tired of this metaverse BS!!!

I think the point is to show how good you are compared to others. If you took a total, then the person who plays more games would win. However, if you take an average, the person who gets consistently higher scores would come out on top. Relax, I think the team know what they're doing. It's not perfect, but pretty close.

I heard that when you get 6 and 16 games, the overall drops significantly because it is dividing your scores by 15 and 25, respectively.

Believe it's been changed to total / games^.4

It was something like Metalkid said. My character by the old system on the 32nd game went from 8th to 16th. I then started a new guy. Then they rescored everyone, and now i'm at 10th...

So your view is that the rankings should be based purely on who submits the most games?

There has to be some sort of balance between the people who play very well and the people who play very often.

If I play say 100 games and each score is 50,000 my total score will be 792,446.

If I play 10 games at 50,000 each my score would be 200,000.

So there is a benefit in playing more games but it is not purely accumulative.

Otherwise, the guy who simply plays 100 games scoring 2,000 points (in other words, submits very low scores for quick games) would have 200,000 points. Is that fair?

Thank you Frogboy for the reply. I think you should probably sticky this post. A lot of people have been complaining about the scoring. Especially the older way where you'd play on game and get hammered. I think most people in the know like the current method of scoring.

So your view is that the rankings should be based purely on who submits the most games?

There has to be some sort of balance between the people who play very well and the people who play very often.

If I play say 100 games and each score is 50,000 my total score will be 792,446.

If I play 10 games at 50,000 each my score would be 200,000.

So there is a benefit in playing more games but it is not purely accumulative.

Otherwise, the guy who simply plays 100 games scoring 2,000 points (in other words, submits very low scores for quick games) would have 200,000 points. Is that fair?


(quote from frogboy above, dunno why but trying to use the quote button is futile right now)
...Yes that would be absolutly fair. The guy who played 100 games and scored 50,000 points would still be #1. I love this game, love this game company, but as far as this scoring system it punishes people who play the metaverse regularly not on gigantic universe setting.

High point games (usually) take more time. Someone can just report a huge number of losses per day and still gain 700-1500~ points per game post, but post literally 100 games in a few hours. Is this fair?

Apparently, from what I read above, the issue is "fairness." For fariness to be evaluated, you have to have a goal that all are trying to achieve, otherwise "fairness" has no meaning. What is fair for one goal, may not be fair for another goal. So, what is the goal of the Metaverse? It is obvioualy more than just scores, as SD has rejected the idea of just adding the scores as not fair. The argument goes that one can game the score by playing lots of short, small games, or even losses, and post the minimal score. So, an element of the Metaverse goal is "how you play the game" as well as score. This implies to me that one needs a taxonomy of game types then to have a fair comparison of scores. This would mean that you would only compare against those playing the same type of games. This is a little messy, because another apparent goal is to have one list of all game types. But, this can be accomodated by defining the game types and the contribution each makes to the score. A game type of "simple" might just contribute a fraction of the score to the Metaverse score, a "middle" type might contribute the actural score, and a "difficult" type might contribute some multiple of the score. The tasonomy of game types would need to be broad, not deep (and there would still be disagreement of the definitions of game types ).

Does this cover all the goals of the Metaverse? I am not sure. But I think a discussion along these lines is more productive than complaining about the current obscure scoring process.

One definate problem is that no-one concerned with their overall score submits a loss. There shouldn't be such a penalty in doing so. Perhaps a loss shouldn't add to your number of games the same way ?

I really wish Frogboy would post the ideas/philosophy behind scoring on the metaverse. It would hopefully quite threads like this down...

Overall I think the actual state of the MV is effectively, like Brad stated, a compromise between the best player scores ( longer games on gigantic maps that take weeks to submit) and the shorter ones that would have been otherwise abused by daily submitters without some kind of square root applied after a certain number of games submitted ( though I would prefer a less drastic formula to be implemented when posting the 6th, 16th game and so on as to avoid the abrupt downgrade quite discouraging but hey - no system can be perfect ).

In order to instill a variety of game types ( **hint**hint** some ''versatility medals'' ), the MV could reward more the players taking pleasure at using the most features possible = all four victory types multiple times, all six official map sizes multiple times, any combos displaying different facets the game can offer. I agree big military wins on gigantic should still be highly rewarded ( I'm completing one at last ); but the other ways should be considered too, as to reward more versatile gamers. For example, on a large map with six civs, why not a bonus when playing a good race against five evil ones?

This post is a Prime example of Why I never want Multiplayer. Someone does not like the way something works and stuff like this happens, and its not fair. Blah blah blah.

Its a shame to create the best 4X game ever then hurt its online community with opaque scoring and disincentives to post your games.

Oh well.

Star Dagger

So far as i can see, the only problem with the adding all the scores together is just simply people submitting a 100 games a day (which i doubt is possible if they're wins). So since noone (except me and my only loss btw) submit losses to the metaverse, make it impossible to submit a loss game to the metaverse. Whats wrong with submitting 100 wins on a tiny universe for a tiny score? Its a win right? It deserves credit right (although not nearly as much as a larger map granted). The guy submitting 1 game a week on gigantic is still going to come out ahead score wise, and if he isnnt then the scorinng that the game does needs to be reavaluated aswell.

