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Re: A Level Playing Field

by EvanCarroll (Chaplain)
on Oct 31, 2005 at 04:03 UTC ( [id://504144]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to A Level Playing Field

I'm extremely disappointed in the lack of logic in this decision. My rants are as follows.

  1. It is extremal illogical to have 7 ranks whose aggregate has under 10 total users. It is even more ridiculous to have 5 ranks, completely devoid of a user who has achieved the status without ill gotten exp.

  2. It is laughable that before 3k exp constituted Saint, and now the highest sizable rank is Bishop (40k exp) with only 6 having this label, and they are only halfway to their previous saintly rank

  3. The term saint, is often used to establish stature, it was a well known term in the perl community and by stripping it of its previous meaning you require that people build name recognition for the other more esoteric terms.

  4. A more thoughtful system would have been backwards compatible/a superset of the old established naming convention and would have granted ranks above Saint, possibly in the form of a surnames eg. 'Saint of Syntax' etc. This would allow Saints to identify with each other.

  5. There was no forum or poll that allowed the users to vote on this decision.

  6. Oblivious to the fact that Perlmonks is five years old, and none has reached 80k xp, the current saint level, the forces from above have lessened the flow of exp. How is someone to reach 80k xp when only a negligible few have reached the half way point, and now there is even less xp than before. Or, is one to ignore the ranking system entirely? In which case, why change something that had a purpose?

I think I could keep going, but I believe it's futile.

Update:

I would usually make this as another reply; but, in light of the fact that would just give you another opportunity to downvote because of dissension I'll elaborate here:

If 33,874 have never achieved 9k exp, and only 79 have 9k+ exp, than how reasonable is 10 levels, over one third of the possible 28 levels to be allocated to those monks? And, at that the last 7 levels move up in 10k xp increments. There is more experience to one of those levels than 99.76% of the user-base currently has. So, what utility do these levels serve in this "game." The answer is they don't. If you want an unreasonable expectation you could easily set one for yourself, how about we add another 15 levels on top of the preexisting 28 and make them 100k xp increments? And, we can make it such that no single node can receive over .05 xp? It is silly.

Here is a more reasonable suggestion:

  1. Make each rank after 3k exp in 1k xp increments. 3000 is achieved at level 13, with 28 levels that would mean that the maximum of level 28 would require (3000+15*1k) or 18k xp. This would give a top rank that would achievable for some degree of the term. It would allow 20-31 people to identify with that rank, and it would make the trip there much more bearable.

  2. Consider implementing a Saint + surname

  3. If you want other ranks/titles after/besides the level 18 Saint, make them based on non-xp things, such as: A) granting the title of Pope to whomever has the max exp when the fairy does her business, B) granting the title of Cardinal Saint to the 10 next below him C) Granting titles like Most Active Saint of Yr.

  4. To expand, here is an idea: Query for all nodes of the prior year, take the top .01% and save the exp in a temp var. Any new node that achives a greater ammount of positive exp, could be called "Blessed". Tally for each monk the amount of 'Blessed Nodes' that they have authored, make note of them in the homenodes, and index them much like the current "Best Nodes Of The Year" (which doesn't really fit with the monastery theme).

etc... There are lots of ways to make a system useful, I just fail to see how this is a reasonable way of doing it.



Evan Carroll
www.EvanCarroll.com

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: A Level Playing Field
by eric256 (Parson) on Oct 31, 2005 at 04:38 UTC

    A few rants of my own with your rant. (Number according to your own).

    • 1. I beleive that the point was to give those high ranking individuals the ability to have a feeling of growth. In order to get that you have to have levels that havn't yet been attained.
    • 2. I think you hit the reason right on the head, errr i mean the nail.
    • 3. saint was just a title of the highest rank. Perhaps now we will see similar name-sake attributed to curate, who knows. I don't know anyone who went around bragging about being a saint so this probably isn't a problem.
    • 4. Maybe, maybe not. As a previous saint i feel only a minor sense of loss, on the whole i probably didn't deserver any notions you apparently attach to saint hood.
    • 5. The proposal was linked to here. BTW there is never any such poll or vote. This isn't a democracy. If you want to have a say then speak up in the correct forums (specificaly pmdev and the cb.)
    • 6. I'm not sure how you can say they lessened XP. I didn't know there was a set quantity of i avialable 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 ;).

    I could go on as well but like you said its futile. ;) Whoever please try to remember that personal XP (unlike node XP) is mostly a game meant to midly entertain, to give a sense of community participation, and to provide that little carrot for people to behave slightly better than they might otherwise. Of course it can't be all those things to all people, and it is probably something very different to others, but remember XP isn't realy anyway so don't worry too much over it.

