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in reply to Re^2: A Level Playing Field
in thread A Level Playing Field

I too up voted you, but lets talk about this:
6. I'm not sure how you can say they lessened XP. I didn't know there was a set quantity of i available and they reduced it. Actualy you could probably argue the reverse. As a saint i'd basicaly stopped voting unless outraged by something. Now i will begin to vote more agian. That voting produces XP for myself and for the person I vote on. It is quite possible then that the flow of XP will increase greatly as many dormant saints begin to vote like maniacs ;).

Part of this your are surely mistaken on, you no longer get exp for voting after you have passed Beadle -- level 5. This is where the B stops in the graph. 504121

Before at Saint -- 3k exp you got 40votes, now at Curate -- 3k exp You get 24 votes. Further analysis of the graph shows that only 7 people will receive more votes on the upper end of the scale, and that will account for an increase of 16xp daily, oddly the same difference between one Saint of yesteryear, and one Curate as of now.

In addition:
20xp< you <50xpYou get 2 votes rather than 5
50xp< you <90xpYou get 4 rather than 8
90xp< you <100xpYou get 6 rather than 8
100xp< you <150xpYou get 6 rather than 12
150xp< you <200xpYou get 8 rather than 12
200xp< you <250xpYou get 8 rather than 16
250xp< you <450xpYou get 10 rather than 16
400xp< you <500xpYou get 12 rather than 16
500xp< you <600xpYou get 12 rather than 20
600xp< you <900xpYou get 14 rather than 20
900xp< you <1,000xpYou get 16 rather than 20
1,000xp< you <1,300xpYou get 16 rather than 25
1,300xp< you <1,600xpYou get 18 rather than 25
1,600xp< you <1,800xpYou get 18 rather than 30
1,800xp< you <2,300xpYou get 20 rather than 35
2,300xp< you <2,400xpYou get 20 rather than 40
2,400xp< you <3,000xpYou get 22 rather than 40
3,000xp< you <4,000xpYou get 24 rather than 40
4,000xp< you <5,400xpYou get 26 rather than 40
5,400xp< you <7,000xpYou get 28 rather than 40
7,000xp< you <9,000xpYou get 30 rather than 40
9,000xp< you <12,000xpYou get 32 rather than 40
12,000xp< you <16,000xpYou get 34 rather than 40
16,000xp< you <22,000xpYou get 36 rather than 40
22,000xp< you <30,000xpYou get 38 rather than 40
30,000xp< you <40,000xpYou finally catch up, 10k exp more and you come out ahead.

So as you can see, everyone excluding the 6 Bishops (congrats btw) and the 1 Archbishop will loose xp/day to give away. Subsequently, this means stipend for a good post will be reduced. If the numbers of users are correct that means, 6,164 people loose xp/day, and 7 gain, If my math is correct, and it might very well not be, that means 0.11% of people will get more exp. I don't see how anyone can extrapolate more exp going around based on the numbers. If as a Saint you failed to spend your 40exp before, that is a comment more on your own behavior than a trend that can be backed with the data we have now. Data shows this must be a damn powerful trend to even counter the force of daily xp that has been depleted.

Update:

Oh, yeah, about this saint issue. If you are level 13 or higher then you are a saint (or perhaps 'saintly'). If you are level 26 then you are both a Saint and saintly. IOW, we still consider all users over 3k to be 'saints'. Have a look at Saints In Our Book to see.
Sounds like needlss ambiguity hiding behind the guise of an improvement. By your own remarks this system was made to compensate for a rise in the saintbase, from 20 to 400. This is a concern, but the "Saints in Our Book" isn't? I can't see argueing one point and not the other. Either your out to protect the 'Saint' stature, or not.

BTW, I plan to upvote you, as I have most others in this thread; but, I'm currently out of xp. Darn, if only it wasn't reduced.


Evan Carroll
www.EvanCarroll.com

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Re^4: A Level Playing Field
by demerphq (Chancellor) on Oct 31, 2005 at 08:59 UTC

    I'd like to address a few of your points, and not necessarily in order.

