The alternate Metaverse may work if you have not seen it hopefully somebody will drop in the thread with a link.

http://altmeta.galciv.org

The fair thing would be to have more than one ranking. There should be "recent year only" and "recent month only" (fair to newer players) and "all games" (fair to older players).

On the other hand, any system that ranks people where they don't play head-to-head is going to have problems.

True, however many of the problems that exist at making the metaverse more 'friendly and accessible' are purely of Stardock's making. Some quick examples:

*The military skewed scoring, e.g. a military win is worth 5X the score as a tech victory even when EVERYTHING is exactly the same - only difference is whether you hit 'end turn' one more time with money devoted to research or invade that final planet and turn off all research before ending the turn. Brad has defended this saying that he feels the other wins are cheaper but I think he's completely, utterly wrong - the number of perfect 60K Maso wins posted shows any scoring system is subject to breaking, so flatten the scoring and let people play how they want to play. I thought it was supposed to be about fun.

*The dropping of scores completely. Aging is fine but you have to set a basement that lets your most loyal players continue to feel a sense of accomplishment. To bring up the main weakness of the metaverse again, that there are multiple people out there with nothing better to do than churn 60K Masos every 1.5 days means that all the aging in the world isn't going to make the ladder newbie accessible *ever*. However, for those of us content for our 4 hours at Number 1 almost a year ago and who just like to fire the game up for fun every now and again, the current system provides zero enticement to take part in.

*No recalc of older scores. Talk about trying to give us a reason to not take part in the metaverse and/or support dropping of scores. When the scoring algorithm is changed, recalc the older scores, pretty damn simple. There's just no good reason not to provide this feature unless they've stopped archiving all that game data they're supposedly using to improve the game. The people who milked scores under version 1.05 or whatever are *nothing* compared to the people milking scores now. I've got scores that were wins that are markedly less than what you can get for losing now, ugh.

Not quite true I feel. I still consider myself "new" in comparison to many of the players in the metaverse (first game 25th Feb 2004), but have managed to so far reach 11th place. In a couple of days, I should mange to pass Jaws - who was number 1 when I started, so that is a major achievement for me.

There are also a number of other newer players in the Galactic Guardians that are on the verge of hitting the top 50, and the challenge of making the top 25 is what is driving them on. Again, it all depends on how you want to play the game, and you can't please all of the people all of the time, but it does work for some.

Totally agree with the rest of your points though.

Yes and call me crazy since I churn out the 60000 point masos but I agree.

Magnumaniac I agree you are a new, but how do you keep new players who do not want to exploit the game interested?




Yes

Could we have a link to the numbers you mentionned. I have currently an hard time to understand (if I read correctly your sentences) why an aging of 30% is better than an aging of 10%.

At the very least, we should not be losing the number of games we've played. I should have about 37 games in and I've got 33, and I haven't submitted in a couple of weeks. It just can't be THAT hard to keep track of the number of games we've played.
I can see the need for some degree of aging of games, but one of the attractions to the game for me was the addition of Metaverse play.
Let's hear a little from our Avatars.

Tech, the Guardians are sort of a special situation. Most of our players are now competing against each other. Using the Alt Metaverse, even new players who are playing Normal can compete with somebody.

It also doesn't hurt that we have do some special things like award our own medals, have a very active private forum, have our own Jester who provides us with jokes and have several fiction writers. Keeping folks interested is not just a matter of scoring, it's creating a community attitude and making it fun to be here.

http://www.galciv.com/forum.asp?BID=GF&id=67477

The program is no longer hosted on my website so the graphs aren't there anymore either unfortunately. The short explanation is that if you age to lower than 30% the old scores actually cause your score to *drop* even if you continue to submit games at the same rate and score range you always have. If you play constantly with the 20% basement then you actually peak at about month 10, watch your score drop for months, begin to climb slowly, and *finally* after 2 more years of playing you'll be back to where you were at month 10 or so.

I think Theoden summed it up pretty well - an active empire which offers far more than just submitting games. The CSF are fairly similar Tech - you have Damoose (amongst others), who rarely submits, but is still very interested in the mechanics and strategies of the game and very active in the forums.

Our own Genghis Hank is trying to reach the top 25 without ever playing a maso game - some feat. Myself, if I get bored I try a different approach to winning, or place restrictions on myself to make it harder.

In short, it is the community that keeps us all here I think.

I no but in my empire there are dozens of players that are not active. They maybe either playing and not bothering submitting because they see no point or have moved away from the game.

I actually really like the alternate Metaverse.

Hmmm...well, just submitted a game and my total games went down by two. At least the score went up!

Oooh, that shouldn't start happening to you until the middle of next month. Every other profile with game loss I have looked at only loses games after 331 days. :notsure:

Thanks Code Monkey for the link. What I have missed was the fact the 30% was not the decaying factor but what was left when there is no longer a decaying factor.
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About Code Monkey's calculations... even with 10% retention, a person who plays a lot, scores a bunch of points in a month, then stops playing for 1 year, then starts playing again in the 14th month, would still always be ahead of the person who starts on the 14th month, ceteris paribus.

No, they probably wouldn't. When they start playing again in the 14th month their score is the total [total aged scores]/[sqrt of games played]. Their 14 month games add a fraction of what the new player's games do. Yes, they can overcome this drag down by playing for *three* straight years before quitting for as long as they want but the new player will actually jump right ahead of most old timers if the old timers haven't been playing for maintenance purposes. Now, if psycho old timer actually jumps back in and begins to play heavily, they will eventually surpass younger players. The issue is whether a system which actually causes your total score to degrade for a period of more than a year even with you continuing to play (and it does) is a good idea, I think it's a terrible idea. They got around this by deciding to only age for a year and then dropping scores out of the calculation completely - which could be acceptable, except they went and boofed up everything surrounding this such as medals, games played, etc.

