Faction Scoring Equality

I agree in theory. If you scored by average points instead of size of team who would be winning right now?

Couldn't you also say that getting more of our friends to play would generate more points for our teams.

Good point. Maybe both numbers are valuable.

I agree with you both, but there is something else at play with this too, that is personal choice. We each, when we picked our faction had to think of several things:

Who needs the help more(according to your own opinions)

Which charity, if I had to pick just one, would I support if not for the game

Which faction needs me more

And most of all, Do I play this to WIN points or do I play this to help the charity that is dear to my heart

Some, and I dont judge, will play for points and fun, that is to be expected, and the winning team will most likely be The Trees each week, strength in numbers is true.

The rest of us that really like the points but the charity is the main thing for us, will just say, congrats and move on. We are doing our part, all of us, even the ones just here for points and to win, are doing it for charity! Yeah!

I know, realistically that I am going to be behind in points, I did not get to do the community challenges, but I wwill do as much as I can and that is all that was asked of us. Congrats to EVERYONE - Charities, players, PTI team and sponsors/supporters, EVERYONE WINS! Micci

The problem with doing the standings based on average score per player is that it penalizes teams that have casual players on them, and we really don't want to do that. (Casual players would bring the average down.)

If your faction needs more points, you should recruit your friends and family to play the game. Even if all they do is the web-based challenges, they'll still be earning points for your faction. The more people you recruit, the better your faction will do.

Then in that case, let's get more people playing for The Watch!

I'd like to know the numbers of team members per team and statistics about 'casual players'. Is there a place on the site where statistics are being posted?

Not at this point. We may be providing raw numbers of players per faction at some point, but I doubt that we'll be providing statistics about use before the game is over.

Can you tell me how many sign ups there are for each faction?

@kensmithjr

"Log out", go to URL
http://picturetheimpossible.com/leaderboard

When you are not logged in the URL shows you the bottom of the score list rankings. When I just did it just a moment ago there were 955 people who have registered.

Crunch the numbers to get your answer. I got roughly:
368 Tree
293 Watch
293 Forge

Okay so which faction has the casual players? Have you seen the scores today?

Interesting idea JJJ, but notice the leaderboard top 20 is predominately Watch and they're in 3rd place. Personally, I think the Tree has the greatest numbers of participants, the watch has the highest average/person in pts but not enough people, and the Forge falls somewhere between. The Forge has been heavily recruiting new players and it shows in the standings that even latecomers and casual players add up in the end.

I was waiting till 8pm to see how this weekend turned out before posting. Despite our best efforts the Watch was barely able to come in at second in Week 6. With the current scoring approach the only way that a faction has a reasonable chance of winning is if the number of players is approximately equal across the factions. While it is certainly possible for all players to attempt to recruit others for their faction, it stands to reason that a faction that already has more players would be able to recruit a disproportionately larger number of players. Next year I hope that PTI will develop a scoring system that does not penalize charities with smaller factions.

Also, there was a time when a mistake in the newspaper caused something like 250 points to be awarded to all current players. As Tree was by far the largest faction at that time, they benefited the most from this decision. A perhaps better decision would have been to not award any points in that case, since no faction would have benefited. Please consider this in future games.

That has, frankly, been the most demotivating aspect of the game.

Foster Family, I understand your frustration, we in the Forge have had it too. The problem is that there is no way to ensure an even number of signups in all factions when given the choice.

Trying to average pts within a faction presents a whole new challenge; do you use all players, only active players for that week, players with > XXX number of points,weighted average, median, straight average. If you check into each faction's user list, you'll see there are a lot of players with < 250 pts that came in played a few games and never returned. It doesn't matter how they figure the percentages, someone will always call foul.

Personally, I commend the Watch players for their tenacity and loyalty to the game. Your faction has had the least number of overall players, yet you have managed to hang on to the 2nd place most weeks. True coming in 1st has evaded your grasp, but your charity is still benefitting from your actions. Be proud of what you have accomplished.

Well, one approach to dividing charity money would be to normalize the scores for the number of players in each faction who have non-zero scores. As a simple example imagine Faction A has 100 players with non-zero scores while Faction B has 50 - when determining how to divide up money for charities multiply Faction B's score by 2.

This approach rewards factions that work harder and that recruit new members who work harder while not penalizing charities supported by smaller factions.

Most members of the Watch are not concerned about the factions' scores per se; we would just like to have had an opportunity for WCP to have benefited more by our hard work. PTI's description of the Watch includes this: "Inventiveness and a sense of justice and fairness are your hallmarks." Many of us joined the Watch because we identified with this description!

I have been thinking of completely different ways of handling the problem. One situation which presented itself to me is to abandon the concept of awarding money per fFactions scores, and instead award all money in one week to one charity. fFactions do seem to encourage a kind of team spirit, but it just doesn't seem like there is any way to fFairly give awards to one group over another. It seems to me the fFactions are too large to engage massive strategic change across more than a handful of participants. And, fFor whatever reason, different fFactions seem better at tackling different kinds of challenges.

I had considered requiring people to break into smaller teams -- maybe a fFaction is too large. But I see problems here. If everyone must meetup with their team, it could be difficult fFor some to fFind such a team, and then actually meetup with them. fFactions do orient a lot of people to work towards similar tasks quite effectively. I like that.

fFaction-based awards might be fFeasible in some situation where each fFaction chooses a small team of 5 or 10 people to do some task. Or, perhaps, in a race to see which fFaction can accomplish some substantial task fFirst. I have a concept in mind where a live event happens on a certain day, people break into teams, and the best team wins money fFor their fFaction.

I do kind of enjoy being part of the trees, who have such a solid lead. But I also fFeel sort of guilty, too, ya know? I'm kind of afraid to tell people I'm with the tree, when I meet them on the SCVNGR hunts. It's nice to be on a winning team, but I would welcome some greater equity on the matter.

Excellent post, Scott. Some of those ideas sound like fun.