GOTM Suggestion

[ButSam80]

You should modify the Game of the Month in a few simple ways to get better results:

Have it so the person enters their User ID BEFORE downloading the Game of the Month.

Keep everything for submission the same.

This could give you an idea of how many people (and which people) DOWNLOAD the game of the month, but do not complete it, or get toasted and decide not to submit it.

(Of course, there is no need to keep track of this for archived GOTMs.)

You can then try Regent, Monarch, Emperor, and Deity GOTMs and see which ones get the most HITS to give you a better picture of what percentage of games are submitted, and see if this goes down drastically from, say, Emperor to Deity, or so forth.

Here's the MAJOR addition I suggest, though:

You can then include EVERYONE who downloaded the GOTM in the rankings, with no submission indicating a 0 score. I think this would encourage people who got trashed to still submit it so us learners have a basis of comparison of how "badly" we lost! If someone didn't finish, I'm sure they have a good reason...but they will get a --- score showing up. No harm done--we all know that --- could mean anything.

This would encourage submission no matter what happens to your civ, not just when you win. It would give a more holistic picture of how the games fared. It would help learners. It just plain sounds like a good idea; what do you think?

 

[Cartouche Bee]

I doubt that entering to download would be a very accurate way to track things because of the ease of creating aliases. However the basis of the idea is pretty good. I think we should look at the average number of entries for the previous three GOTM. For example, the last GOTM was at emperor level and therefore the number of entries was down because it was more difficult to finish. The average number of entries for the previous three GOTM's was 84. GOTM 4 had only 58 entries. If the remaining 26 results were added in as zero's then the average score in that GOTM would have been 2300 instead of 3332 which better reflects the difficulty. Just an idea.

Cartouche Bee

 

[Pearman]

It would not be easy to create an alias though, because you would have to submit the game using the same name you downloaded it with.

You can also check IPs to make sure no game is downloaded twice by the same computer.

I think this is a very good idea, and even though Im sure SOME people would still be able to beat the system, it would cut down on unsubmitted scores by a lot.


Oh yeah, on another note, an argument against that would be that some people didn't have time to finish the game. A counter argument would be that it takes the average of the best 3 out of 5 scores, so even if you dont finish 2 times in 5 months, you are still okay. An also, a nonsubmit is the same as a 0 anyway, so people would not lose anything by having a 0 instead of a nonsubmit.

 

[Matrix]

Sounds like a lot of trouble for a little gain.

The main idea is to keep trackof the people who has downloaded the GOTM to play it. Perhaps a small script could be made for that (though I can't program in Flash nor Perl), but such a system would be far too much trouble.

 

[BillChin]

Originally posted by Matrix
Sounds like a lot of trouble for a little gain.

The main idea is to keep trackof the people who has downloaded the GOTM to play it. Perhaps a small script could be made for that (though I can't program in Flash nor Perl), but such a system would be far too much trouble.

I agree with you Matrix. However, if someone wanted to keep track of the number of downloads, an easy workaround is to post the start file in a thread and the bulletin board software keeps an automatic count of downloads.

As for the original idea, I doubt the result would be what is hoped for. The sixth tourney game on Apolyton (http://apolyton.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=136) got downloaded about 400 times with about 20 submissions. It would be kind of silly to enter 380 zeroes. A lot of people are lurkers (read but never post and many never register). A lot of people are curious. A lot of people download and then run out of time or lose badly. My guess is that there five to ten times the number of downloads as submissions. The proposal might make the non-participants more important than the people actually playing the game.

 

[ButSam]

Good idea I wasn't aware people already received a 0 if they didn't compete, so that takes care of part of my argument. Tracking downloads v. submissions (and downloads overall) could help out, and I think posting the GOTM in a thread for the month it is active is the way to do it...after that, it could be moved to the Archives. What do you think, Matrix?