So a couple years ago there was a big brouhaha about revising CP, lots of different opinions about how to do it. But, generally it was agreed it is not an accurate reflection anymore of broad based achievement.

2 Years later, I just won a Civil War game today to bring me back up over 2000 to a 0 CP scoring 11 place.

I have over 500 points more than what would get me 20 pts on a less played board and it is worth nothing for rankings.

What was true then is way more true now. Is it time to do something? 

Yeah.  Stop playing Civil War. 

:)

I remember really liking my suggestion to replace CP but I forget what it was. 

I think our main current issue is that new people come to the site and can't advance in CP's because of the scores earned by the legacy/inactive players.  

It would be interesting to assign points and rankings to only active players. Just remove inactive players from all the rankings and generate CP from whoever is left. the inactive players wouldn't lose their status permanently , everything would return when they become active again. What's the point anyway of keeping track of stats for people who don't pay anymore, they don't care or they would be playing. If they care they only need to meet the qualifications for being active. That would really mix things up a bit without affecting the 'by game' scoring system.
I realize I did not mention what criteria would be used to define 'active'. That a whole seperate discussion.

Yea there would be a lot of criteria to define on that gnome. Would being active define as playing any board or the specific board they are ranked in?

I would agree that getting rid of inactive players would be a good thing for those active players seeking the top spot. Seems like this would be hard to find a good way that pleases all.

I think active on a board would be taken a turn in a game on it in the last 6 months (or maybe up to a year).  

I guess I'd also want to hear from MB and how this would affect him.  I'm assuming he's getting CP from close to 100 different boards.  He'd have to play two game on each every year.  That's 200 games a year just to maintain his existing CP.

You'd also need to send warning emails - "Warning you will be removed from CP consideration if you do not play a game on BOARD_NAME in the next 30 days."

And then again every week or something.

Wouldn't it be better to define active players by their logins? (Something Like: Logged in this month or this quarter)

I mean, as long as MB is here and playing games, he should be enjoying all those CP's.  It doesn't seem right to force a guy to always be playing a board.

i'm with ratsy on this one. 

i'd be curious to hear an opinion of someone who has left for extended periods of time and come back (yertle, risky, asm, among others).

I would like to see what is being done for chess ratings.

After 12 months on inactivity your ranking is removed, but not deleted. If you start playing again you get back where you left off.

If possible, we could have two rankings, one with active players and one with all players (the one we have now). And Championship Points could be given from the former rather than the latter. Then you know not only which points you can get but can also consider threats to your point status from comebacks.

Activity being determined board by board is not a solution I'm in favour of. Doing it by login as probably best, one could also consider going by competion date of  last played game just so people can't maintain high rankings by logging in once a year and doing nothing.

I suggest to start simple. Define active as playing any rated game to qualify as active on all boards. That will avoid an endless loop of discussions resulting in stagnation. It would be a good first step and then after three months or so re-evaluate

Also. I think you should be considere inactive after only one month. The criteria can be more stringent since the repercussions are not severe. One need only play one game to get all their rankings back and it only takes playing one game a month to stay current. The point is to cull form the ranking those who are no longer engaged, not make it easy for legacy players to hang on. If they cared about their rankings they would be playing. You are not taking away anything precious to them

I checked consequences for itsnoatumor on Civil War. If we remove anyone not active past 12 months he advances to 10th and gets 1 point. 6 months, same. 3 months, advance two places and gets 2 Points. 1 month, same.

I'm easy like Sunday morning. I want newer members to catch the CP bug. Board by board seems a bit intense though....

Though active vs inactive might improve things a bit the way we calculate CP itself I would say is the problem. It only pays top 10 spots no matter how many wins people have racked up. It was pretty good when most scores were under 1500, but now 1500 wont even get you top 20 on many boards.

Like I said two years ago. I don't really care how we change it or what it does to my ranking, but 1100 (1-2 wins) on a less played board should not get more points than 2000 (dozens of wins) on a more played board. That just doesn't make sense

Even a simple change like paying out top 20 and setting 2000/40 pts  as the new standard (effectively doubling everything) would drastically improve the situation. Might not only solve the issue of heavily played boards paying out nothing, but encourage people to take up lesser played boards again as those board leaders who have been sitting on 1500 now have a new goal to shoot for. I know at least a couple of my #1's I don't really play anymore because I could only lose CP. 

And, I'm sure no matter how we crunch the numbers MB will still be on top. =D

And here we go again...   (forecasting 20 pages by the weekend)

I think that calculating your ranking score based in active/inactive is probably not realistic.  Tom had to pause wargear to recalc scores, and if players are constantly getting moved in and out of the rankings calculation, that would mean a new recalc every month or however often we wanted it to check for active status.  Which would mean an unacceptable amount of downtime.

More realistic would be to have the general ranking score include everyone, but only allow active players to earn CP.  CP calculation is much simpler.

Whether we require activity on a board or site basis, depends on what our goal is.  I thought it would be good to force players to not just sit on their past laurels, and require them to be in active competition for CPs, so I like the idea of forcing them to play at least one game a year on a board to keep in the CP competition, for that board, but if the point is just to let new players get a chance to get into the rankings, then having a site-wide active flag should be good enough, and is simpler (always a good thing).

>Even a simple change like paying out top 20 and setting 2000/40 pts  as the new standard (effectively doubling everything) would drastically improve the situation.

At this point, something simple like this is my vote too.  Just expand the CP scale.  It's not perfect and never will be, but it's an easy change (I hope), and will fix 90% of the problem.

I think if we can come up with something with broad acceptance and relatively easy to implement, we have a decent chance of getting Tom to change it.

Hey Ozy, you would not need to do a recalc for anyone's ratings. It would only affect CP which is related to your ratings but does not affect them. although I agree this is addion work. Much much easier than doing a complete recalc but still more work. Not sure about details but something that would be better suited as a real time calculation field rather than storing in a database

oh yeah - if you are just talking about active/inactive affecting CP, but not your score, that's seems totally doable and makes sense to me.  Seems fair too - players will still get to see they are #1 on a board even if they are inactive - like a hall of fame kind of, but they don't get CP for it unless they're actually active.

Let's just double down....easy to code?

Ok - here's some hard numbers for a CP system that is the same, but expanded:

http://www.wargear.net/wiki/doku.php?id=general_features:modify_championship_point_calculations:expand_championship_points_scale

Can someone run this against some actual boards to see how it goes?

It gives more points up to 2500 instead of just 1500.

What is the current highest score on any individual board?  Has this been going up, or do we think this # has pretty much peaked?

Thought about it some more and added an even more extended (to top 30) list, which has my vote.

I increased the minimum to 1150.   You can still get to that with just one or two wins still, so 1050 just seemed so low to start getting points.  

Even though it goes to 30 positions, the minimum scores are so much higher that the biggest payouts will only be awarded on the most popular boards. 

Highest ranking on an individual board is probably IRsmart with his 2959 on Wargear Warfare. He hasn't played on it for a year so I assume he's not going to improve it anytime soon.

WW has 2000+ ranking all the way down to 24th. But I assume that's for this board only.

I'd like to keep the 1050 minimum, it helps less active boards get activity.