    P.S. I will admit that upon reading this initialy I was dumb founded and felt stripped of my previous regal, but now i realize I didn't loose saint hood, i was never realy a saint before. After all a Saint can't stop being a Saint if he was realy Saint now can he? ;)

    So I and *many* other begin a fresh journey in a game we thought we had already won. This should be viewed as a good thing and a challenge.

    ++ to everyone who helped make it so, and ++ to those who don't like it too, after all you'll need that ++ to get back on track!

    update: fixed horrible formating


    ___________
    Eric Hodges $_='y==QAe=e?y==QG@>@?iy==QVq?f?=a@iG?=QQ=Q?9'; s/(.)/ord($1)-50/eigs;tr/6123457/- \/|\\\_\n/;print;
      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

        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

        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.

      1. I beleive that the point was to give those high ranking individuals the ability to have a feeling of growth. In order to get that you have to have levels that havn't yet been attained.

      Oh, c'mon, don't be silly! I strongly doubt that those high ranking individuals needed any additional level to have a feeling of growth. OR that they really matter!

      Not to say that I disagree with your rant to EvanCarroll's one. Actually that many and that high levels rather serve the purpose of showing the new brothers and sisters joining the Monastery that even very active members with exteremely high rankings still have a long way up to the ultimate level, so that they will start their pilgrimage towards enlightenment with due hubri^Whumility.

      3. saint was just a title of the highest rank. Perhaps now we will see similar name-sake attributed to curate, who knows. I don't know anyone who went around bragging about being a saint so this probably isn't a problem.

      Hey, and so I'm such a miserable nullity not to count as "one", heh?!?

      Whatever, that kind of name-sake if really that important, of which I'm not really sure, was so at best as an inner "Monastery thing", and it was far too easy to become a saint, so that just by this fact saintity itself was somewhat desaintized, wasn't it?

      Jokes apart, curate can't have just the same name-sake as saint, since they convey quite different psychological feelings - let's face it! Also, not being a native English speaker, many of the names for the new levels sound somewhat exhotic and unknown, and I have an overall impression, like many other people here, that the choice has been suboptimal. But OTOH I wouldn't know even where to start to do better, so I just shut up. After all, who am I -but a simple Vicar- to say how the Monastery "should" be managed?

      4. Maybe, maybe not. As a previous saint i feel only a minor sense of loss, on the whole i probably didn't deserver any notions you apparently attach to saint hood.

      Let's face this too! The majority of us former saints did feel a sense of loss for being unsaintized. OTOH I suddenly found my level pushed up from 10 to 15, and (letting aside the fact that the former was out of 10 and the letter out of 28 ;-) this compensates for the loss!

      6. I'm not sure how you can say they lessened XP.

      Indeed rumors are that P is a little-known roman numeral for "Plentium", so that XP is "ten less than a plentium". Thus it is a constant, and cannot be lessened, nor increased, for what that matters...

      P.S. I will admit that upon reading this initialy I was dumb founded and felt stripped of my previous regal, but now i realize I didn't loose saint hood, i was never realy a saint before. After all a Saint can't stop being a Saint if he was realy Saint now can he? ;)

      I thought Saint Christopher was declared a legend and not really a Saint. After a little research on it, he seems to have lost some status but retained his title, but others did not. So there is precedent for losing saint-hood if someone cannot be proved more than a legend. This is probably not an issue with perlmonks, as contributors are real people and not legends (though some have legendary reputations).

      However, if there are bots acting at perlmonks and gaining XP, this issue might have to be reconsidered ...

Re^2: A Level Playing Field
by dws (Chancellor) on Oct 31, 2005 at 06:37 UTC

    It is extremal illogical to have 7 ranks whose aggregate has under 10 total users.

    It's called "planning for growth", and is an entirely sensible thing to do. To not do so now would mean laying out new ranks again in a year or three.

    There was no forum or poll that allowed the users to vote on this decision.

    Where, pray tell, did you acquire the notion that this was a democracy?

      What is more, there was a discussion about the matter, and the proposal was on the whole very much favourably received.

      See A Proposal for Additional Levels for the discussion. Evan may be forgiven, for judging by the node ids, the discussion was held quite some time before he joined up.

      • another intruder with the mooring in the heart of the Perl

      Vive la vroomocratie!!

      mhoward - at - hattmoward.org
Re^2: A Level Playing Field
by spiritway (Vicar) on Oct 31, 2005 at 05:44 UTC

    I'm sorry you feel that way... it seems to me that the idea here was to make the process more "open-ended", so that no matter how high you've risen, there is more to go. That's how it is in programming, and in most of life - no matter how good you get, there is room for growth.

