Perhaps a "loyalty" rating which goes higher when you don't go CD, but something that can go lower than the value for new accounts only encourages people to ditch old accounts and create new ones

very good point.

especially as the opposite effect will be to make people want to stick to one account... the more loyalty it earns.

Plus 'loyalty' is ever so much a nicer thing to strive for than 'not-shame'. :)

I'm not so sure because sometimes, especially in live games, you are forced to go CD because other people refuse to pause. If this works against you it seems unfair.

Also two live games i was playing were paused/crashed but unexpectedly un-paused/un-crashed themselves so all the players went CD.

Lastly people would still start new accounts if they had a bad ratio as it would be harder to improve your loyalty rating if you had a few CDs than if you had no CDs.

I second davebishop's concern about live game CDing, though I believe you said in another thread that live games that crash will be paused when they restart going forward, Kestas.

My memory is fuzzy, but if that's the case, then the concern is mostly addressed.

well, many of us do not play against players with new accounts and it is possible to keep them out of games by setting the pot limit to 101 so it is not a huge problem in my mind if people create a new account. I think most people realize that your early games are going to have more NMR and CD problems until you are at a level where you can enter into other games. There's always the ability to create private games as well to exclude brand new accounts.

I agree that it should not be called "shame" rating.

I do think that some sort of system would be good even if it causes some to get a new account because eventually peple are going to realize that if they want to build up a good profile and reputation then they need to NOT go into CD =)

And Dave, no one should be forced to pause a live game. That's the whole point of a CD penalty/rating: it gives you more incentive to finish what you started...

I like the idea, but then I always play on to the bitter end, so it wouldn't affect me anyway.

Kestas point is a good one too.

I would have the "value" or cost of a CD decrease both over time and with number of games completed. I've been playing here for 10 months and have completed 16 games (defeated in 8). If I'd CD'd in each of those 8, my Shame rating would be 0.5. If I'd only CD'd in one game, my Shame rating would be 0.0625.

Should a game I CD'd in 10 months ago or 10 games ago, affect whether I be allowed in a game today or not?

Should CDs be "spent" (removed from your stats) after 6 months or 6 games?

Should you have one CD removed for every 2, 3, 6, 10, n completed (non-CD) games?

Where would or should the line be drawn?

"And Dave, no one should be forced to pause a live game. That's the whole point of a CD penalty/rating: it gives you more incentive to finish what you started..."
i've never made anyone pause, but have had many complaints from others wanting to pause

firstly, lets call it Loyalty from now on. Kestas and others were right (Im a negative kind of person, always thinking of the negative side of things, so I thought of it as a negative deterrent at first)
Building loyalty is better, both for the soul and for keeping people using 1 account.

1) it won't promote people opening new accounts. New accounts will have loyalty score of 0. The presumption is if you want to not be playing in a game with CDers, then you set the minimum loyalty score to be 80 or 90. Setting it to 100 means that only accounts which have never CDd can join. Of course, as alluded to, sometimes people do CD not out of any fault of their own. So it cannot be a pure ratio as 1 CD will mean you can never be 100 again, so as SpeakertoAllens indicated, we need a scale which increments with successive games that you play without CDing.
While this should not remove your actual record of past CDs (your sins rightly, will never be forgiven) it will increase your loyalty score.

So some parameters of the rank should be as follows
1) a new account can never have a better loyalty score than ANY existing account. Even ones that have CDd all their games. A new account should have the same score as an old account that have CDd ALL the games they have played. In other words, the score is floored at a level, and new accounts start at this minimum score.

2) the rate at which loyalty is earned can be based on the number of contiguous games played without a CD. The increase in score should not be linear, but logarithmic. The higher the score, the harder it is for you to move downward in ranking, but also harder for you to go higher in ranking as well. Giving reason and credence to earning true 'seniority'. Starting from 0, your rank will go up or down very quickly, so 1 CD when you have only played 3 games will move you down a lot more than 1 CD when you have played 50. And vice versa.

