant at higher levels.
Cakewalk .25 multiplier
Beginner .5 multiplier
Simple .75 multiplier
Normal 1.0 multiplier
Challenging 1.5 multiplier
Tough 2.0 multipier
add 1.0 for each difficulty level over tough.

This means that a tough game is worth 8 times more than a cakewalk and to score well - you need to beat the higher difficulty levels.

Your score is the sum of all games played (this way there is no penalty for older games).

For games submitted prior to posting difficulty, look at the first several games with a difficulty to assign one for scoring purposes.

If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to post an unofficial ranking based on this system. I'd look at the top 25 metaverse players and see how they compare on this ranking system.