Messages

31

Suggestions / Re: Additional points

« on: October 10, 2012, 08:19:18 pm »

- This bug that you create x engines in a depot and shoot up your company value i heard of this before. Didnt know if that was true or not but thats a pain indeed. Isnt there a possibility to substract this in the CV-calculation formula? (something like: CV" = CV - (engines [complete trains] that have <=0 income this year * their value) ? Or is that to simply thought?

well in the mindmap linked above i tackled it with subtracting the total value of all stopped/crashed vehicles. but you are right, i have also added "total value of all vehicles without positive income is SUBTRACTED" now. should be technically possible but right now everything is still nothing but theory.

- The thing i mentioned about the different cargo types is also a fragile part because a few short trains with different types and i transported 8/8 types cargo.

yes, good point.
what would be also a way to circumvent the problems of perf. ranking while keeping its positive aspects would be to not use perf. but making the same criteria part of the score algorithm, just in a smarter way.
e.g. we give a reward for cargo diversity too (like +1 XP for every cargo type transported) but only cargo types that you transport at least 20% of the amount of your most used cargo type are counted. that means if you focus on coal and transport 100,000 tonnes of coal per quarter you must at least transport 20,000 litres of oil to have oil count as another cargo type you are seriously transporting.
this won't be 100% accurate as not all units of all cargo types work on the same scale and not all industries grow their production the same, but it should still do a much better job than only checking whether any single object of a specific cargo type was transported.
put that idea also into the mindmap.

- You must be joking that you have the option to send money to other companies on? ... really :/

players like to use it to boost each other and lend each other money, it often leads to a quite social gameplay i often wonder about. and as long as the score system isn't just depending on money or CV alone the advantages of money transfer aren't really big (except in the beginning, as i mentioned, initial boosting...). it has always been enabled and didn't cause any problems in the past.
circumventing weaknesses in the score algorithm by disabling game features is never an elegant solution, rather a last resort of there is no other way to mitigate a potential problematic effect. i still hear you that this poses a higher risk of getting abused than many other features and we should watch it carefully. but this we can still review again when the score idea is finished - then we'll see whether disabling it would be necessary or the benefit from it would be too small to have a considerable effect.

- And if possible calculate the time taken on a monthly or quarterly base. Instead of only yearly

unfortunately one technical limitation comes into play here: the CV value OpenTTD gives out to external applications over its interface is only updated quarterly, so that would be the lowest possible interval we can depend on (i know the OpenTTD client calculates it locally and real-time, but it can do this only because it has more data than our external application and has the exact same formula programmed into it as the server).
apart from that your suggestion is not really clear to me. calculate what against what? the time taken after a quarter...is a quarter. so i guess you mean see how much the CV has raised between quarters? and then give scores for it, more scores the more the CV increased within that quarter? or only check quarterly whether the goal was reached and at the end give higher score the lower the amount of years played is?

That said, im no coder or anything so i have no clue how easy/hard this stuff is

that's why on the right side in my picture i included every piece of information the game is giving me as a coder, but explained as normal text, so everyone knowing OpenTTD should be able to understand it. everything you see there can theoretically be taken, summed up, averaged, calculated against other values, measured on different scales, set in relation to other values, get multiplied by other values, get added or subtracted...whatever helps. which values you consider, how much weight you give each value and the way you let it influence the final score is more a mathematical and logical question than one for coders.

32

Suggestions / Re: Additional points

« on: October 10, 2012, 06:23:28 pm »

I believe your servers are goal games right, not make the most stations or deliver all kinds of cargo's.

actually i like the idea of goals that make features attractive that otherwise nobody would care about. e.g. making various cargo types being delivered a necessity forces players to play the game with all its aspects instead of just playing game number 100 of type "who is the fastest to connect all oil wells".
but that's for sure a question of taste and at least for the goal part they could even be different between servers, so we could satisfy different tastes. as long as the score system is somehow universal...

