Ladder penalty point discussion

[Urmel]

So forgive me if the Nexuiz ladder isn't the first thing that pop's up in my mind.

Well, finally you've been managing to avoid penalties within the last 10 months since you joined the ladder, even under these unbelievably hard circumstances.

And no, you shouldn't been forgiven if you don't respond challenges by the right time. A ladder should be full with active players. But it's full with rather disinterested people who for example hardly managed to play four 1on1 matches in about 300 days

The fact that half the ladder is full of "competitors" like that, in combination with an ELO system that rather punishes players who frequently fight their matches makes me cry and if I were the rulz0r of the ladder, there would be penalties for not playing enough

Ok, that was a little off topic now, but in this sense, whining about some rudimentally demanding rules now is not very sportsmanlike and I still don' t get the point where the problem with the current rules is.

[ai]

Well, the main point is that PP's should or could be removed somehow. Currently they can't which is very very strict and no fun at all. And secondly, that thing I said about Nexuiz ladder isn't the first thing popping up in my mind is whenever I run intro trouble. Of course one does not care about anything else than solving the problem, if you immediately think about the ladder as soon as your computer/internet/apartment crashes/burns/explodes then I really feel for you.

[Urmel]

On one side you start a thread with a discussion about something you always managed to avoid, on the other side you try to mock me just for having my own point of view. What's your point actually?

[Dokujisan]

Urmel...I think his point is pretty clear.

People change. Things change. It's very much like the bad credit reporting in the U.S. If you are late on credit card payments, then you get bad credit, but you're not branded for life. You have the option of turning your credit around. Bad credit marks expires from your credit report after 7 years, and you can have good credit behavior added to your report to help improve your score.

[ai]

On one side you start a thread with a discussion about something you always managed to avoid, on the other side you try to mock me just for having my own point of view. What's your point actually?

I don't quite understand what you mean but I did not mock you. I just explained what I prioritize over other things. But if one is a hardcore gamer then probably he/she will prioritize the ladder over fixing one's computer/apartment. But I'm curious what did I manage to avoid? All these things I've talked about is particular to me, I'm not saying everyone has these problems. But when one do one might not be able, have time or even think about the ladder and gives you a PP. I have somehow managed to stay clear of PP's mostly because no one challenges me And I don't know too much about computer hardware but I have so far managed to fix some problems, unless they fix themselves which ironically (and luckily) is what happens most of the time .

But anyway, I just explained what usually happens to me when what I prioritize when it does happen. If it came off in a bad way and it seemed like I was rude or misbehaved I apologize

[divVerent]

As a non-member of the ladder, I still think it would be good if penalty points expire if you did not get any new penalty points for some time AND have played a certain number of matches.

Like, to make one PP expire, you have to wait three months without getting any additional PPs and play at least 10 matches in that time. The one of these events that comes last will get you rid of ONE PP, and to get rid of more PPs, the same routine would start again. That way, an active player can afford one PP every four months, while an inactive player would NOT get his PPs expired.

The idea is a bit similar to the German system with the points for drivers - for certain offenses, you get points. If you have 18 points, you lose your driver's license. If you do not get ANY additional points in two years, you lose ALL points you had. (actually, this is somewhat simplified compared to the actual law, but is usually right in practice). Still I'd think one should not lose ALL PPs for actively playing again, but just one PP in a certain time interval.

[Urmel]

To close this one thing:

ai, you managed to get any penalties (not even one!), even though since you joined

1. your CPU fan broke
2. your GPU broke
3. your PC crashed
4. you installed Linux
5. your ISP sucks
6. everything goes boom when sitting in front of your computer
7. you live alone and have no friends in your town
8. the ladder isn't the first thing that comes to your mind when going online
9. you are nearly as weird as kojn

So your'e my best evidence there is just no reason for you to be afraid about getting pens. GreEn doesn't have any sadistic tendencies and I'm sure he wont give you any pens if you ever get hospitalized. Actually he's a very sensible and nice person. That's what I wanted to tell you all the time

it would be good if penalty points expire if you did not get any new penalty points for some time AND have played a certain number of matches.

would be a nice idea as well, why not?