Now that the "In theory" part is out of the way... onto the brainstorm of ideas
What about this:
play 1 game, no CD, that does not earn you any LP (loyalty points)
Play 2 games, no CD, No LP
Play 3 games, now the LP start kicking in. if the 3rd game is not a CD, then you earn 1 LP.
Continue to play any games over 3 in a row, without CD, and each 3 games earns you 1LP.

Now introduce a multiplier.
Whenever you earn an LP, it gets multiplied by a factor, depending on your current LP total.

0-10, x5
10-50, x3
50-100, x2
500+, x1

Of course, these parameters are just thoughts, the distribution of the current LP score of all active accounts must be studied to find the statistical distribution of LPs at different multiplier levels, or at different game interval levels (current example I used 3+ games ) with the goal to achive a nice bell curve. (math majors out there, please feel free to step in to correct me for incorrect assumptions)

Loss of LP follows the same formula, except that 1 CD game will cause the loss of 1LP x Current Multiplier, instead of the 3+Non-CD games it takes to earn one. (loyalty, like trust, is easier lost than gained)

With the given database of account data, and the sequence of games played, is it possible to run these formulas to calculate everones current LP score?

that hurts my brain.

can't we just use the number of times a person has gone CD as their CD rating? or am i being too simplistic here.....

@Jacob - no, because people would be punished for their crimes forever. There has to be some way of reducing your Shame rating/increasing your Loyalty rating over time. A simple count wouldn't do this.

@Everybody - After further thought I think the number of CDs that remain "live" should only be reduced when a player is actually defeated in a game (i.e. killed out, rather than simply surviving or drawing). By doing this you would know that the person has reformed their CDing ways.

I would further modify the rule such that the player had to have increased their number of SCs by at least 2 before being defeated. This would stop a sly, devious, cunning player*** from entering a series of short turn-time games in order to enter suicidal moves until they were defeated, thus discounting their CDs quickly and with little effort.

*** - I know it's very unlikely, but we have to allow that there might possibly be one or 2 players like that here.

"There has to be some way of reducing your Shame rating/increasing your Loyalty rating over time. A simple count wouldn't do this"

That's why I suggested that one CD falls off for every five completed games.

I don't see why this is needed at all. When people go CD it provides fun opportunities for others. Roughly half of my games have been CD takeovers.

While that is true, Jamie, it is also true that most CD nations don't get taken over by anybody and it unbalances the play in those games.

Yes but that evens itself out once you've played several games. Sometimes you benefit from a neighbour going CD so you can steal his SCs, sometimes you lose out because one of your allies goes CD.... it all evens out over time.

@Jamie, this system does not stop people from CDing. People still will. It just dis-incentivizes them from CDing. CDing is current 'free'. It just puts a negative LEFT mark on your permanant record. While this is great and good, it is as useless as having a law, but not being able to enforce it. (for a real life example, think of J-walking laws...people still J-walk). As players with many CDs can still join games as long as they can pay the ante. This makes low ante games fraught with CDing players, which severely changing the game dynamic.

@Jacob I like that drop off method, except that we want to track Loyalty, not CDs, and also we want to make it so that setting the minimum loyalty settings for games not to be something difficult and if we just used say, 1/(#cds+1) as the loyalty score then the score becomes hard to set because the scores would be exponential. (people would have diminishing scores from 1, .5, .25, .125, .0625, 0.3125 etc....

Therefore the LPs must be an arithmetic progression ( so that scores would be something like 0-50 for noobs with no CDs, around 50-100 for experienced people who may have played many games, but perhaps CDed once or twice, and 100+ for people who have played many (30+ games) without any CD at all.

That makes it easy for a game creator to easily say, screen out the Frequent CDers by setting a minimum loyalty of say, ~20-30


Another idea is just to have CDs reduce your point total by some amount for each CD say, 5%? But I'm sure folks who CD sometimes legitimately would not like this approach.

