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Topic: Player of the Month (Read 3606 times) |
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mistre
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Player of the Month
« on: Jul 1st, 2008, 10:57am » |
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Quote from Fritzlein in my new player retention post:
"I agree that Player of the Month has outlived its usefulness, and the money could be better spent otherwise. I'm leery of rewards based only the on the best of something (e.g. only for setting a bot-bashing record) since that is as prone to being won by the same people over and over as is the PotM. At the time PotM was changed to its current rules, we wanted to promote HvH games, but I think a tournament manager would do that better, and the contest money should be aimed at newcomers instead. Omar has suggested a payout for anyone who completes the bot ladder, which I think is a great idea, because it is specifically targeted at newcomers."
Any thought on what we can do instead? Now that Arimaa is going to be published, I would think the time to make a change to this would be now.
I am also interested in knowing more about the "tournament manager" that Fritzlein is referring to.
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Fritzlein
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Re: Player of the Month
« Reply #1 on: Jul 1st, 2008, 11:32am » |
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on Jul 1st, 2008, 10:57am, mistre wrote:| I am also interested in knowing more about the "tournament manager" that Fritzlein is referring to. |
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A tournament manager is something like the Tomato account at the Internet Chess Club. There they implemented the tournament manager as a user account, a sort of bot that you can talk to. You tell tomato to create a tournament, ask it what tournaments are available, tell it you want to join a specific tournament, etc. Tomato automatically handles the game pairings, instantiates the games, handles forfeits, and keeps score.
For the Arimaa server, a tournament manager would not have to be completely automated; it could instead be an aide to a human who wanted to run a tournament. Also it would not have to be fully-featured. Humans could handle most of the work at first.
The minimal feature for running a non-live tournament is the game scheduler. A human TD could keep score and make the pairings, but there is no substitute for automated scheduling of the game times like we have in the World Championship. We have tried to have human-run tournaments in the past, and the games never finish because the participants can't schedule a mutually agreeable time. Without an automatic scheduler, there is no way to determine whose fault it is that the game didn't happen (i.e. no way to forfeit a player).
Other features could be added individually later.
For running a live tournament, no automated tournament manager would even be necessary, but it sure would be nice to have a scoreboard, automatic pairings, and a way to handle forfeits/withdrawing.
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Fritzlein
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Re: Player of the Month
« Reply #2 on: Jul 1st, 2008, 2:40pm » |
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By the way, lest we think events don't matter, I checked the stats here. For the months of January, February, and March, we averaged 45.5 unique humans logging in per day. For the months of May and June we averaged 29.9 unique humans logging in per day. Apparently more people participate when something is going on.
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Fritzlein
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Re: Player of the Month
« Reply #3 on: Jul 16th, 2008, 8:21am » |
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Well, so much for the "summer slump". After the low numbers of logins in May and June, I was digging in for a long period of decreased activity, but just now I logged in and was one of twelve simultaneous users. I'm trying to remember when I last saw such a busy gameroom when there was no event going on.
I guess I just can't predict the Arimaa server activity.
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mistre
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Re: Player of the Month
« Reply #4 on: Jul 16th, 2008, 10:16am » |
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Back on topic:
No offense to ArifSyed, but he has now pocketing $210 in Arimaa winnings just by having an inordinate amount of time on his hands and playing every beginner that happens to wander on to the site. He is the only player to win Player of the Month in all of 2008 and he is well on his way for winning in July too.
To me, this contest is the most broken thing on the site and should be changed immediately. At the very least make it so that someone that wins one month is then ineligible to win for another 5 months, so it can spread out to more players and encourage player vs player games (which I think was it's original intent). As it is now, this contest is not fun at all and is a foregone conclusion who will win by the 5th of the month.
Omar, you might as well just end the contest and pay Arif $30 a month on the side for constantly playing Arimaa.
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| « Last Edit: Jul 16th, 2008, 10:16am by mistre » |
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mistre
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Re: Player of the Month
« Reply #5 on: Jul 16th, 2008, 10:28am » |
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I went back to the beginning of 2008 and saw who would win POTM if you could only win once every 6 months (beginning Jan 08 ).
Jan - ArifSyed (71 pts)
Feb - Arimaa_Master (39 pts)
Mar - LAbiuso (36 pts)
Apr - Arimabuff tied with RonWeasley (18 pts)
May - Woh (9 pts)
Jun - BilalQ (17 pts)
Jul - ArifSyed (71 pts) would be eligible again.
If this rule was in place, I guarantee the winning totals for Apr, May, and Jun would have been much higher as their would have been a fun incentive to play more human vs human matches.