Otherwise you could just ignore the CV and focus purely on 999 perf rating, which might be interesting aswell (read: also annoying to reach . )

systems that depend purely on a single value can be easily cheated. we started with only CV considered and how long the game takes and people won the games with high scores by buying 300 train engines unused in the depot as soon as they had the money for it.
as perf is already a value consisting of several other things it is not as vulnerable as CV but it's still not enough to depend on it alone. also it has some disadvantages that you have mentioned which also would be compensated if other values are relevant too.

the more values you consider for the score
- the more flaws some values might have on their own compensate each other when used in a mix
- the lower is the chance of something being cheated

Tbh the best thing to do is have your score be highly (read: almost completely) dependant on the time it takes you to reach the goal

apart from the problems mentioned above this would also exclude the idea to give XP monthly. and if the goal is only CV i can play a normal game and short before the end i create a new company and send all my money over to that new company. i wait a bit more until i got enough to reach the CV goal and send this over too, making my new company win a huge goal within only a year = crazy amount of points.
also, "time it takes you to reach the goal" in relation to what? and how would that work on a short server where you only need 1-2 game years to win it?
but yes, currently it IS part of the calculation so it DOES work, but again only as one part in a bigger mix.

basically there is 10 good ideas how to do a score system and 9 of them eventually suffer from all sorts of vulnerabilities.

I dont get why you would use performance rating as a measurement for skill and exp reward.

it would be one aspect among many others so it wouldn't have a very high weight in the overall XP calculation (as everything else).

33

Suggestions / Re: Additional points

« on: October 09, 2012, 05:45:53 pm »

the right side shows what data is technically available and could be used for scoring, so you get an idea what's available. the left side is some first brainstorming based on several ideas that were posted here:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/21345942/OpenTTD_GS_data.png

tell me your thoughts on it.

34

Suggestions / Re: CityBuilder - share ideas/comments

« on: October 09, 2012, 05:41:30 pm »

since we set the CV goal to 0 i don't think it is possible at all. the current score algorithm does not consider CV higher than the goal CV, hence your CV is always treated as being 0 and you never get scores. check for your additional points thread for ideas about a new score system, until something like that is in place there probably won't be any scoring on CB servers.

35

Ban/Unban Requests / Re: Inappropriate admin behavior - Geert

« on: October 09, 2012, 02:49:30 pm »

With so many retarded morons on this server I guess my place is not here... OK good to know.

Cheers

thanks for invalidating all your former arguments (and possible future arguments), showing what type of person you really are and assuring us all of the correctness of the actions that have been taken. i absolutely agree that your place is not here and conversion of the temporary ban to a permanent ban now will make sure you won't have any such bad experiences again (e.g. servers where rules are actually taken serious).

@Geert: good job here.

36

Suggestions / Re: CityBuilder - share ideas/comments

« on: October 07, 2012, 08:10:31 pm »

and if necesarie, compute diferent things in diferent servers to get an homogeneous score.

your sentence points out the problem pretty well. did you notice you just said: "different + different = homogeneous"? it's full of variables that don't have anything to do with each other. how do you want to bring them together?
and yes, we do plan to run several CB servers, as this seems to be a very popular game mode. i don't see a reason to extrapolate when we are going from one score system to 2. if you're married for 1 year with your wife and have 1 child, i will tell you in 20 years you will have 20 children from 20 wives. do you think that's a correct interpretation of the tendency? 

Your preocupation in relationate CV and population is excesive, although you say, they grow separately and is not related. You must get x points for x population, at equal you get x point for x CV.

it doesn't work like this, CV grows faster than population and it doesn't grow in a linear way. you might have 10 million for 5,000 population. then you got 100 million while at 7,000 population. then you got 500 million at 9,000 population.
it will be more like f(x) = 2 * (x - 2)³ - 0,0005 * (x-2)² +2 or something.
tell me the formula how they are related and we can do it 

37

Ban/Unban Requests / Re: Cossack

« on: October 07, 2012, 07:59:18 pm »

the format is MM/DD/YYYY, not DD/MM/YYYY

38

Ban/Unban Requests / Re: Cossack

« on: October 07, 2012, 12:05:42 pm »

two and half months the ban is. it was said earlier and you have seen it.

