Additional points

[TechNoir]

After playing a long game and winning only 12 points I would like to suggest scoring points for other things than achieving a goal and achievements.

So points would be possible to get from such things (these are only suggestions after some brainstorming):

-most passengers transported
-most trees planted
-most coal transported
-highest profit on vehicle
-highest average income per vehicle
-most primary industries funded
-highest average rating per station
-most vehicles in the game
-crashed trains = -1 pt deducted
-caught by regional investigators after bribery = -1 pt deduced
-highest number of tracks
-biggest production of goods

Discuss

[alex879ro]

Hey TechNoir

As an answer to your suggestions:

You can get even 5 points for a game...depends on what u did in that game. The score algorythm is secret but if you think about it, it`s pretty logic what u get points for and what u don`t get points for.Therefore, i`ll answer to your suggestions:

1. most passengers transported - (u already get points for the quantity of cargo that u transported so the more u transport, the more u get)
2. most trees planted - if players would know that we give points that, everybody would try to grab some points by planting
3. most coal transported- the same as passengers
4. highest profit on vehicle - you already get points for that via performance score
5. highest average income - the same as passenger number
6. Most primary industries funded - personally, i don`t agree with that since i consider that funding industries is just a replacement for real work (making transfer rail systems)
7. highest average rating per station - i agree with this proposal.....it would make players learn about a good rating for a station
8. crashed trains(points deducted) - yes, i agree with that too, that would make players more responsible
9. caught by regional investigators after bribery - i don`t agree because not being able to work near that town for a year is a hard enough punishment, it would be too much
10. highest number of tracks - if we would do that, players would start making thousands of tiles of tracks, and i think it`s already included in the scoring somewhere but no directly
11. biggest production of goods - the reward for that is a higher profit and finishing the server faster, therefore getting more points:)

I hope i was of help....personally, i think a discussion about that list of proposals would be useful:)

[TechNoir]

Wow. I didnt know that points depends on secret alghorythm ;o I am now very curious how it works. I guess the main thing is about speed. So it only promotes "speeders" ;o

Mainly i suggested this because sometimes you play a lot and you can get small number of points ;/

Your justification was good. Yea some people can think like that.

[geo]

u should give alex 1 karma if the answer helped u
well, ofc there is an algorythm, we don't give points based on looks

[ST2]

well, I can point to where's some hints 
-->> http://www.n-ice.org/openttd/highscorecalculation.php

[YorVeX]

i agree with alex in every point. and yes, 7. and 8. really sound like good ideas with some slight modifications i'd propose:

7. highest average rating per station :

that sounds like you want to give only the person with the highest average station rating a bonus? that's too punctual and only awards one single player, i'd say we rather make it more fuzzy and just say "the algorithm should take the average station rating of each player into account for calculation of his score". so the higher the avg. station rating of a company is the more points the player gets.

8. crashed trains(points deducted)

if you deduct 10 points from a player on server 7 it could mean you take all the points he gets for this game. do the same on server 5 and the player won't even notice the missing points.
so again let's not take hard values here. we'd do something with percentages, taking the game length into account and give it a weighting so it only affects the total resulting score by a certain degree (the exact values again will be secret  )

a general note on changes to the score system:
such changes as above depend on certain data being stored in the first place. e.g. right now we don't record the number of crashes a player has to the database, that means i cannot just change the scores that already exist.

• in step 1 we have to add the feature that all necessary data is collected
• in step 2 we would reset all scores to 0 and archive the TOP 10 score table
• in step 3 we would change the score algorithm and now a new round starts

we've already done that once, so the process is not new. but we have to plan it, pick a reset date, announce it on the website early enough (maybe 2-4 weeks before) so players don't get a bad surprise...
for this reason i'd like to let this discussion go on more before we do such changes and collect more ideas so it's really worth the effort.

[vitalikk2005]

I think the scoring system is quite well balanced as it is now. It still might benefit from some *small* tweaks, like some of those proposed in the original post. And I absolutely don't like the idea of resetiing all scores and starting a new round. If the changes are small (and I vote for them being small and gradual if needed), resetting will not be necessary.

[TechNoir]

Maybe instead of adding new points we should make new statistics. Like monthy, weekly and yearly. I also want to suggest table with average points per game  ;p that would be interesting to see

[YorVeX]

And I absolutely don't like the idea of resetiing all scores and starting a new round. If the changes are small (and I vote for them being small and gradual if needed), resetting will not be necessary.

in the beginning we did some changes to fine-tune the formula but it was always applied to existing scores too so they all were consistent to each other. i don't like the idea of gradual changes that don't affect previous games, it means you look at your personal scores and got 2 same games but you got different scores for them. will lead to a lot of confusion among players and probably complaints.

so what i'd rather do is apply the changes to all old game records too and recalculate all scores. but as you can imagine even a very small change will affect especially the TOP 10 players that had a lot of games very much, because it multiplies itself with every game played.
imagine 2 players that both won 100 games and are at almost the same rank. but one didn't care for vehicle efficiency and ran a lot of small vehicles while the other one used fewer big trains. now if i do only a very small modification to the weighting of the vehicle amount it might boost one player 10 ranks up and the other one 10 ranks down.

i can't think of any change that matters and brings in new ideas (like the station rating suggestion) on one hand but on the other hand wouldn't completely turn the current score board upside down (which will lead to complaints from our most faithful players.

this is why i'd always want to do it using a score reset.

also i think it's not that bad to start anew every X months (the current scores are already connected since 8 months). probably we take a lot more time to find good changes and then we'd do the next reset at the end of the year. what's so bad about restarting once a year? many players will be happy for a new chance. it's not motivating for new players to see how they get 10 points for a game and even the guy at rank 20 has 600.
and if a TOP 10 really is good he will get back to this stage on the new highscore board soon enough, why should they fear their standing?

