Re^2: A Proposal for Additional Levels

[belg4mit]

Bah, rotting is deflation. That's perfectly natural. The problem with is implementing it. You'd need to know when each XP was awarded, it appears to currently only keep a running total. (think of it as maintaining a web site counter with an entry for every hit so that you can say: visitors within the last XX days)

[sfink]

Not if you rely on randomization: give every XP point a 0.1% chance per day of expiring. Older XP will then get a higher probability of dying off than younger (an XP is dead with probability 1-0.999^age). You don't need to recompute everyone's totals every day, either, although to be completely accurate you would have to recompute on any day that a user's XP total changed.

I'm not too crazy about the XP rot idea, though.

I think the XP ramp should be closer to quadratic. Tune it so that the top two or three levels are empty (give everyone something to reach for). Or better yet, make the upper levels require more than just XP -- make people earn a certain number of "quest" points. Quests could be proposed by anyone (including monks eligible for advancement); when a monk claims to have accomplished a quest, other monks vote on how much credit should be given. Your vote would be weighted by the logarithm of your own XP or something (or just by your level, if XP requirements are exponential!). If some minimum number of monks have voted and the average value has stabilized for a few days, award the points.

The sorts of quests I'm thinking of are things like writing a review, releasing a CPAN module, writing a test suite for someone else's module, implementing a feature for the perlmonks site, etc. Hmmm... or in some cases, deleting a CPAN module (by merging its functionality with another).

Just a thought.

[johndageek]

Why not have points begin to erode at a very small percentage of the members total after a certain period of time since last vote was cast.

This would encourage voting on a relatively regular basis.

I also like the idea of 20 votes.
They should be used as a powerful tool to be applied only after some thought, not as a bookmark or as an attaboy (er attagirl, umm attamonk?). A positive comment in a reply is a good reward from another esteemed monk. That comment plus a vote (+ or -) puts a much higher value on those votes, not only for the writer of the nodes but for others who want to see the truly popular/interesting nodes.

My take on the game of climbing the ladder – I am generally not a game player, but it is interesting to watch my meandering climb up the ratings, with the occasional gain in power, it does add to the experience of being a member of the Monastery. If the scale is to become sliding because too many people have beat the game and now find it no fun, why not create another game that only people in the top ranks have access to?

An additional game at the upper levels would prompt those who need to beat a game or a system have something to look forward to, while leaving those of us who plod along lending a hand where we can, and gaining knowledge in the many ways the Monastery offers are able to keep track of where we are in the scheme of things.

One other point, any time you put someone on a scale, they will pay attention to it. I believe many people (myself included) will take offense to being randomly bumped downward just to make more room at the top of the scale. Personally if this is the route taken, I would like the ability to opt out of the XP scale.

What could the additional game be? Perhaps as suggested elsewhere in this post, XP beyond an upper limit in the highest rank can be used to buy additional powers. Things like signature options, particular home node modifications, option to put a picture in the front-page rotation, be able to buy various icons (also suggested elsewhere) or with enough points, the ability to post an icon others can buy for their home nodes.

Obviously I have no idea what effort implementation would take, but these are my 2 cents worth.

[belg4mit]

You don't seem to be making much sense here. It's not an absolute i.e; rate monastery member Bar on a scale from one to ten. It's an open-ended scale like temperature. At one point we thought ice through boiling water was all you needed, later one realized that there was much more outside of that; you have ice and then you have Antarctica, there's boiling water and then there's volcanoes and stars.

It's not "a random bumping downward" and you might just also go up a notch (on the numbered scale). In any event the number of XP you possess won't change.