Most of this criticism is academic. Most people won't ever play the game long enough for these quibbles to make much of a difference. My complaint is that it's a shoddy system period. They made the metaverse a selling point of the game, screwed it up, and then said they don't care because not that many people use it anyhow. Now they're trying to release AP in 2 weeks with *new* metaverse features that currently are completely absent, it's more bad following bad.

Regardless, for those of us still paying attention a year later, that we not only have very flawed metaverse but are also losing something as basic as 'games played' is an insult to our loyalty. The metaverse was supposed to be a way to entice players to submit game data so the devs can improve the game further, I don't believe it succeeds on that front. Once I was willing to overlook the flaws since it was 'in progress' but that the old problems are still in place, that new problems are arising, and they are making more unproven promises regarding the future of the metaverse a full year after it was originally implemented leaves me feeling they're all talk and no substance on this element of the game.

No one should be penalized for playing the game over a long time. Why penalize loyalty?

He won't be the first - I was there a while back (admittedly before AP) as the only top 25 player without a maso game.

Alex


~SDC~

I am for aging to a degree, It gives a chance for new players to climb the standings :notsure:

I am at a point my old games are gone.

I was there very close to 3rd spot for weeks during the v1.13 days. I do not play MASO either. Although I have stopped making any headway now.

I do not agree with aging. I think that over time some people will just become tired of the game or move to playing other games.

Lets face reality, most games do not last much more than a year. Stardock has supported Galciv v1.xx for a year now and they are adding the new expansion pack in June. They are talking about v2.00 sometime before the end of the 2004.

At that point not many will be playing Galciv v1.xx anymore. The life of this game will have been about 2.5 years. I am sure that there will be a good following for v1.xx but it will decline rapidly.

Lets stop the aging of the metaverse and return the games / scores.

A little history.
Everytime the players have requested a scoring change it comes out worse than before. And I was part of a few of these requested changes, so I'm just as at fault as the next guy.

1. We wanted the alliance and the beyond human victories nerfed because after all, you shouldn't score points by hiding in the corner, hitting turn, and doing nothing. (this is important and we'll be revisiting this shortly)
At the time I suggested that a good scoring system should know the difference between having 3 planets in the corner and having the entire shebang save one planet. IE. A tech win with only one planet not taken should score about the same as a military win with one tech not researched. But a tech win where you hold 1 planet and were about to be crunched. should score quite a bit less.
So they nerfed em. (Isn't this one of the big complaints now?)

2. We wanted pop nerfed to stop guys like Staffa and I. So we nerfed pop. I suggested we reward pop at certain years and beyond that not. But that's not the way we nerfed it. And it had the unintended consequence of letting the air out of maso scores because wonders (which you get fewer of on Maso) became more important)

Then the maso players screamed and screamed that they were totally the best players and should be rewarded handily...and the crankers thrashed. Maso's 10 times harder. You peons can't play maso, therefore, you don't know. Blah blah blah. Oh it went on and on and on...

So we made another change and boosted maso hugely. And to stop milking, we just put a cap on.
Trouble is Maso isn't harder. It just involves exploits. And they are all published. And now we come to a situation where the best way to get to the top is to do guess what? Hide in the corner, hit turn, do nothing and get an alliance win for 60k, it can be done with one planet!!!!! Say this sounds familiar... Alternatively, on 1.02, do nothing, hide in the corner, hit turn untill terror star tech, send da constructors out 5 to a planet, then alpha strike the place (there will be no computer response) Say weren't these changes going to eliminate Cranking? OOPS.

As far as the aging goes, I'm against it. Why shouldn't it be tough to get to the top? If you don't want a bunch of dead players at the top, it takes a few lines of code to sort out the non active players, take them off the tables, and put them back on when they return. Many of the older players, knowing of the handicap of aging, jettisoned their old scores. I still think that's kind of cheating so I kept mine. still stayed near the top under several different scoring regimes despite the aging ball and chain. But eventually, unless there is much more score inflation, I will become stagnant. Come 6 more months for me and I either have to crank em out faster, or I become Stagnant. Of course, I can't see myself playing this game in 6 months. It's become far too easy. I can whip one out in 30 minutes if all goes well. Trouble is, I can only stand playing about an hour anymore. And I see no fun in running a monkey see, monkey do system as is required these days. The computer is absolutely no comp for me. I still use cntrl-n not because I can't win, but to save time.

Edit: (spoiler taken out. Sorry)

So now the thing to do is hide in the corner, hit turn and score big. That reminds me. What was our first change? Oh yeah. No one should be able to just hide in the corner and get a big score. HMMM. Funny how things come full circle.

Note: I use the term We, sometimes to note a change stardock made. I use it in the sense that we were as much a part of it as they as they were just trying to respond to us, even though they did the actual changing.

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I think I'd like to see them put their money into GC2 and make the game itself better.

The question you need to ask yourself, and I mean everyone who has a complaint about the system, is how important getting the system changed is to you. Is it extremely important and should be given top priority, or is it just something you'd like done?

If it is extremely important to you, I'm sure Stardock will try to address the issue. If not, I believe they currently have other projects that need their attention.