[alex879ro]

And I absolutely don't like the idea of resetiing all scores and starting a new round. If the changes are small (and I vote for them being small and gradual if needed), resetting will not be necessary.

in the beginning we did some changes to fine-tune the formula but it was always applied to existing scores too so they all were consistent to each other. i don't like the idea of gradual changes that don't affect previous games, it means you look at your personal scores and got 2 same games but you got different scores for them. will lead to a lot of confusion among players and probably complaints.

so what i'd rather do is apply the changes to all old game records too and recalculate all scores. but as you can imagine even a very small change will affect especially the TOP 10 players that had a lot of games very much, because it multiplies itself with every game played.
imagine 2 players that both won 100 games and are at almost the same rank. but one didn't care for vehicle efficiency and ran a lot of small vehicles while the other one used fewer big trains. now if i do only a very small modification to the weighting of the vehicle amount it might boost one player 10 ranks up and the other one 10 ranks down.

i can't think of any change that matters and brings in new ideas (like the station rating suggestion) on one hand but on the other hand wouldn't completely turn the current score board upside down (which will lead to complaints from our most faithful players.

this is why i'd always want to do it using a score reset.

also i think it's not that bad to start anew every X months (the current scores are already connected since 8 months). probably we take a lot more time to find good changes and then we'd do the next reset at the end of the year. what's so bad about restarting once a year? many players will be happy for a new chance. it's not motivating for new players to see how they get 10 points for a game and even the guy at rank 20 has 600.
and if a TOP 10 really is good he will get back to this stage on the new highscore board soon enough, why should they fear their standing?

I don`t agree with the fact that 2 games having different scoring is a reason for reseting scores cause the same happens...even if you reset scores, they`re still our scores so 2 games have a different score anyway u take it. However , i do agree that a new chance is not bad from time to time, and starting clear and fresh is very important. It might make certain players show ambition. I`m sure everyone wants to reach 1st place and for some reseting scores is just a catalyzer. But we need to wait until more modifications come up before we can reset the scores.

[vitalikk2005]

I'm not sure how score calculation is implemented technically in your system, but I believe it will not be difficult to keep points for past games intact, while updated scoring rules would be applied only to newly played games. This approach will allow introducing changes without any complaints from players, because it does not affect current leaderboard standings.

[Gopher]

The amount of points awarded for a Hard Game seems small and out of proportion compared to the Desert S#3 specially since it is harder, and even points awarded to non winners should have more weighting, since they can spend a lot of effort and hours.
Example: I got 10 points for coming 2nd in a hard game which took 4 hours. If I did 5 Quickie cames in that time I'd get more points whether I won or got 2 or 3 points a game.

[YorVeX]

The amount of points awarded for a Hard Game seems small and out of proportion compared to the Desert S#3 specially since it is harder, and even points awarded to non winners should have more weighting, since they can spend a lot of effort and hours.
Example: I got 10 points for coming 2nd in a hard game which took 4 hours. If I did 5 Quickie cames in that time I'd get more points whether I won or got 2 or 3 points a game.

imho that doesn't have to do anything with this thread.
such things we can always discuss and if it turns out to be true we can always raise the score multiplier of server 6, even for existing scores. but please make a post about that on the special board for server 6, i want to hear more examples from others too and also find out whether you can really do 5 quickie games in the same time 

[YorVeX]

I'm not sure how score calculation is implemented technically in your system, but I believe it will not be difficult to keep points for past games intact, while updated scoring rules would be applied only to newly played games. This approach will allow introducing changes without any complaints from players, because it does not affect current leaderboard standings.

if i'd win a game twice on the same server within 30 game years and almost same performance points and i get different points for those two games i would complain. and some time later it will be hard to remember when we did which changes so nobody can explain anymore how points at specific times had been calculated.
also you lose any way to track your improvements - right now you can compare and see that 3 months before you only made 50 points per game, but today you already make 70 points. that wouldn't be possible anymore if you change the score algorithm from today to tomorrow.

scores of games from yesterday would be different scores than those from today, so you cannot compare them anymore. it is some kind of reset but you'd hide that fact from players, confusing anyone who tries to compare them.

such a score system lives from the trust of players in it to some degree. if players get the feeling it is constantly adapted by measures they don't know (but might assume its to someone elses advantage and not theirs) he might lose trust into it and get frustrated.
a reset on the other side is a clean cut, it's official, obvious for anyone.

[AlexAlex]

In complementation to the proposal of TechNoir.
I have another proposal, but with different orientation.

In the actual system, the only way of get point is wait to the goal reached. If you not are loged WHEN the goal is reached, you not get points.

I think in an aditional system that assign points to the user EVERY MONTH for stay conected and make things. I think in relationate this system with the performance score. In that form, if you not have performance, you not get points. If you have a performance below 100 or 200, you not get point. But the main orientation is... STAY CONNECTED AND MAKE THINGS. And not in AFK, because if you are in AFK, you are making nothing, and you not get points while you are in AFK. The points can be asigned to the user when they disconnect, or when the goal are reached.

With this system, i think that the servers are promoted, because the user get points for make things, and not for wait to the goal reached, and we can get more players, and more logins.

Wait for your comments.