    First is this issue of votes bonus. You seem to think that people will lose out because of the vote bonus. This wrong. Under the new system users will continue to recieve their vote bonus until they have 250XP. Under the old system the user would lose their vote bonus at 200XP. So that has actually moved up.

    Regarding the new vote allocation scheme. You say that people lose votes. And you are right. That was a deliberate design decision. Under the old scheme all users over 3k XP recieved daily 40 votes, which represented a voting pool of 16.6k votes. Those same 400 odd users now receive about 7k votes. Generally speaking this is perceived as a Good Thing as it makes newer and lower level users votes mean proportionally more, and compensates for the increase in total number of users. Overall the vote count is still almost certainly signifigantly higher than it was when the original level scheme was created.

    Also, it seems to me that you (and many others) have become used to the old system without realizing that it in fact was a very different system when users like myself first joined. Not because the system changed of course, but because of the size of the user base. When I started there were less than 20 Saints and only about 100-200 regular users. We currently have a regular user base of about 4000 and we have over 400 saints. This is a drammatic inflation. And the way we have compensated for it is to reduce the number of votes available. This will mean that the $NORM will drop over time, which in turn will mean that lower rep'ed nodes will generate more XP for the users that write them.

    Id really appreciate it if you could leave off the doom-and-gloom predictions until the new system has had a chance to "settle down". I think that in two or three weeks you will have forgotten what all the fuss is.

    And just to reassure you, the gods involved in this releveling did a fair amount of analysis and debate to come up with the new scheme. We considered a lot of factors, including current user XP distributions. We think that the new scheme will in the long term provide a lot of room for growth, and will return the voting/experience system to something a little closer to what it was when it was first introduced. And frankly if it looks like it needs to be tweaked again to respond to something we have overlooked, then it will be.

    So rest easy.

    Oh, yeah, about this saint issue. If you are level 13 or higher then you are a saint (or perhaps 'saintly'). If you are level 26 then you are both a Saint and saintly. IOW, we still consider all users over 3k to be 'saints'. Have a look at Saints In Our Book to see.

    ---
    $world=~s/war/peace/g

      When I started there were less than 20 Saints and only about 100-200 regular users. We currently have a regular user base of about 4000 and we have over 400 saints. This is a drammatic inflation.
      No doubt there's inflation (I only recently arrived here - I only know the current situation), but the numbers you quote don't show "drammatic inflation". In fact, they show *de*flation. "Less than 20 Saints and about 100-200 regular users", suggest the ratio of users/saints is between "1:10" to "almost 1:5". Currently having 400 saints and about 4000 users gives a ratio of about "1:10". Which means that if the number of regular users in old times is in the high end of your estimate, we have an about same ratio of saints, perhaps slightly more. But if the number of users was at the low end of your estimate, the relative number of saints has almost halved.

      Note that I'm not commenting on the real situation several years ago - I wasn't there. I'm just commenting the numbers you state, and the conclusion you draw from those numbers.

      Perl --((8:>*

        Sorry, i should have been more clear. Its a drammatic inflation of the votes available in the system. The point is that the amount of votes in common circulation is much higher now (even with the new vote allocations), as a relative number, as a ratio of users regularly online, and as a ratio of posts being made.

        For instance the saintly ones are so because they come here often, if you took a look at the average days stats a much higher proportion of saints would be online on a given day than any other level. Back when there were much less saints this was much less relevent, in the recent past it was ridiculous.

        With something like an average of 20-50 posts a day we had 16k votes in ready circulation. Thats something like 800 votes a node if fully utilized. The only reason $NORM didnt go completely crazy over the recent past was because many of the saints were aware of this and tended towards minimizing their votes.

        So the inflation I mean is the amount of currency available to the community at large. We reduced the amount of votes allocated in order to try to counteract this tendency. Hopefully it will work out ok.

        ---
        $world=~s/war/peace/g

Re^4: A Level Playing Field
by itub (Priest) on Oct 31, 2005 at 06:02 UTC
    you no longer get exp for voting after you have passed Beadle -- level 5.

    You may not get a bonus for running out of votes, but you still have a 25% chance of gaining one point per each vote you use.