Scary_Retard_6 Posted:

An overall “I’m #1” epeen for a leaderboard with clbum leader epeens available is a good idea.

I suppose it’s ok if we have the same overall peen for all leaderboards, going for each of them is really a pain in the bum Log in to see images!

Scary_Retard_6 Posted:

You needed to get past me first Log in to see images!

Yeah but I believe it would be much easier if it’s only between you and me Log in to see images!

This is really bad.

Is the damage irreparable?

oh et why did you do this

Jalapeno Bootyhole Posted:

LOL. Yeah, I’m very convinced. Anyway, if I “play the game,” will I arrive at a completely different conclusion? That topping a leaderboard doesn’t offer bragging rights?

The problem is that now certain players can get certain E-Peens far more easily than certain other players just because they have different preferred character clbumes, regardless of whether or not character clbum is at all relevant to getting the E-Peen. It doesn’t encourage the people on the wrong side of this change to play other clbumes (I want these E-Peens on my main, not an alt), it just devalues their efforts. It also devalues the E-Peen itself.

Not that E-Peens really have value anyway, but they’re just about the only reason to play this game right now for a lot of us.

Jalapeno Bootyhole Posted:

Hmm. Quite a lot more “hurt feelings” in this thread than even I expected, considering this the indisputably positive and frankly awesometastic nature of this development.

You confuse frustration with hurt feelings (for me at least anyway)

These changes are quite obviously disputed and far from ‘awesometastic’. The current crop of leaderboards are extremely poor judges of excellence, so instead of one badly designed goal, we have 5 badly designed goals. That’s not an improvement.

If the cake tastes like ****, you don’t improve the situation by giving everyone more cake.

Moar chances at Peen while addressing clbum discrepancies equals win, full stop. It’s easier to get some achievements as an Emo Kid? Well, maybe more people will start playing as Emo Kids and kick in some competition. (It really is the best clbum, you know!)

Nicco provided a good example as to why the new system for bumigning peen is unfair to many long term players.

That misses some other aspects of the problem though

Leaderboards are for players who’ve been repeating simplistic tasks over and over for a very long time e.g. job points (especially if you’re a troll) or forums pwned, even buildr and incit submissions. These are not a measure of skill, but of time served. A younger player cannot, ever, top any of these leaderboards, no matter their level of skill.

That or else players are encouraged to game the system e.g. auctions, or flamebate and friend peens. Have you noticed the ever increasingly spammy contests forums? So – a negative consequence of how you designed the reward, that will continue to get worse over time, until players just give up trying (as has already happened to a large extent for the flamebate peen)

These are not good metrics for judging excellence.

Please think about what players *actually have to do* to achieve the goals you set and check that these activities are not excessively OCD, make sense and won’t lead to negative consequences like, well, taking the fun out of the game. It seems obvious you haven’t taken this step so far, and have simply gone with ‘new leaderboard category, make a peen for it’ mostly out of habit.

As for incremental or “milestone” Peen: Relax, they’re coming. But I don’t see why we can’t have both milestones and leaderboard Peen.

First of all, as someone already mentioned, it’s bragging rights. Second, we can’t possibly foresee every milestone and we have more important things to do than endlessly churn out new Peen. And third, this is still a competition. If we just gave everyone a series of “Participant” medals, there’d be no incentive to excel. We can celebrate the leaders of each clbum while acknowledging other great players by awarding both Peen varietals.

Since the current crop of metrics are not a way of judging skill, but progress, they only make sense as milestone peen. The leaderboards for them were, are, and will remain a mistake. Awarding peen for performing the same simplistic set of tasks twice (through leaderboard and milestone) still discriminates against younger players.

If you want leaderboards, lets have them for something which actually does demonstrate skill in some regard. e.g. speedrunning (perhaps total number of speedrun times held at once for your clbum) or *cough* winning Incit the most within a set time period. That’s more of a measure of skill/talent/consistency/whatever, discounts the time served aspect, and doesn’t rely on a player being lucky enough to have chosen a player clbum a year ago that doesn’t have much competition.

Jalapeno Bootyhole Posted:

LOL. Yeah, I’m very convinced. Anyway, if I “play the game,” will I arrive at a completely different conclusion? That topping a leaderboard doesn’t offer bragging rights?