Why i'm upset is each new game i do i have scored MORE than the last game, yet my metaverse score is LESS with each game. Logic? Nope none.

I think the scoring system is fine as long as it's working as advertised. If there is something wrong with the calculations, that should be fixed, but I have yet to have a problem myself. Otherwise, the game designers set the rules in the metaverse as they do in the game. Stardock has decided this is how you score in the metaverse so that's how you score. Understand it and play it. I'm sure they try to satisfy as many people as possible. Anyway, it wouldn't really matter how they set it up, someone would always complain.

I think a lot of players dont realize that another recalc was done. The scoring system is now working correctly and readjusting scores at everry submission instead of a huge hit at game 5, 16, 32 etc. dj-LiTh The main reason your score dropped is because you had a v1.1 beta score that got recalced. All of us that played games on the 1.1 betas 1 and 2 took quite a hit on this recalc. The 1.1 betas missed the last recalc. All recalcs have now been done. If you post another game your total will go up. The formula they are using takes your total for all games, Subtracts 5% for each month the game has been on record to a max. of 60 %. This total is then divided by the number of games played to the power of .4. Hope this helps.

The problem is, they applied the recalc routine to all the v1.1 betas, even betas 3, 3A, 4 and the memory issue special fix - all of which were already using the new scoring system.

So legitimate scores using the current system were divided by a factor of around 10 just because they were a beta - that's the thanks you get for playing with the buggy betas, spending hours suffering random CTDs and save game issues, and sending debug and exception logs off to help them produce a stable final version.

You should be doing "beta" stuff for the joy of helping test and make the game a better game.

Many good points, still the recalculation is a process that must be improved to better suite the 2 categories of players, those that play many games a lower levels and those who play few games a higher level, maybe having 2 types of scoreboard could solve this problem, 1 for lower levels and 1 for higher levels of the game.

I went from 2nd place to 160 because most of my games were betas. So I understand the phylosophy behind the recalculations, but some players get a big cut just because they are not playing the latest version. I believe that beta scores should not count at alland they should be wiped out when the official version comes out.

I agree, people playing beta versions should not have their scores allowed in the Metaverse. They should be testing, not competing. Also, what if there's a bug in a beta version that results in abnormally high scores? That wouldn't be fair. The Metaverse should require the current game version and disallow beta versions or old versions.

CraigHB Do you think that a score of 5000 pts, after spending a week and a half playing the one game, for a suicidal military victory on a huge map is fair? As Magnumaniac said in this thread the Beta 3 and 4 versions of 1.1 were recalced even though the new scoring system was in place for those versions. I agree that these games should be removed if they cannot be restored to there original value. It is a compromise that i would be happy with. If they were removed anyone that played a lot of beta games would see their total scores, at this point in time, increase as the divisor in the equation would decrease a lot more, in proportion, than the dividend. A lot of us spent a lot of time playing the buggy betas and our total metaverse score should,in all fairness, not decrease because of this. Some of us that average 50,000 to 100,000 points per game on 1.2 received scores of 5 to ten thousand for similar games played on the Betas 3 and 4, which used the same scoring system as 1.2, after the latest recalc. It was only Betas 1 and 2 that you could exploit the scoring system by pressing end turn for 40 game years. By removing these games completely we would have a much better chance to increase our totals with future games, as the divisor would be a lot lower. The system that is in place is a fair one. All that is needed is a re-examination as to which scores deserved to be recalced, or to do a complete ommision of all the Beta games. I know you have much higher priorities. All that I ask is that you give this some thought. Thanks for your time. TBAY

 

A user, playing on hard for a few turns could retire (lose) a game in 10 to 15 minutes and still score a 1000 points or so.

If the metaverse was purely based on quantity of games submitted rather than having some level of quality measured then it's purely the player who cranks out the most games. 

You would get someon ewho would literally submit 1000 games where they just started teh game, got the game goin ga bit and then retired being at the top while the guy who played on a hard difficulty all the way to the end, taking 16 hours to do it, being at the bottom.

Quantity of games should matter but so should the quality of the game.

CraigHB Do you think that a score of 5000 pts, after spending a week and a half playing the one game, for a suicidal military victory on a huge map is fair?

No, that's not fair either. Most simple solution, disallow beta versions in the Metaverse.

Come on. The Betas were way harder than the original version. The AI was better and better through the betas. I'm not sure how to deal with them. The fact is they allowed metaverse play with them.

Over time they'd have faded into dust anyway. The only bad thing was the folks that were milking long games for points. That could have been solved by clipping the scores on long games.

Maybe a "normalization" of all the betas should have been done, however what's done is done. The sad fact is, i've got a player with 5 games that's ranked higher than my 32 game guy. Is that right ?

Average score for a winning game (total scores for a win/# of games) + average score for a loss (total scores for losing games/# of losing games) + accumulated points for each game submitted 0.05(Game Score) regardless of win or loss. This gives some motivation for submitting even losing games without a thought of screwing up your average. This also gives some credence to reward those that play more games.

Average Score Wins + Average Score Losses + 0.05(Total Score for all games submitted)


Now, the real crux of the matter is how individual games are actually scored, and since I have no idea what the formula for that is I can't comment.