The point of points:Anyone is welcome to challenge or correct this, but to me the Tempus point system has two clear goals:
A) To reward player progress, which encourages continued play
B) To keep track of relative skill between players, which encourages competition
The first goal is achieved through completion and a well-done timer system, though I’d personally like to be able to see course run CPs and more CPs in general. When you complete a map, you get points. When you improve your time, it feels good seeing the difference.
When you improve your time enough so that it’s fast relative to other people’s runs, you get points. There are map leaderboards to track fastest runs, and there are player leaderboards to track overall points. With this, you have achieved the second goal, especially when considering other factors like how those fast times are listed on your profile or the IRC announcements.
Together, these create a system where a player can look at their own progress and where they stack against other people’s runs and achievements. Great, both goals have been achieved. So, where’s the problem? They don’t scale.
On Scaling:The OP mentions that completion gives comparable points to top times. I’m not sure if I have a skewed view on this or if Starkie was just being diplomatic, but I’d argue completion is hands down the superior method for rank climbing, at least for most people. The other day I spent 2-3 hours sweating to get 100 TT points, and then 12 minutes chilling out to get 50 completion points.
With completion, there is no chance to be pushed into 11th and completely lose all evidence of progress, at least as far as the point system is concerned. There are no restrictions on the ‘quality’ of your run, and hence no need to bind /r to a key very close to W or LMB. There is no relentlessly slamming your head against the jump wall of fame. Even without looking at the amount of points given out, completion is already much more attractive for ladder climbing. Once you look at point rewards however, I’d argue they aren’t at all comparable unless you are on the absolute top end of jump and your !incomplete is full of speed2s and wallfoxs.
For many, you can simply grind out some t4s every night and you’ll be rank 50 before you can say ‘Justice for Haggis!’. Okay cool str nice one, but what does any of this have to do with scaling?
On Scaling (for real this time):Simply put: there are more maps now than in early days Tempus, meaning more easy points.
If there were only one t4 map in all of jump, sitting at 50 points would be the baseline. Anyone above that would be practically famous, with the WR holder being a living god. This puts a colossal emphasis on top10, as there is only a single avenue of competition and the difference in points between someone who has completed all the maps on tempus vs rank 10 would be huge percentage wise (85 is 70% higher than 50).
NOTE: Rank 10 on a T4 gives 35 points, WR gives 350.Then a new t4 gets added, and there’s a whole new area of competition. Maybe the current top 10 players all get their exact same rankings on the new map, but that would be unlikely. People quit but their times remain, people enjoy and excel at different things, some might keep their focus on the old map, others might not etc. Lets say 12th on jump_AAA gets 9th on jump_BBB. Now the point increase is more evenly spread. I’ve made some fully sick illustrations to illuminate my illustrious point.
https://imgur.com/a/sAdpJhttps://imgur.com/a/xmAViThe axes aren’t to scale or labelled because lazy. X is people, y is points. Hopefully the 12th gets 9th example shows that the TT points will (probably) be spread wider, and that there will be a wider range from rank nobody to rank 1.It appears as map count increases, so does how evenly tt points are distributed (no flame for sample size or shitty deceiving graphs). This is ideal right? Players can pick and choose what want they to run and there isn’t ultra fierce competition that is ruled by 10 people with the 11th and onward being ignored (not a perfect hypothetical because /top functionally replaces /srank and /drank, but this gets less viable as map pool increases). This allows more room for hopefuls to enter the scene as the top players won’t be as singly focused on the one map without introducing anything that handicaps top players to make room for new players.
Of course, more even tt point distribution and a more progressive/gradual increase in points is achievable with the percentage based TT system that plenty of others introduced years before this thread even went up, and it solves a bunch more problems than this. I 100% support that system.
This isn’t what I’m getting at though.
Scaling (no actually for this time really yeah for real man hey):If you look at the difference in percentages like I did way up at the start of the previous section, you’d see rank 10 has 70% more points than rank 11, the baseline. When the second map is added, the widest spread scenario (unlikely I know) would see rank 20 has 35% more points than rank 21, the new baseline. As more maps are added, not only are the TT points more likely to go to a larger set of people, the impact of those points also decreases.
However, in the real world instead of the hypothetical one, people don’t even bother to complete every map that they are capable of, because there are simply so many. In the real world there are people with what would be equivalent to 85 points here. That is, people who have TTs but don’t have ‘baseline’ completion.
NOTE: To be clear, I’m not saying lots of maps is bad, infact I believe the opposite, I’m just stating fact.Many, many people have a bunch of maps lying around that they can do, but haven’t due to laziness or lack of motivation or finding that map type boring (not naming any techniques in particular…) or any number of reasons. The worst cases are people like haggis, who could absolutely smoke many of the people – myself included – who are higher ranked than him on various t2-4 maps. Another example is dd, who is soldier rank 30 but completion rank 84 and who has 10.3k tt points while I, at soldier rank 29 and completion rank 38, have 2.7k tt points. While I do think there is some merit in completion, more specifically t6 (and maybe some t5s), I don’t think it accounts for 7k points. dd is better than me, plain and simple, but this isn’t reflected by the system,
which means goal B of tempus isn’t being fulfilled properly. If you want to know who is ‘better’, you must investigate and compare their profiles and times, or simply ask around.
What I’m suggesting is, at least, a discussion on what would happen if tt points scaled with map count. This would remove the ever-decreasing impact they have due to the ever-increasing map pool. Good jumpers wouldn’t be ‘forced’ to grind out dumb t3s or to go increasingly harder in TTs to break even with baseline points.
Now, I’ll be honest, I have no idea how you would tune this properly.
Obviously completing squared or sinister is still very impressive regardless of your time, and I don’t think people should be discouraged from doing that if they are looking to rank climb. If you put too much focus on fast times, the pendulum will simply swing the other way and later down the line we’ll see people saying
‘I DID HANAMI_H AND THESE MORONS JUST GET BOATLOADS OF TOP 5% TIMES AND WRECK MY RANK!! SHIT POINT SYSTEM!!’. A % based TT system would need to be fine-tuned even before thinking about adding this system, so it would be a lot of work. I guess a re-tiering of maps might help, though.
I haven’t seen this suggested before and there might be a very good/obvious reason as to why that is; feel free to enlighten me on that reason. Maybe this will too heavily favour the evil dog jump bourgeoisie and destroy any hope or passion of the innocent, hardworking jump proletariat. I’m just throwing stuff out so if you see a reason as to why it’s bad, please say.
