Alright, here's the deal. Right now the penalty point system is like that that if you have 4 PP's your out, gone, so dead and banned or something like that. And there is NO chance of trying to reduce the PP's so if you get one you'll get stuck with it FOREVER!
And I think I speak for many people when I say that we don't like that. There might be certain circumstances where we just cannot control it. Like not being available for certain reasons or whatever. And I just don't like it that you'll get punished for something that might not be your fault and would like to at least have the chance to make up for it. There should be some expiration or some other system where you can get rid of the PP's.
For instance, what if you're a good player and you're happy with your score and been playing for a long long time. And just 4 errors (and no chance of redeeming) is like stabbing that dedicated player in the back. And of course if it would be me I would NEVER re-enter the ladder cause of those stupid rules.

I even have been thinking of creating another ladder which actually gives PP's but they can be reduced.. like for instance after a certain amount of time (months). And I've seen that there was a poll in the 1on1 ladder about the PP's but it got locked right away with no chance of even discussing it. So that's why I reopen a new thread about the same thing. If you lock this one too then it's just stupid to be honest. (locking the first one was). Let people say what they think about this. Or at least explain why the PP's definitely won't ever dissapear? Too much work, not motivated or what?

Sorry if I sounded rude in this post but I am a little upset (and always been) about this matter, and never actually got a clear answer.

I am also interested in an explanation.

The amount of work is not huge to do that. Honestly I'd just have to extend the clean-up script that actually gives the automatic PPs for not reponding to challenges with a program code that checks how old the existing penalty points are and delete them. Would just be 1-2 hours of work, of course there's not too much motivation and little time , but if pressure is big enough I'll do it.

Up to now I wanted it to handle it the way that after 5 PPs people get out. Anyway, if PPs were about to expire, I will of course lower the amount of PPs which lead to a ban to 2 or 3, otherwise the PPs would effectively be ineffective as only people who want to have PPs on purpose would be banned.

The reason for PPs leading to a ban is primarily to get rid of "idlers", which means players or teams who just don't play anymore, and who ignore their match notification emails (on purpose, or not) of new challenges, as well as getting rid of geeks who got PPs in matches for other reasons (cheating, using old versions, rude behavior, etc.)

Anyway, as I think "5" PPs are very much, and the mentioned circumstances are not convincing to me, so my personal vote is to change nothing. If one's internet is broken one can be able to decline open challenges and set himself inactive from another PC, and for anything else there's the inactivity setting. I'll unlock the voting thread again and I ask the people to continue voting there, but to continue discussing here (although I guess that the poll will be the bottom line for me to code it or not).

Maybe a stupid idea, but how about a possibility to get rid of PPs by passing a certain amount of ELOs? I'm thinking about maybe 20 to 50 ELO points for one Pen Point.

I can just say that this would technically be doable but it smells like a sale of indulgences to me...

Yeah. Maybe it's because I can't follow ai's point of view about the "certain circumstances where we just cannot control it". On one side it's possible to set yourself inactive for a very long time, and on the other side you've got two weeks time to respond to a challenge.

Sorry, it's not a matter of uncontrollable circumstances, it's just a matter of lacking discipline if you forget to login for more than 14 days. Even if you lose your inet connection at home, everybody has one or more friends where they can go online.

Are there any other uncontrollable circumstances that cause you pens?

So if you want to get rid of your pen points, just pay!

Well I have lots of uncontrollable circumstances, many of them are computer related and lately even apartment related. Which is, sometimes my computer fers up and does exactly what it shouldn't at the absolute time where this should not even be possible to happen. My computer have crashed, restarted, blue screened, stopped working, shutting itself down and it fucking even have singed and danced mocking me. And I live alone with no friends in this city. Sometimes my ISP fers up too and just recently my entire apartment exploded. At least all the lamps, and yes, literally the lamps exploded. For no reason whatsoever. I just sat in front of the computer and booom! Everything went dark.

I now have a new computer but of course guess what.. even THIS one fers up... WTH!?!? Anyway, the other circumstances that came to my mind was other things like accidents, hospitalized, job related things etc.. be creative.

And finally, when these things happen to me, I'm sorry maybe it's just me but, I don't really think about or care about the Nexuiz ladder and worrying about my PP's when I even don't have a computer working which I use for school, work and other things than just playing Nexuiz (yes it's true). So forgive me if the Nexuiz ladder isn't the first thing that pop's up in my mind.

If you have such problems I suggest you set yourself inactive for 2-3 weeks, since you couldn't play ladder matches anyway, since everything explodes every 2 minutes, right?

Your power supply is broken and will damage your computer, as well as your lights which exploded because of overvoltage. Think about it when ruining a new computer PSU with that.

I didn't over voltage anything. I been having the same machines plugged in for months and then just one day it decided to to explode. Just out of the blue, totally unprovoked. And as far as the setting myself inactive would be good, just that I cannot control these things, they happen whenever they feel like. It can go weeks and months with nothing happening and then suddenly it goes all wrong. It's like it's having it's own life. An alien race have put a beacon on my for bad luck...