    Sure, I'm disappointed that I won't be "saint" any time soon, or that I got "demoted" to hermit. And yes, I'm going to have to learn a whole new set of names, all that stuff - but so what? The number didn't change, only the name attached to it. That number is a better reflection of how I'm doing, than calling me saint, pope, lord high everything, supreme astronaut, or whatever.

    I believe the result of this change will be to encourage those who had reached the "saint" position to continue, even though some may have felt like they'd "arrived" or "made it", or whatever. A saint with 3000 points isn't necessarily the same sort of programmer (or participant in Perl Monks) as one with 8000 points. Why should the same name be applied to them both?

    Anyway, I'm OK with the change, though I agree that perhaps a bit of user input might have been appropriate. Perhaps over time this change will be more palatable to others, too...

      I believe the result of this change will be to encourage those who had reached the "saint" position to continue, even though some may have felt like they'd "arrived" or "made it", or whatever.

      Ya know, I never really put a lot of stock in my Sainthood. Thinking back, the biggest significance Sainthood had for me, is that I pretty muched stoped voting unless a post *really* stood out to me.

      Now that I'm a Vicar, I wonder if I'll start burning through all my votes every day as an easy way to earn XP and make progress?

Re^2: A Level Playing Field
by spiritway (Vicar) on Nov 01, 2005 at 05:38 UTC

    Without wishing to sound critical, I think that you are perhaps overly concerned with XP and with the words associated with a given level of XP. It seems to me that XP should be no more than a sort of fun incentive to grow, rather than something you struggle for and fight over. It's not a particularly good measure of much, except how popular your posts are with the other monks. As someone recently pointed out, there was one monk who never posted a single article, yet attained the level of "saint". For all I know, s/he might not even have tried to learn Perl.

    Rather than remain upset over this, why not try to make it fun, just learn Perl, ask questions, post answers, and so on? You've offered some very good answers to questions - you must know your stuff. So sit back and enjoy... or not. I guess it's really just how you feel...

Re^2: A Level Playing Field
by blazar (Canon) on Nov 04, 2005 at 16:50 UTC
    I'm extremely disappointed in the lack of logic in this decision. My rants are as follows.

    Well many of us were disappointed with some aspect or another of the new system. But it seems to me truely excessive to be "extremely disappointed".

    1. It is extremal illogical to have 7 ranks whose aggregate has under 10 total users. It is even more ridiculous to have 5 ranks, completely devoid of a user who has achieved the status without ill gotten exp.

    2. It is laughable that before 3k exp constituted Saint, and now the highest sizable rank is Bishop (40k exp) with only 6 having this label, and they are only halfway to their previous saintly rank

    Well, it seems that within the old system Sainthood had become quite a earthly thing, whereas the new one pushes it back and by far to its heavenly status. But it's still there, depending only on your skills, and involvement and time, and if you don't mean to spend yours to such and extent, do a favour to yourself and do not forget that after all fundamentally this is still a game!! Albeit a stimulating one, and one stimulating you to write (and do) interesting things, Perl-wise, that is.

    3. The term saint, is often used to establish stature, it was a well known term in the perl community and by stripping it of its previous meaning you require that people build name recognition for the other more esoteric terms.

    My overall impression is that you're exaggerating here too. PM is a great resource, but it does not coincide with the whole perl community, and I don't think that the term saint is all that known in other context. And even if it where, was all that important? Do you know of interviews in which it has been determinant?

    4. A more thoughtful system would have been backwards compatible/a superset of the old established naming convention and would have granted ranks above Saint, possibly in the form of a surnames eg. 'Saint of Syntax' etc. This would allow Saints to identify with each other.

    On the extension bit I do agree, although some other retouching to the levels may have been done, including the insertion of a few new ones "below" and a (more) moderate stretching, bringing Saint up to, say, 10k.

    But that suggestion of surnames I can't agree with. Though it would have been nice to trascend the Sainthood (and human) level by means of a whole new angelic hierarchy. See also other hierarchies here.

    5. There was no forum or poll that allowed the users to vote on this decision.

    Was it expected to be? Granted it would have been nice, but after all it may also have been a mess...

    6. Oblivious to the fact that Perlmonks is five years old, and none has reached 80k xp, the current saint level, the forces from above have lessened the flow of exp. How is someone to reach 80k xp when only a negligible few have reached the half way point, and now there is even less xp than before.

    Is it so bad to know that however high you rank, theres' still so much you could do, so much you could learn, so many ways you may contribute to the Perl community?

    Or, is one to ignore the ranking system entirely? In which case, why change something that had a purpose?

    Why should you ignore it completely? Just do not forget it's there to serve you (in the form of a sort of game) and not vice versa. After all I have a higher ranking than $Larry or, say, autrijus here. Am I expected to go round boastin' about this?!?

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