No one said that topping a leaderboard doesn’t offer bragging rights. What they said is that the current system of awarding leaderboard peen makes no sense (as Nicco and others have pointed out).

Jalapeno Bootyhole Posted:

I understand your concerns, but I still think this is far better than the alternative. If we had unlimited design resources, I could see the advantage to “flavoring” the Peen so that they’re clearly clbum-specific, perhaps while retaining an overall leaderboard Peen.

No, I don’t think you understand, and I’m not trying to insult you with that statement. No one asked for you to design a separate peen for “Camwhore Flamebate”, “Emo Kid Flamebate”, “Troll Flamebate”, and so on. What was asked for were non-clbum-specific milestone peens.

You could even do this without designing new peens in many cases. I’m very close to getting Full of Sale (Best Bidder leaderboard), and I personally would not care if after getting it, it transformed overnight into a milestone peen instead. Obviously, holders of other leaderboard peens might have the opinion that converting their peen into a milestone peen would somehow “devalue” it, one way to address this is to set the milestone really freaking high, to around the value the leaders have, or even above them.

Just as an example, Full of Sale could be set at 1000 unique sellers (or even 1500 if you want to torture your users). “1337” would be 1500 forums pwned. Flamebate Fodder would be awarded at 1000. Freemason would be a Buildr score of 75. Miss Popularity would be 500 friends. Gimme a category, I’ll propose a number and people can bat it around.

Anyone who has a leaderboard peen already would keep it as a milestone peen, even if they don’t actually have the required milestone score (this has happened before with Dom medal peens when double medals were accidentally awarded, then taken away).

The current leaders could continue their quest to stay at #1 on the leaderboards for bragging rights, meanwhile the other 99% of the users would actually have attainable (though difficult) goals to shoot for.

meeeeeeeeee Posted:

^ upvoted. Said what I wanted to say, better, and in fewer words.

still a lot of words imo

I didn’t read it all

@CZ: are you going to fix this? you must!

bump

waiting for response from an admin to the above posts

Jalapeno Bootyhole Posted:

I meant to get back to you guys regarding this issue, since we discussed this on Monday. I have a lot on my plate today, so this can’t be too in-depth, but I’ll respond now.

First off, thanks for the civil and constructive tone of these latest remarks. It gave us a lot of food for thought. Here’s what we’re thinking:

1) Clbum-based leaderboard Peen for inappropriate categories (i.e., where there are no barriers to entry based on clbum) were a simple mistake, and they will be rectified.

2) Milestone-based Peen for across-the-board achievements, as I might have mentioned, will arrive eventually. We’ll try to make them formulaic enough that, as the goalposts continue to shift, we’ll be able to tweak the values to reflect the prevailing numerical reality.

3) BB2 floated the idea of interval-based Peens. For instance, a user who accomplished the most in a given category over the last 30 days could be given a player-of-the-month Peen for it. These could be given out daily, based on the activity over every 30-day period. However, for the time being, that idea was struck down because there are theoretical maximums in many categories, and it would result in way too many ties to be meaningful. Nevertheless, for some boards (INCIT wins, for example), it might be feasible.

4) Regarding our leaderboard Peens, let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater, as much as I enjoy that vivid and gruesome metaphor. From a purely utilitarian point of view, we think it’ll affect more people positively than negatively. Let’s see if it results in more people vying for those Peen using other clbumes — in those boards where it makes sense to split up by clbum, of course.

Being the leader of any given category is a bragging right that we’d rather not squash entirely. We realize that splitting it by clbum, at least for the time being, “devalues” the leaderboard Peen somewhat; that can be seen as a good thing. Milestone Peen will serve to devalue it further. In fact, once they’re in place, we might literally devalue the Peen length conferred by said Peen.

We also realize it’s tough for newbs to earn those Peen (if there’s a continually active griefer riding the top), but this is pretty much true for countless leaderboards throughout the gaming universe. However, it’s not impossible to top if you’re extremely dedicated. Worst case, we could consider shortening the “inactivity” periods to make it easier to vie for leadership.