There's no dispute that the n-ice servers are the best on the game and i can't really comprehend not being able to play here for two and half months.

to speak in exact dates here's the entry from our ban list:
alex879ro "Cossack(UK) - Reasons described on the forum in the Unban Section", Ban date: 08/27/2012 01:34:43, Expires at:  11/10/2012 01:34:43

39

Suggestions / Re: CityBuilder - share ideas/comments

« on: October 07, 2012, 10:51:39 am »

our problem was that we also wanted to integrate CB into our existing score system. that score system does know nothing about "population", so you could have won a CB game but if your CV wasn't good you would have gotten 0 points for it. hence the idea to also show CV in the goal so it is transparent to players that CV is also necessary if you want to get scores. we cannot just add population to the score algorithm, because nobody knows what would be fair equivalents of CV and population. would it be fair to give the same score for 5000 inhabitants than for 100 million euro CV? or rather for 10,000 inhabitants?
and even if you find two numbers that are matching: growth rate of CV and population are different and both are not linear. it would be nearly impossible to integrate it in a fair way, arguments would arise whether CB servers got an advantage for scoring or "normal" servers.

anyway, remember the server name is TEST and it was meant to find out exactly about things like this. and what we have learned is that
- the additional CV goal contradicts the whole CityBuilder idea too much and fades out the actual town growing idea
- there won't be a fair way to include population goals into the current score system

next step is to draw conclusions from it and come up with new ideas. on this thread lots of ideas were discussed how the score system could be changed. it seems it goes into the direction of having a separate score system for CB, including a separate highscore table and personal scores.
also we are thinking about changing the system to give scores (or maybe call it XP then and give players ranks/levels?) every quarter to resolve the unfortunate situation where people play 80% of the time on a server but aren't connected when the game is won, not getting any points for it. with points/XP every quarter players could even go to a long run server and only participate for one or two game hours, still getting some points.

40

Suggestions / Re: Additional points

« on: October 07, 2012, 10:37:09 am »

yeah i guess we will end up using data we can get in a mixture and then use the delta between quarters to calculate scores given per quarter. we can take many things into account: transported CV, perf., income, transported cargo, number of vehicles, number of stations...plus the ideas TechNoir had on his initial post, remove XP if you had vehicle crashes and so on...
and then every quarter you get a message like:
*** You received [14 XP] for your efforts in the last quarter, you now got a total of [1,337 XP]

41

Suggestions / Re: Alert players who haven't set password for their company/companies..?? whatever!

« on: October 07, 2012, 10:28:19 am »

yeah, so far it looks like we're going to get the alert. but we need more votes before we can really decide also on the interval.

42

Suggestions / Re: Additional points

« on: October 05, 2012, 10:51:58 pm »

it seems more and more like for the CityBuilder servers we will need a separate scoring system. so alex and me just discussed the idea that we could use this chance of starting over to test such a system there: let the CB servers have gradual scoring (e.g. tied to the growth of your city between quarters). as CB scoring would start at 0 we have the chance to play around with new scoring ideas in this sandbox, so we should use it 

43

Suggestions / Re: Additional points

« on: October 05, 2012, 10:16:02 pm »

the very basic idea sounds good, because even on a long run server players can get scores when they only want to play an hour or so.
in a next step we should be more clear about what "making things" would mean.

something that was also discussed between admins on IRC a very long time ago was some kind of XP system, like other games have it. so you get XP for certain things, you level up with certain XP amounts, maybe also make achievements part of that.
the hard part will be deciding what to give XP for. delta of CV to the CV you had last quarter? same for income? or for transported cargo amounts? giving it only for building wouldn't be a good idea, people could start to abuse it by spamming unused structures everywhere.

44

Suggestions / Re: City builder test #k1 -- enable "never expire vehicles"

« on: October 05, 2012, 05:52:55 pm »

i wouldn't mind. it gives more freedom of choice to people while not having a too high impact on gameplay. anyone else seeing a problem with it? maybe i am missing something.

45

Suggestions / Re: Alert players who haven't set password for their company/companies..?? whatever!

« on: October 03, 2012, 11:55:50 pm »

i agree that still many players seem to forget it, although ST2 also has a point there, because you only need to remember this "Default password" button a single time and from then on no longer have problems, as your client will always automatically set a password.
anyway, such warnings have already been programmed and i would only need to enable it in the configuration, so it would be no problem to do it. although it does not "prompt" the player, it would only be warning messages on the chat.

anyway, maybe there are players that just want to reply on the company protection on our servers and wouldn't want annoying warnings? let us know your opinion...
if we would enable it: in what intervals should the warning be shown? every 5 minutes? 10?