no more secrets

red · Joined: 31 May 2007 Posts: 10

Our team philosophy is more anti-scoring than anything -- you can see by our bottom-of-the-barrel score. While we choked on some clues (refusing to call for well over an hour), we felt that we rocked others. Our team was as cohesive as ever and not once did we 'have words' with one-another. I'd definitely play with the same group again -- regardless of leader boards, scoring systems, or pack position.

Most important was that we had a great time, and hope that we helped teams around us have fun as well. Laughing

Scoring systems never really properly account for how long a team chooses to work on a puzzle before they call (a *big* variable), whether they choose to work with/against and/or help/hinder other teams, what type of help they ask for, how much food they provide the GC helpers along the way, or for other random variables (tampered clues, broken vans, etc) Speaking of which, shouldn't we get bonus points for solving the "van swap" clue without missing a beat. Wink

As a self-evaluation metric, I think we'd prefer to see the number of calls for each given clue on the board. We'd also prefer to have team names encoded -- simply to head off the trend of the Game heading further down the road to being more and more of a competitive puzzle challenge. Competition can make people do crazy/unfriendly things. Since this historically has been a gentleman's Game, we'll be the anti-competition at the back-of-the-bus doing the zany stuff. Y'all are welcome to join us anytime!

We were bummed to have been skipped by clues -- especially the MS Text adventure. We kept getting sent to field offices within 15 minutes of their closing, and by the time we found a seat, we were moving on.... We'd much prefer the opportunity to solve all the clues at our pace and help level and come in hours later having played our Game.

My 2 cents
-Red
Orange Snood (Snood + Orange Crush)

DaleNeal-GC · Joined: 21 May 2007 Posts: 14

Hi Red,

I re-read this post just now before submitting it, and it's probably way more information than you cared to know. But, you brought up a number of topics (competitiveness, scoring, skipping, etc) that various people on coed astronomy care a lot about and that we've discussed and debated at great length.

Our philosophy when putting together NMS was to try to make a game that was fun to play, and which allowed teams to be competitive *if they wanted to*, but that didn't require it. In particular, we tried to offload the competition aspect onto the field offices rather than the main route, and we intentionally did not bring up any aspects of scoring prior to or during the game. Our aim was to allow teams to choose their own level of competitiveness and take as many or as few hints as they felt like on the main route clues.

With respect to the leaderboard and scoring, I definitely debated with myself about publishing all of the data. Any scoring system we could come up with would be imperfect for all of the reasons you mentioned and more. My hope is that the leaderboard data can be used both for competitive teams to "see how well they did" as well as for all teams to better understand their own solving abilities. I think it's neat to have the data to see things like which puzzle types you did better than average on, or whether you get more affected by sleepiness and late night solving than other teams.

Encoding the team names is an idea I hadn't thought of, and the cat's already out of the bag on this one, so to speak. I will consider it in the future if coed astronomy is ever crazy enough to run a game again. It seems to potentially be a nice balance, as it allows teams who do want to be competitive to reveal their times while allowing all teams to see their times within the context of all of the other teams.

Regarding skipping, we're very sensitive to it, and I think NMS had one of the lowest skip rates of any game I can recall, in part due to the field offices. As I mentioned in a previous thread, teams saw much more of the field offices than we expected, and we didn't intend for teams to be repeatedly arriving 15 min before closing.

Our skips were not imposed out of any desire to force teams to be competitive or solve clues more quickly, but out of purely logistical constraints. Unfortunately, a number of our clues had very hard cutoff times caused by a number of factors--public parks close any time between 7 and 10pm, Marini's Candy closes at 11pm, rangers kick you out of Cuesta park if you're running a clue after 11am, there was a birthday party at Twister's Gym after us, etc. We felt especially bad about skipping you on the Microsoft Text Adventure clue, but it had high enough staffing requirements that most of core GC would have had to skip our own end-party to continue to staff that clue.

There is an argument that we could have restructured our route to use only sites with low staffing demands that we could have kept open all weekend. We could also have had staggered finishing times, which I feel takes away from the positive social aspect of hanging out with all of the other teams. This would have been a very different, and in my mind at least, a less compelling game, but I understand that there is a very large variance in what different people and different teams want out of a game.

Lastly, regarding per-clue GC help line call volume, we recorded this manually, so we don't have a very accurate count. I can try to get you some numbers on that when I get home tonight, though.

So that's my 3 cents or thereabouts. I'll shut up now. =)

-Dale
_________________
AnEelLad

red · Joined: 31 May 2007 Posts: 10

sparCKL · Joined: 21 May 2007 Posts: 14 Location: Mountain View, CA

I'll second what Red said:

YARRRRR-GC · Joined: 21 May 2007 Posts: 10

DaleNeal-GC · Joined: 21 May 2007 Posts: 14

neilfred · Joined: 27 May 2007 Posts: 9

Looking at the leaderboard.html page is interesting, but it's hard to digest the data. I hacked up a little javascript to allow you to watch the weekend playback at high speed with times appearing in order:

http://www.derf.net/nomoresecrets/

I made it show only the completion times so you can fit more on the screen at a time, and of course reduced font size. Hopefully the buttons are self-explanatory. I should also say that I'm not a javascript expert, and I only tested it in Firefox.

Enjoy!

YARRRRR-GC · Joined: 21 May 2007 Posts: 10

This javascript thing is pretty cool!

sparCKL · Joined: 21 May 2007 Posts: 14 Location: Mountain View, CA

DaleNeal-GC · Joined: 21 May 2007 Posts: 14