Yes, Nicco’s scenario, of a seventh-place overall Troll being denied a Peen while an ninth-place Camwhore receives it, is regrettable. We apologize to these players. But realistically, we’re talking about a tiny percentage of users who would be affected by this discrepancy. In any case, milestone-based Peen should help address this, as well as other new approaches to rewarding excellent gameplay.

If this will be rectified, does that mean players who took advantage of newly lowered requirements for leaderboard peens will have them stripped? Because thanks to the split I got Flamebate Fodder/Full of SALE/Gavel Time.

Also, while I like the 30-day idea of rewarding the person to gain the most in the last 30 days, is giving it out daily too much? I would think it would make more sense to give it out monthly to the players who during that month accomplished the most.

glowspawn Posted:

No, I don’t think you understand, and I’m not trying to insult you with that statement. No one asked for you to design a separate peen for “Camwhore Flamebate”, “Emo Kid Flamebate”, “Troll Flamebate”, and so on. What was asked for were non-clbum-specific milestone peens.

You could even do this without designing new peens in many cases. I’m very close to getting Full of Sale (Best Bidder leaderboard), and I personally would not care if after getting it, it transformed overnight into a milestone peen instead. Obviously, holders of other leaderboard peens might have the opinion that converting their peen into a milestone peen would somehow “devalue” it, one way to address this is to set the milestone really freaking high, to around the value the leaders have, or even above them.

Just as an example, Full of Sale could be set at 1000 unique sellers (or even 1500 if you want to torture your users). “1337” would be 1500 forums pwned. Flamebate Fodder would be awarded at 1000. Freemason would be a Buildr score of 75. Miss Popularity would be 500 friends. Gimme a category, I’ll propose a number and people can bat it around.

Anyone who has a leaderboard peen already would keep it as a milestone peen, even if they don’t actually have the required milestone score (this has happened before with Dom medal peens when double medals were accidentally awarded, then taken away).

The current leaders could continue their quest to stay at #1 on the leaderboards for bragging rights, meanwhile the other 99% of the users would actually have attainable (though difficult) goals to shoot for.

QFT and Full of win, Since I started playing late last year, I see half of the e-peen which happened before I even got here as completely out of my reach, and then many from before I started caring also gone. Though I have a small e-peen right now (my max streak has also been 8 as I know I can get it later and am more concerned with other things for my visits) I want to have the opportunity to get a decent sized one. It can be very discouraging at times.

Half of the leaderboard I see as completely unattainable, and that’s mostly because it is until 200 players ahead of me stop playing for 4 months and ones such as “Most Forums pwned” and “Most Job Points” are unattainable for the foreseeable future which makes their e-peen essentially unique. While there is nothing really wrong with unique e-peens, it’s nice to see at least the potential of hard work paying off in a new e-peen beyond beating the game, streaks and medals. But with new records constantly happening, it becomes more and more out of anyone’s reach to get to the top of Leaderboards unless they are a staple of Forumwarz.

Although some people get screwed a bit right now with the Clbum Leaderboards, it does give others SOMETHING to shoot for, and some new people will possibly work on other clbumes since they have more attainable Leaderboards, but to replace getting to the top with a milestone for each I would think the best solution. It would give everyone a chance at getting those peens though hard work while Leaderboards can remain as bragging rights which they probably began as anyways.

One thing that might be nice actually is a series of images beside one’s avatar to show if they are at the top of a Leaderboard, Gold for the highest Leaderboard, Silver for the second highest and Bronze for the bottom 3 remaining.Then there would still be competition for the Leaderboards, even between clbumes for the color of the trophy, but still have a trophy for the clbum.

Inertia Posted:

So apparently we now have discontinued the practice of awarding e-peen for topping a clbum leaderboard for some categories like Hall of **** and Flamebater. But why are the people who got it that way allowed to keep the peen? Also if in some leaderboards you cannot get the e-peen by topping the clbum leaderboard only then it would make this separation of the clbumes useless wouldn’t it? Because wasn’t the reason this was introduced was to minimise hogging of leaderboards? (Which by the way, I don’t see any problem with, it’s only fair..) So aren’t we back to where we were before?

Don’t quote me on this, but even though this isn’t a Camwhore RP thread, I believe some stripping is in order.