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| « Last Edit: Jul 16th, 2008, 10:28am by mistre » |
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Arimabuff
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Re: Player of the Month
« Reply #6 on: Jul 16th, 2008, 10:50am » |
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on Jul 16th, 2008, 10:16am, mistre wrote:Back on topic:
No offense to ArifSyed, but he has now pocketing $210 in Arimaa winnings just by having an inordinate amount of time on his hands and playing every beginner that happens to wander on to the site. He is the only player to win Player of the Month in all of 2008 and he is well on his way for winning in July too.
To me, this contest is the most broken thing on the site and should be changed immediately. At the very least make it so that someone that wins one month is then ineligible to win for another 5 months, so it can spread out to more players and encourage player vs player games (which I think was it's original intent). As it is now, this contest is not fun at all and is a foregone conclusion who will win by the 5th of the month.
Omar, you might as well just end the contest and pay Arif $30 a month on the side for constantly playing Arimaa.
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Maybe the winner should give some proof that he has a busy schedule.
/sarcasm
Sorry mistre but I won't follow you there. Whatever his motives, Arif promotes the original intent of the contest, that is inciting people, sometimes new to this game room, sometimes not, to play against other people and therefore he fully deserves the reward.
I may dislike some of Arif's "initiatives" but winning that contest is definitely not one of them.
Your idea of disqualifying someone for 5 months after he won would have for obvious effect of neutralizing constantly 5 of the 6 most frequent players of the game room and therefore reducing the activity to almost zero!!!
Another brilliant idea like that and Omar may as well, shut down this site altogether.
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| « Last Edit: Jul 16th, 2008, 11:01am by Arimabuff » |
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Arimabuff
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Re: Player of the Month
« Reply #7 on: Jul 16th, 2008, 11:59am » |
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Besides, what kind of message would Omar send if he started penalizing people for playing "too much" of Arimaa?
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mistre
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Re: Player of the Month
« Reply #8 on: Jul 16th, 2008, 1:33pm » |
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on Jul 16th, 2008, 10:50am, Arimabuff wrote:
Your idea of disqualifying someone for 5 months after he won would have for obvious effect of neutralizing constantly 5 of the 6 most frequent players of the game room and therefore reducing the activity to almost zero!!!
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I completely disagree with this statement. The POTM applies to only Human vs Human games which still make up a very small percentage of games on this site. It has no effect on bot games and those would continue as normal.
My original point stands - the contest has lost all sense of purpose if the same person wins every month and in convincing fashion. Arif knows that he can win every month and everyone else has given up even trying. Therefore it is no longer a contest, but a free give away to Arif for playing Arimaa. If Omar wants to pay Arif $30 a month to play, then he should just do it on the side and shut down the Player of the Month altogether.
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mistre
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Re: Player of the Month
« Reply #9 on: Jul 16th, 2008, 1:35pm » |
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on Jul 16th, 2008, 11:59am, Arimabuff wrote:| Besides, what kind of message would Omar send if he started penalizing people for playing "too much" of Arimaa? |
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I said nothing about penalizing anyone. Just not rewarding someone for playing the most games.
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Fritzlein
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Re: Player of the Month
« Reply #10 on: Jul 16th, 2008, 1:46pm » |
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Promotion is a tricky thing. The behavior we get isn't always what we expect, or what we wanted to promote in the first place. One unexpected feature of the Player of the Month contest is that it isn't a contest. It hasn't been a contest in months. Not that it was always hotly contested, but there used to be suspense more often than there is now.
Another unexpected feature is that it has given ArifSyed an incentive to intentionally lose games to lower his rating. He has discovered that the lower his rating is, the more likely newcomers are to accept his invitations, because they think they will be getting a game with someone near their own level, not a game with a ringer. Thus the Player of the Month contest is encouraging ratings distortion.
(Note that rating manipulation by intentional losses can't be handled by any mathematical system. We can tweak the ratings to prevent amassing a huge rating via bot-bashing, but there is no way to prevent someone from driving their own rating arbitrarily low. There must be a social solution to sandbagging, either by banning people who intentionally lose rated games, or (better) by removing rewards for having a low rating.)
But anyway, the question in my mind is not whether the Player of the Month contest is a good thing or a bad thing. Overall it has been a net positive for the Arimaa community, and probably would continue to be in the future. The question in my mind is this: if we have $30 per month to hand out as an incentive, is there a way to dole it out that is more beneficial to the community? It was precisely that question that led to revamping Player of the Month and totally changing its rules in April 2005. Three years later, the question hasn't changed, but the community has changed, so the answer has changed as well.