[GreEn`mArine]

Hehe, thanks for your support Urmel...

div0, could you please give me a nice formula how I should calculate the deletion of penalty points - actuallly most of the points you mentioned are realizable. But would it really make sense? ^^

And I wouldn't penetrate people for not playing much, anyway, if you think someone plays too little, just challenge him...

[divVerent]

Well... you would store in a database:

nPenalty: Number of Penalty points
lastPenaltyDate: Date of last penalty point
lastPenaltyMatches: Number of matches at last penalty point
nMatches: number of matches actually played

Now, the cleanup function (maybe it would be run daily) would work like this:

FOR each player with nPenalty > 0:
IF today >= lastPenaltyDate + MINDELAY AND nMatches >= lastPenaltyMatches + MINMATCHES THEN:
lastPenaltyDate = today; lastPenaltyMatches = nMatches; nPenalty--;

In SQL, it would look about like this:

to check for expired penalty points:

UPDATE players SET nPenalty = nPenalty - 1, lastPenaltyDate = NOW(), lastPenaltyMatches = nMatches WHERE nPenalty > 0 AND NOW() >= lastPenaltyDate + MINDELAY AND nMatches >= lastPenaltyMatches + MINMATCHES

to actually give someone a penalty point:

UPDATE players SET nPenalty = nPenalty + 1, lastPenaltyDate = NOW(), lastPenaltyMatches = nMatches WHERE id = THEPLAYERID

That way, penalty points expire after some time, but not by themselves. So someone who never accepts challenges would not get his points expired, even if nobody challenges him any more.

I'd say parameters for MINDELAY would be 30 to 90 days... and MINMATCHES would be 5 to 20 matches. Both of these need to be reached to expire a penalty point.

The problem is, when such a system is in place, someone may think "I play my 10 matches in two months, and then am entitled to not show up at a match at will". Maybe it could become an unwritten or enforced rule that someone who did not show up at a match will get challenged by the same challenger again; that is, there would be no way to actually "escape" a match, you can then just delay it. The only way to not have to play would be to give up the match, which earns the challenger a win.

[GreEn`mArine]

Thanks for the formula!

Actually the PPs are stored in the matches table in the DB. However, they are listed only on the player/team profile page. I did it that way because in the admjn interface I select the match to edit and then assign a PP to one of the participants. This design may not be optimal, but honestly the whole ladder code isn't very good either

But never the less I can still get the date of when the last PP was given (for finished matches I would take the date of when the match report was accepted and the match was published, for unfinished (deleted) matches I'd take the challenge-date itself). Getting the total number of played matches or total number of penalty points is easy, too. So basically your idea is probably better than just letting pass a defined amount of time and deleting the PP from a match if the date is older than 6 months or whatever the time is. Your proposed default values (10 matches to play after the last PP-match and this within 3 months or more) are not good imo. maybe 3 matches and 4 months ? Any ideas ?

Just for the other ones I'll describe how it would work (it's a script executed daily for checking the database for inactive users):

The script does the following for every player/team that has one or more PPs:

- Create a list of all PPs of the user, and when they happened (I'll use an array for this, I do this because this information is not always in the same field and as such I cannot jsut do one SQL query and sort it right from the beginning)
- Find out when the latest (the "newest") PP occured, store information in <lastPP> variable
- Only continue with the script, if the player has had <MINMATCHES> matches (FINISHED matches) after the <lastPP> point of time
- If condition above is true, check if the time difference between <NOW> and time of <oldestPP> is >= <MINTIME>, if yes, delete the oldest penalty point.

The last point will not run in a loop, but only once, so it would delete max 1 PP per script execute. Sicne players don't get PPs daily (but the will check it daily) this will be enough.

So as defaults I could propse:
<MINTIME> = 4 (minimum number of months to pass after the oldest penalty point)
<MINMATCHEs> = 3 (minimum number of consecutive matches that need to be played and finished after the last PP).