We’re trying to be a lot more transparent these days about upcoming features and changes so that you guys have a chance to chime in with your feedback.

We have decided to change the way Speed runs are calculated. Right now they’re solely based on the time difference between your first and last attack.

This is flawed because it is making people with varying levels of internet connectivity compete against each other unfairly. Also, if the server lags out it can screw you over.

We listened to your feedback, and here is the new proposed system:

Lemon Score = (turns taken * weight) + pwnage done – ego damage taken

I am not sure of the best value for the weight value yet — I’ll have to run a few simulations to see what weight works best.

The idea here is we’re now counting how many turns you took as a measure of speed rather than the actual time taken. Finally, we add in how much pwnage you took and how much damage you took to avoid clustering of similar move counts.

In our brainstorming sessions this seems pretty solid. What do you guys think?

Sounds like a fair change, but I’m afraid that it will have the effect of making a very easy game even easier.

scully Posted:

I believe you will still need to separate clbumes or we will see trolls, cams and emos steam rolling, while hackers, permas and re-re can never hit due to their much lower powered attacks.

Actually stupidly I’d forgotten that lemon wasn’t divided by clbum yet. This will definitely happen at the same time.

CaptainDDL Posted:

Sounds like a fair change, but I’m afraid that it will have the effect of making a very easy game even easier.

Personally I don’t think being at the whim of your internet connection or the server speed is a good challenge to have.

But yes, keep watching GD. Very soon we will begin the Great Gameplay Revamp™.

Sergeant Cid Posted:

1. Would ‘over-pwnage’ (inflicting more damage to the thread than necessary to kill it) count as total pwnage, or would the max health of each thread be the total pwnage factored in?

2. Would healed Ego damage count into the calculation, or would it simply factor your ending Ego versus your max Ego?

3. Would the Ego damage variable be calculated as a percentage, or total points of Ego damage?

1. Not sure, but I’m leaning towards not trimming it. There are two possible outcomes here. Either everyone will cluster with the same highest value, or we will have many incredibly high unreachable values at the top. Either way since scoops are given out due to a statistical deviation, it should work out.

2. Healing wouldn’t count except as a turn. It will just sum up hits to your Ego.

3. Total points of Ego.

Ego damage is random, isn’t it? So there’d still be an element of “I did it exactly the same way both times but got a different time”?

Not sure this is a problem, just want to clarify.

(Also moving thread to Dom thread because speedrunning is pretty much all about scoops.)

I can already see how this will make people decide between two options:

KCC Speedruns for the Flezz versus Pwnage Runs for the scoops.

I think the name obviously needs to be changed from Speed Run to something else. Maximum Pwnage Run, maybe? Power Run?

And now there’s virtually no reason to wait for anything other than a maximum threadcount in a forum, unless the weight factor you use is the thread count itself? That way, there’s virtually no need to wait for max/min threads anymore, unless you’re moar file farming.

sweet

Are adjustments going to be made according to number of threads? It’s a large determining ‘luck’ factor at the moment. If you’re running visits, you get more lemon or a job success when there’s a low thread count. You can’t wait for a low thread count if you want vanilla. You only have the dubious luxury of waiting for a high thread count if you’re farming for moar files.

In short, is there some better way to control, influence or predict thread count than what we have at the moment? Perhaps an extra column in the forums list so we can see at a glance which will give better results, or abilities which affect the total (e.g. reduce the count by one for some kind of cost, e.g. an item slot or an expensive consumable)

meeeeeeeeee Posted:

Are adjustments going to be made according to number of threads? It’s a large determining ‘luck’ factor at the moment. If you’re running visits, you get more lemon or a job success when there’s a low thread count. You can’t wait for a low thread count if you want vanilla. You only have the dubious luxury of waiting for a high thread count if you’re farming for moar files.

In short, is there some better way to control, influence or predict thread count than what we have at the moment? Perhaps an extra column in the forums list so we can see at a glance which will give better results, or abilities which affect the total (e.g. reduce the count by one for some kind of cost, e.g. an item slot or an expensive consumable)

I’m not sure, I think I like the random number of threads as is right now. It is hard to predict, but that is part of the challenge, right?

Nice. Log in to see images! Lama glama edited this message on 05/06/2009 10:58AM