It seems clear to me that the promotion dollars, however they are distributed, should not target players who are going to play all day anyway. There is no point in making contest that I am going to win, because it won't change my addicted status. I don't need any more incentive than my deep love of the game. The players that we should be targeting with promotions are relative newcomers who need our help to get to the addicted stage.
One problem I can see up front with prizes for which only newcomers are eligible is that people will have an incentive to set up new, phony accounts in order to make themselves eligible. There is a definite practical hurdle to be overcome if we want to exclude old-timers. Mistre, your suggestion of six-month ineligibility faces the same issue of duplicate accounts. But if the prize money really is going to spur growth, we have to get around the duplicate account issue somehow. Perhaps the prize could only be paid out upon production of identification.
Once we have a means for excluding phony accounts, however, just about any contest becomes promotional by adding the rule that it can only be won once ever per person. The same scoring for the current contest could be used, or a plethora of other possibilities. For example, every month we could start a new game-per-week single-elimination tournament, scheduled like the World Championship, open only to those who haven't won in the past, with the $30 prize going to the winner.
I don't buy the argument that it is counter-productive to exclude our most accomplished and most active players from the promotion. First, the exclusion of past winners would mean that the contest stays a contest, so people don't get demoralized and stop playing. We don't want an exclusive circle of highly-motivated players, we want to draw everyone in over time. Second, the core people of the community are going to stick around regardless, but there are some people who will drift away somewhat without a little extra motivation to keep them active. These are the people a promotion can and should engage.
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| « Last Edit: Jul 16th, 2008, 5:16pm by Fritzlein » |
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mistre
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Re: Player of the Month
« Reply #11 on: Jul 16th, 2008, 4:51pm » |
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Excellent post, Fritzlein.
If the $30 is truly meant for promotion and promotion only, then limiting it to newcomers would be ideal. Here is an idea. A player is only eligible to win the player of the month within the first 3 months of joining. However, that player can only win the prize once.
If we want to award longevity on the site and give incentive for all players to play human vs human games, how about a system where you accumulate your POTM points and redeem them for Arimaa stuff once you reach certain levels.
Here is an example:
Challenge Match game - worth 10 pts
Arimaa Championship game - worth 5 pts
Computer Championship game - worth 5 pts
Arimaa Postal Tournament game - worth 3 pts
Human vs Human game (postal or live) - worth 1 pt
Redeem your points for prizes -
Arimaa TShirt - 75 pts
Arimaa Boardgame - 150 pts
Fritzlein's Arimaa Book - 1,000,000 pts!
Or something like that.
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| « Last Edit: Jul 16th, 2008, 4:53pm by mistre » |
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Arimabuff
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Re: Player of the Month
« Reply #12 on: Jul 16th, 2008, 9:22pm » |
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Karl, I didn't say that I approved of Arif's behavior, he definitely has no ethics whatsoever when it comes to Arimaa, as you said he keeps his rating extremely low (losing repeatedly against Arimascorep1 for instance so that newcomers think that he is one of them and play with him also it makes them think that he is rather weak and he can win an easy 3 points by a swift attack). What I didn't like is mistre disparagement of someone for having "too much time on their hands". If someone wants to play Arimaa all day then we should encourage them not mock them the way mistre and a couple of others here do. As for Arif's "ideas", I definitely don't like them and I agree that things like "losing a game voluntarily" should be forcefully discouraged. On the other hand playing HONEST Arimaa for hours shouldn't be looked down upon by people like mistre. That was my point. I hope that you follow me on this.
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Arimabuff
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Re: Player of the Month
« Reply #13 on: Jul 17th, 2008, 4:07am » |
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In a nutshell, playing dirty tricks is reprehensible but playing lots of Arimaa isn't something people should be berated for, quite the contrary actually.
There are nuances that some around here don't seem to grasp.
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RonWeasley
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Re: Player of the Month
« Reply #14 on: Jul 17th, 2008, 5:26am » |
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Another way of gaming the Player of the Month contest is to open new accounts, pose as other identities, and play games against the primary account to boost its score. So you win a prize for playing with yourself. I'm not sure this is happening yet, but it's another way to game the system. This is another reason I don't like alternate accounts.
I think the situation we have here is a competition that can be exploited by undesirable behavior. When that happens the competition needs to be changed or discontinued. Ultimately it's up to Omar how he wants to use his own money to promote arimaa. We can only offer commentary. The PoTM contest may evolve into something that favors players with lots of time to play honest games, and the same player(s) always win. That's okay with me even though I understand how such an extreme won't motivate the average player.
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