Some thoughts about scoring in Galaxy Trucker Digital
Galaxy Trucker Digital has an interesting scoring system.
There is a base score for if you made a profit (i.e. did not lose completely) of 100 points, and a couple of multipliers for game length and type of game. Most importantly, you get points for who you defeated in the game. These are added to your base points, and the multipliers are applied. The actual credits scored in the game do not come into it at all.
The points for who you beat are the interesting bit. You get 20 points per level of the person you beat. You go up levels according to what appears to be a geometric scale.
So what is my point about all this?
I was investigating the leaderboard earlier today. It ranks every online player according to their total point score - not level. I'm in the top 100 players in the world. So I looked around at the other players, and that is where I noticed something odd.
With many such leaderboards, you see scores per rank fairly level to begin with, with jumps between them very small, and then a series of discontinuities, as many players drop out, a general levelling out, and then a another batch of larger discontinuities, and so on until you reach the top 10, where you see a whole lot of massive - usually exponential - jumps from 1st to 2nd to 3rd.
In GTD, you do not see the top-end jumps so much. The top 100 are pretty even, and you only see larger jumps in the top 10. But those jumps are not huge - in fact they are only slightly more than proportional, meaning that a place in the top 10 - or even first place - is actually quite achievable, even with thousands of players!
Which means that CGE have got it right, in a way that almost every other tournament does not.
There is a base score for if you made a profit (i.e. did not lose completely) of 100 points, and a couple of multipliers for game length and type of game. Most importantly, you get points for who you defeated in the game. These are added to your base points, and the multipliers are applied. The actual credits scored in the game do not come into it at all.
The points for who you beat are the interesting bit. You get 20 points per level of the person you beat. You go up levels according to what appears to be a geometric scale.
So what is my point about all this?
I was investigating the leaderboard earlier today. It ranks every online player according to their total point score - not level. I'm in the top 100 players in the world. So I looked around at the other players, and that is where I noticed something odd.
With many such leaderboards, you see scores per rank fairly level to begin with, with jumps between them very small, and then a series of discontinuities, as many players drop out, a general levelling out, and then a another batch of larger discontinuities, and so on until you reach the top 10, where you see a whole lot of massive - usually exponential - jumps from 1st to 2nd to 3rd.
In GTD, you do not see the top-end jumps so much. The top 100 are pretty even, and you only see larger jumps in the top 10. But those jumps are not huge - in fact they are only slightly more than proportional, meaning that a place in the top 10 - or even first place - is actually quite achievable, even with thousands of players!
Which means that CGE have got it right, in a way that almost every other tournament does not.
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