"Sure, this game was ruined by CDs, but at least I got free centers!"

yay fun~

If you want to be fussy and start a game that excludes newbies or people who regularly CD, just start a password-protected game and only give the password to people who meet your criteria as 'good' players.

players who do not piss all over the game

lolwut

Very few games are "ruined" by CDs.

I have been in more than 50 games on here and I can't recall a single one where I felt a CD had "ruined" the game.

I didn't say they ruin games (although I think they can...) - I just said they upset the balance.

perverse definitions of terms will do that

@digit

While I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea of "loyalty" I think it puts an extra unnecessary layer of confusion in there for new players. Just imagine how many times we would have to answer the question "What is loyalty?" in the forum...

It should be a CD rating.

Also, we may be having this discussion all for nothing...

Kestas, are you still looking at this thread and is this something you are even considering implementing in any sort of form?

@ Acosmist: "perverse definitions of terms will do that"

Eh?

If the Loyalty Rating scheme is introduced, it would have to be highlighted in the FAQ, preferably with a couple of worked examples as soon as it is introduced.

Something for the nice-to-have-list: put up a warning when creating a game with a restrictive Loyalty Rating to the effect that the currently selected rating would exclude x players (out of a total of y players) from taking part (or something like that). It would be a shame to set a rating so high that nobody could play - not even the creator.

Would a player with a low Loyalty Rating be allowed to create a game with a high rating, thus allowing a CDer to play with mostly non-CDers?

Again for the nice-to-have-list; would it be possible to allow people to only be presented with joinable games that have a limit above a selectable Loyalty Rating (perhaps limited to their own rating at a maximum)? Unless it's a passworded game they're invited to join course.

look guys, the kind of people who CD on this site, aren't the kind that would give a s**t about loyalty ratings.
What this would do is make people like me, who have gone CD through no fault of my own due to dodgy live games where literally every player went CD or people refusing to pause, have to play against crap people who always CD.
No decent game won't have a decent CD rating.

haha dave bishop

@Dave

The context of this whole thread was that it was a suggestion to improve live games where people leaving early is a significant problem. The people who play live games represent a pretty wide range of players across this site.

But some live games need extra people to get started, due to lack of interest.
It is better for someone to join and CD than for the game to never start, no?

many of us feel that it is better for the game to never start.

I gave lost a game because my ally cded. I was all set to win it.
Ally left, allowed the remaining players to gang up on me.
So yes, games ARE ruined by CDers.
You could say that games can be won via CDers too but that isn't part of the game.

A missed turn isn't a CD.
And to address concerns of legitamate CDs costing
good players, well that is why my scaling
system suggested that once you are a long time player with high loyalty you can't lose the loyalty as fast as a Newbie. (the multiple factor) you can surely afford a couple legit CDs without your score being penalized enough to prevent you from joining.

And as someone said. You can always join a game regardless of loyalty restrictions if it is a private game and you have the password.
Unlike DPs, LPs only govern restrictions on public games.

Oh, and you only get penalized for CDing on NON Live games

Why? If you choose to participate in a live game, you are making a commitment to stay at the keyboard the whole time the game is running. If you CD, it's your fault just like in a normal game.

Well in a game that has really short turns it would just be too unfair I think.
I mean missing a turn when you go on holidy is one thing. Missing your turn because you had the runs or an emergency booty call is just cruel.

Emergency booty call? Hahaha.

I am seeing players intentionally going CD when the defeat is close, I guess they don't want their defeats count to go up, but it really screws the game (like in advanced games where everybody finalizes to make it smoother)

Exactly Gallando. That is because people naturally see Defeats as more of a negative mark than Left. (you can always make some excuse that you left a game because of so and so) Which is exactly the motivation that we want to add a real tangible negative incentive for leaving games.

I am in favour of a CD scoring more than -1 for the win/draw/loss stats. Indeed, perhaps -3 (3 losses) for a CD game...?

I appreciate that there are times when players cannot get on-line but my experience is that the players who respect the games most try very hard to set something up to avoid a CD. I am pleased to be able to say that my CD count is Zero, so I am clearly biased on this issue.