Trailblazing Seems to be Interfering with Scoring

Bugs
#1

First, just to rule out some things you might ask: I’m basically a veteran player (translate to: I play way too much) and while I don’t always score the best one can, I can tell when something should score more than 20 points. I also looked for anything like this in Bugs and didn’t see anything, so I apologize in advance if I missed a relevant post.


Lately, when playing on the Inputs cells, it seems like when I’m trailblazing I’ll score an automatic 20 points on almost every cell. This is incredibly frustrating when I spend more than a couple of minutes on a cell and it’s really obvious that it should be worth 50 points or more and there are not obvious mistakes. This doesn’t happen randomly or every once in a while, but repeatedly; trailblazing 20 or more in a row and getting only 20 points per is just not right. 

Also, if I decide to skip a cell while trailblazing a bunch in a row, I’m sometimes awarded 20 points when I shouldn’t be awarded any at all. This does not happen repeatedly, but only once (then skipping works properly as long as I stay on the same project).

I’ll keep any eye on this post and will definitely speak up if this gets attention. Thanks. :slight_smile:
#2

Hey ketta,


Sorry you haven’t been getting many points recently.  There have been numerous discussions about points in the past, but I don’t know if they were in the bugs section or not.  Searching for points would probably do the trick.  The main thing that is different about the Inputs to the J cell is that they are just very very hard.  There are a lot of places where the cell needs to be extended but it is not at all obvious that that’s the case.

Now I’m not suggesting that you aren’t doing things right.  That’s a possibility, but even assuming that you are the best eyewirer in the world, the difficulty of the cell leads to everyone getting fewer points given the system that we currently have.

You can read in more detail in some of the other posts how the points system works, but in general, we are rating you based on how you do compared with the rest of the people working on the cell.  You get more points for finding all the stuff that is considered to be “in the cell” by the rest of the players.  This leads to 2 undesirable consequences which we haven’t found a way around yet.  The first is trailblazing.  If you are the first person to do a cube, we have nothing to compare you to.  In this case we give a fixed point score to you (I think it’s currently at 50).  The second undesirable consequence is that the correct minority isn’t rewarded for their correctness.  Until majority opinion exceeds some threshold, it’s impossible for us to distinguish someone doing the right thing from someone playing randomly or otherwise vandalizing the site.

All of these problems are exacerbated by the fact that the inputs to the J are just really hard to do correctly.  We are currently working on tutorials to help people get better at them.  We have discussed many different point system alternatives both on the forum and internally.  So far we haven’t found one that we think will be substantially better than what we have already.  As always, we are open to suggestions!
#3

I understand all of that–in fact, the reason why I like working on these Inputs is because they’re challenging.


However, I still think there is an issue. I noticed it again recently when switching to MOSTEC #1 (only because there was nothing available to work on for either of the Inputs). Several times in a row (about a dozen), 20 points per trailblaze, regardless of difficulty or time spent, and at least once a skipped cell generated 20 points. Please understand I’m not being whiny about points themselves…it’s seeing this recurring issue that just doesn’t seem right.

It only happens when I’m on a trailblazing streak (never when not trailblazing a bunch of cells in a row).
#4

Hmm.  It sounds like maybe we didn’t switch trailblazing over from 20 points to 50.  I’ll look into it.  The “points when skipping” is a known bug which we haven’t gotten around to fixing yet.


Thanks!
#5

Thanks for your reply. :slight_smile:


Just to let you know, this 20 point trailblazing streak happened again last night. I could no longer work on Inputs 2, so went to 1 and could never get more than 20 points for probably 2 dozen cubes in a row (some were massive, some were spaghetti, etc). Normally, it seems that trailblazing can generate typical points (I’ve gotten hundreds for one cube at times, as I would for a non-trailblaze cube, as well as a high range of points…just trying to provide examples). I switched to the MOSTEC cube, same thing. The only way I was able to get normal point ranges was to go to a completed project.