Penalizing for inactivity

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goblin
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Post by goblin »

[dmp] wrote: The score is a attempt at rating the skill-level. Mixing this with activity will make the score evem more arbitrary than today.
That's a very good point.

I see it like this:
If we have to choose between rewarding and punishing, what would be the best? That's what's discussed in this thread.
We still have to decide whether to mix skill and activity points or not. But that's a different discussion that probably should be taken in a different thread.

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Post by [dmp] »

goblin wrote:
[dmp] wrote:If its easy to define active, why is it hard to define inactive?
Because nobody plays 24 hours a day - everybody is "inactive" from time to time. Do you want to punish everybody for being inactive while sleeping? I imagine not.
Turning it upside down: You want to call a team active forever, as soon they played their first game. I doubt that is what you want :)

So, active can be defined by some rules (eg. 1 match in the past 7 days). And inactive would be "the rest" (all teams that does not meet this rule)

For our purpose (reward, punish a team) we dont care how active or how inactive they are. So indeed its boolean for this purpose. Either we reward active team sor not. Or the alternative. either we punish inactive teams or not. And I belive that the two is the same in our case.

If everyone earns $100 and you want to have $50 more than your mate. We got two solutions:
  • Get rewarded: You get $50 more.
  • Punish everyone else: All us poor souls needs to pay a 50%-goblin tax. Leaving us with $50.
Both approaches will make you 50$ richer than everyone else. The same would be true for team points for being inactive / active.
As stated before, you'll have to decide when to call a team inactive. And you'll have to decide on the level of inactivity. It's much easier to decide when people are active, since activity means action, and actions can be measured instantly.
Unless you figure that a team can only be active during a match, then you'll need to define for how long they are active without performing any new actions. And once they cannot meet being active.. They're inactive. No need to see how active or how inactive they are, in order to reward/punish teams.
I can't see why it's so important to you that inactivity is punished instead of rewarding activity :?:
That isnt my point. My point is, that pointwise these two are(can be) equal. Rewarding teams for doing something good for the league, is more positive, than punishing inactive teams.

However, in an elo-score wise-context, I would prefer punishing inactive teams. Let's say that ELO score is correct. The less the team plays, the more likely it is, that the ELO score is wrong when they begin to play again (people get rusty, other teams improves). (Its like saying: "We have no clue how they play now, but I'll bet its bad")

It makes more sense to remove elo scores from these teams than reward active teams ("active teams? Then they MUST be good"). For active teams, we can look at the results and see how they perform.

In other words; We need to decide: What is the better. To overrate active teams, or to underrate inactive ones. As the active teams are out there playing and can get an accurate elo score, why break it. When they lose a match they will lose more points (because of the reward) compared to what a not-so-active team will (even if they're equal in skill)

If inactive teams are punished for inactivity, it would mean that we're unsure if the elo is correct and therefore we under-rate them. When they play again - the elo score is wrong. But will hopefully readjust itself quickly as they play against stronger (elo-point wise).
What do you prefer yourself:
:arrow: Go to work, or we'll kick you in the crutch :evil:
:arrow: Go to work, and we'll pay you money :D
Last placed I worked at, I got both. And then I left - so now I get nothing. :) But we agree what the words means. My arguments is only in the context of points to teams.
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Post by sussi »

Just another idea, if we have a personal ELO score as mentioned above, than the point gain or lose could calculated from the average personal score per team of the player who played the match. And add/substracted to the teamscore.

That would make it more interessting of let playing new players and makes the league more interessting.
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Post by [dmp] »

Funny sussi. I just suggested this to you today. Even more funnier, i told you that it was already posted here. Feel free to comemnt it: http://my.bzflag.org/bb/viewtopic.php?t=8023

Now, this thread is about penalizing for inactivity - let's keep it there.
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Post by goblin »

[dmp] wrote:Unless you figure that a team can only be active during a match, then you'll need to define for how long they are active without performing any new actions.
That's actually exactly how I figure - the only sure sign of activity is the fact that you played a league match. Everything else is a transformation of this.
And it scales well too. If you get 1 point for a played match, you get 10 points for 10 played matches. If you get 10 activity points in 10 months, and someone else gets 10 activity points in 1 month, he has 9 months to get just 1 extra activity point in order to seem more active than you.

The other way around, punishing inactivity, you'll have to agree on some period of time in which some amount of matches have to played.
"Oh, boy, we have to take the summer holiday into account, since many people prefer not to play BZFlag on the Hawaiian beach."
Fine, people aren't considered inactive during summer holidays.
"Oh, boy, my summer holidays are in August-September. Why am I punished for that?"
OK, Everybody gets a 2 month period which they can distribute around the year as allowable inactivity period.
"I just broke my arm, ..."
"... In the middle of a divorce..."
"... Climbing a mountain for world peace..."

As soon as people are punished for inactivity, they will serve a lot of valid reasons for not having to be punished.
If you mark up the points given for Lost/Draw/Win, nobody will ever complain - you played, so you get the points for playing.

I think I understand your point, and I get the feeling you also see what I mean.
Yes, score-wise the net effect of punishment and reward may be the same (modulo the time period and amount of matches that people will never agree on anyway).
No, psychologically it's not the same, and no, we don't want the work overhead that results from defining and enforcing rules of punishment, since rewarding is much simpler.

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Post by [dmp] »

goblin wrote:I think I understand your point, and I get the feeling you also see what I mean. [...] No, psychologically it's not the same
Yeah, I got your point. And I agree that there is a difference psychologically. I think this is why many favors rewarding. I'm just not sure how well it would work with ELO. (But if this is really an issue, would highly depend on how much teams are rewarded).

Personally, I think mixing ELO (skill) and activity is a bad idea, no matter how you do it :)

PS: Du er velkommen til at smide en besked på een af IM'erne :)
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Post by birdie »

Personally, I think mixing ELO (skill) and activity is a bad idea, no matter how you do it
thats the point of this whole tread
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Post by goblin »

[dmp] wrote: Personally, I think mixing ELO (skill) and activity is a bad idea, no matter how you do it :)
Well... Yes... Activity and skill are two different dimensions in the game. As such, they should be kept separated.
The problem seems to be that we can't find any better way to induce activity.
[dmp] wrote: PS: Du er velkommen til at smide en besked på een af IM'erne :)
Jeg er aldrig blevet helt gode venner med IM - tror jeg er for gammel :)
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Post by smalltux »

longhair, agreed!

Guys, please! If you want to do arbitrary mixes of orthogonal things like skill, activity and who knows what else, this is going to be a very good random generator soon...

As for solutions to the activity problem, I hope to contribute to that in some way. There are lots of things that could be done to bring people together - a match planner for one! (You can't "force" people to match, but you can make it easier. But let's take that in another thread.)

I have a long angry rebuttal that I wrote before seeing this post, remains to see if I wrote it in vain... ;-)

/smalltux (David_V)
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