I appreciate the thought that Ryan and all you others are putting into this. I also think the present system is pretty darn good.

- Yes, there are unwinnable opening positions. A perfect scoring system would take this into account and say, "you got 5 isolated countries, your break even point is 6th place." But if you spent the time required to program that logic you might as well use it to ensure relatively even starting positions instead. The better solution is for players who get a bad beat to jump back in another game and win some points.

- Playing for high position without going for the win is lame. The ideal system would reward players who try to win even if they fall short and punish those who just try not to lose.
The 'only winner scores' variation would eliminate the reward for just hanging around. However, it would not distinguish between a player who fought a good fight and came up just short from a player who turtles up after round two and just happens to be far from the winner's corner. I am not sure it would be an overall improvement.

- What I *would* like to see is some punishment for quitters. The point of the game is to play, and a person who bails out after two turns is worse that one with poor skills.
Since random disconnections are a fact of the internet, we could define quitting as missing three straight turns. Under the current system, that could freeze your score at whatever you would get if you were eliminated at that point (while your armies remain on the board as now.) If we moved to an only-winner-scores plan, then a quitter would get docked a specific number of points.

In regards to your last point, some people will make you wait twenty minutes before they kill of your last guy, why punish people for quitting?! It's not their fault.

After another 15 or so games I have to restate my position that this scoring system is pointless. After playing hard and obtaing a rating of 350, the next 4 games were played with me going out either before I had a move or after only 1 move (where my territory with 6 die attacked territories with 2 and lost both times). My rating went back to 50.

In chess you at least have several turns to use your strategy to move yourself into position to defend yourself. Here - you have no control. Only with immense luck are you able to hopefully get good starting position and good rolls.

I once again say that the idea of this ELO system makes no sense for a game like this. You might as well make this a slot machine game - because there is too much chance and luck involved - as opposed to skill.

Practically every person that I see with large ranks is back to zero within a few games. The only people making the leaderboard have very suspicious win percentages (like the guy who has won 85% of his games..... I doubt that is possible even for the smartest player).

Ryan, even your own stats have gone up and down (how many games have you played so far.... have you seen how practically every person at every table bitches about this scoring system?).

I'll keep playing just for the fun of the game - but until this scoring system is overhauled I doubt you will get any folks that become longterm players (at least for points).

To play devil's advocate:
The example you picked has only played 7 games. It's easy to make enough alt accounts until you win 6 out of 7. As average rating goes up he'll drop off the board. Most of the people high up get 1st or 2nd in over half of the games, and the exceptions are on a winning streak, so the scores make sense. It would be dull if you couldn't have a bad game and couldn't get punished heavily for having that bad game.

I was actually thinking about this some last night.

The difference in skill between a 3rd and 7th place finish is not that great. In fact, I've seen quite a few games where the 7th place player went out based on pure luck and the 3rd or 4th player went out just because he happened to have two countries that were a pain to get to and/or he picked off a weaker country at the right time.

Also, it's not very fun when people are playing for 3rd or 4th. What ends up happening is that whoever gets an early lead is for all intents and purposes unbeatable and everyone else just picks off the weakest and then quits.

I think to discourage some of this, a better point spread would be (if 150 points are at stake:

1st 100
2nd 50
3rd -15
4th -25
5th -35
6th -40
7th -40

Something like that, anyway.. That makes it not such a big difference between 3rd and last place and encourages people to gang up on the leaders a bit more and try for at least second place.

As it is now, I think it's kind of silly that if there are 3 empires with 2 countries each and one empire with 6 (just to simplify), the correct strategy is for the small countries to attack each other. In no way does that make sense if the goal of the game is to 'win'

The current system based on ranking and deviation from ranking means that equally ranked players will score (some multiple of)

3, 2, 1, 0, -1, -2, -3 , depending on position.

It might be good to make these 'reward factors' , say

5, 2, 0, -1, -1.5, -2, -2.5 - still averaging 0, but with a bigger reward for winning.

This would be implemented by using this score instead of the rank (actually using 4 minus this score instead of the rank)

On the other issue, K values and starting scores, scaling the K value on its own makes no difference, if it had been 8 rather than 32 from the start, all the scores would just be a quarter what they are.

But, if we are starting from 0, then a high K value for low rated games will get people started, and lower K values further up will reduce the volatility.

If we start with 1600, there is no reason to treat 0 any differently to how we do now, it will be a small source of extra points.

Finally, lets not make it too serious because it would be easy to cheat and it would be better to stay as a fun game.

Just wanted to voice my support for keeping the placing system rather than win/lose. It makes the end game much more interesting, I find, than gang up on leader constantly until someone is able to somehow overcome it. Current system is less likely to promote long stalemates.

I also just wanted to voice my support for the current system in place.

sure your score could go to zero at with a couple bad games, but thats what makes this game so interesting.

Personally i think the scoring system is fine, but I'm sure whatever it is changed to it wont be that big of a deal since the game itself is so much fun.

Forums which lose your entire post if your login times out? Ick.

Anyway, I like the rating system, but I have a few suggestions:

1. The current rating is quite a fun number to play with, but as it's so volatile it's not a good indication of how good a player is. Some people seem to get upset if their rating drops very low, when they know they're playing quite well, and would probably prefer a more representative number to be displayed. Perhaps we could track the ratings as we do now, but the number we display in public could be an average of a player's rating over time? It could be flat, like the last n (10?) ratings, or weighted, after each game take the long-term rating, take off 10%, and add the latest volatile rating.

2. I like the system of placing within the game, rather than winner-takes-all, but I think it could be improved. For one thing, at the moment, the difference between 6th place and 7th place counts for as much as the difference between 1st and 2nd, and I think that's wrong - we should have a non-linear scale so that higher places make more difference. Also, perhaps placing shouldn't work just on when you're eliminated? If you accumulated points during the game for various actions, we could then place the losing players in order according to these scores, not just when they were finally eliminated. For example, you could score a point every turn for every dice you have on the board, or for every territory you hold, or for every dice you eliminate in a successful attack.

The 3:57am entry on this thread shows up as an error message for me, so I'm not sure this entry will work. (The error says: Fatal error: Call to undefined method comment::name() in /home/gpokr/gplayr/include/default.topic.inc on line 144)

I just wanted to comment on one aspect I do not like about the current scoring system. It does, as Ryan suggested, encourage people to play others at their same level. However, as an above-1800 rated player, it's taking forever to get a game started...I mean I'll wait at a table for half an hour and still no game. (I haven't waited longer yet, but at the current pace, I could see it taking several hours). Of course it's better at certain times of the day, but the site doesn't have the critical mass of popularity at this point to allow playing games with people of your own level, at odd times, without a long wait.

I could go to the lower ranked games, but if people there understand the rating system, they know that they should wipe me out pronto. My 150 point loss is their gain. The thing I like about kdice is it's a nice quick-paced game, but with waiting around so long to start a game, it loses that entirely.

I think for now I'll switch to lower ranked games, and have my score tanked until I won't be singled out for early destruction. Shouldn't take long. :-)