I feel you man. My apartment is getting a bit crazy also lately. My lamps exploded (no glass shattering though)... I need to buy 7-8 lamps :/

And I don't like that the PP is stuck for ever.

ai wrote: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.

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.

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?

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.

Urmel... wrote: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

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.

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

divVerent wrote: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?

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...

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.

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).

This design really sounds slow and maybe error prone. Before running it, please check manually if it does what it should do right.

With just three matches and four months required to get rid of one PP, I'd propose the limit of PPs to be set to three - four points and you're out.

As another idea, offenses may generate more than one PP and the limit could be kept. Basically, deliberate rule violations may be worth two PPs (like, leaving the server, or entering a wrong/incomplete result), while accidental mistakes would be worth just one (like, not recording the demo, not accepting/declining a challenge).

As for the numbers - I did not expect ladder players to be so "inactive"... just three matches in four months...

divVerent wrote:As for the numbers - I did not expect ladder players to be so "inactive"... just three matches in four months...

Umm yeah, I can back that

well, it could also be 6 matches in four months, or even an different system, that the number of matches played will reduce the required timespan of, lets say, 6 months by some amount (the more matches played the shorter it gets...so basically the system that was proposed at first, to have a PP to be deleted after a fixed amount of time, but to be able to decrease that time by playing matches in the meantime). This would, however, also allow inactive people to get rid of their PPs after some time...

What do youguys think about that?

Sounds very good to me.

you can call me stoopid, I don't understand

but I trust you...

GreEn`mArine wrote:well, it could also be 6 matches in four months, or even an different system, that the number of matches played will reduce the required timespan of, lets say, 6 months by some amount (the more matches played the shorter it gets...so basically the system that was proposed at first, to have a PP to be deleted after a fixed amount of time, but to be able to decrease that time by playing matches in the meantime). This would, however, also allow inactive people to get rid of their PPs after some time...

Actually, my idea was the opposite - one would have to wait BOTH some time AND actually play to get rid of penalty points.

One COULD use a more complex logic, like, expire penalty points whenever "matches played since last PP was given" * "time passed since last PP was given" exceeds 24 "monthmatches". That way, you'd be rid of one PP if you play 6 matches in four months, if you play 3 matches in eight months, if you play 24 matches in one month, whatever... but if you do not play at all, the PPs won't expire. That would have the nice effect that someone who has a penalty point actually gets motivated to challenge other players so he can get rid of his PPs faster, and each match would count, not just that minimum count.

But I think such a logic would be too complicated - not too complicated to implement, but too complicated to understand by a "mere player".

A compromise may be "expire a penalty point IMMEDIATELY if 6 matches have been played since the point was given, or otherwise in four months, given that one has played at least two matches in that time". That has a similar effect - someone who has a PP is more happy if he can lose his point fast, so he will play his six matches to get rid of the PP and not try to just wait the four months.

The thing is, I know about the "maths" of such models - but not about the psychologic effects of them. But I know for sure that never expiring PPs cause a bad effect on the mood of a player who got one without really being at fault - which CAN happen.

Actually, my idea was the opposite - one would have to wait BOTH some time AND actually play to get rid of penalty points.

Yeah, I did get that

One COULD use a more complex logic, like, expire penalty points whenever "matches played since last PP was given" * "time passed since last PP was given" exceeds 24 "monthmatches". That way, you'd be rid of one PP if you play 6 matches in four months, if you play 3 matches in eight months, if you play 24 matches in one month, whatever... but if you do not play at all, the PPs won't expire. That would have the nice effect that someone who has a penalty point actually gets motivated to challenge other players so he can get rid of his PPs faster, and each match would count, not just that minimum count.

Also is a good thing (and indeed not too complicated to implement). But as you said, it might get too complicated to understand for a "mere player" ^^

The systems that were suggested so far are:

• Automatically delete a PP once it is older than x months (6 months for example)
• Delete a PP after X months (e.g. 4 months) OR also delete it (immediately) if 6 matches were finished after the PP
• Introduce something like "monthmatches", which is the product of played matches after last PP * 'time passed since last PP (in months). To delete a PP the player needs to gain a fixed amount of monthsmatches (e.g. 24). This can be achieved by playing at least one game (because otherwise the equation will always be 0), and e.g. get the PP deleted by playing 1 match * in 24 months or by playing 24 matches * in 1 month or in any other mathematically possible way to get a number >= 24 !
• both of these conditions must be fulfulled in order to delete the PP: some months have to pass (e.g. 4 months) AND the player must have played a defined number of matches (not neccesarily within these 4 months, but before that number of matches wasn't played, the PP won't expire either)

Any more reasonable suggestions? Otherwise I'd suggest to have a poll first that choses the kind of system to use, and after that a poll that goes into details about the defined values for the variables.

I did some empiric tests using these four models in a Python script using Gnuplot - and found that they are more or less equivalent, but the parameters need to be chosen differently.

The only difference is how they motivate the players or not.