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 how many regular points are available? 
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Posted on: Sun Sep 30, 2012 2:36 pm




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Joined: Fri May 13, 2011 2:12 am
Post how many regular points are available?
My question is. How many regular points are available in a week? I have done every puzzle & there are people with as many as 36 more points.


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Posted on: Sun Sep 30, 2012 4:55 pm




Posts: 65
Joined: Mon Mar 05, 2012 8:17 pm
Post Re: how many regular points are available?
523 + 10 * total # bonus puzzles solved + 16 pts for 12x12 puzzle overlap (submitting day or 2 late)
The more all time pts. that you have accrued (longevity) hinders your bonus puzzle opportunities the way things are currently set up.


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Posted on: Sun Sep 30, 2012 5:03 pm




Posts: 17
Joined: Fri May 13, 2011 2:12 am
Post Re: how many regular points are available?
rickt wrote:
523 + 10 * total # bonus puzzles solved + 16 pts for 12x12 puzzle overlap (submitting day or 2 late)
The more all time pts. that you have accrued (longevity) hinders your bonus puzzle opportunities the way things are currently set up.

Yes i know that. But there are people with 619 regular points. where i have 573. I did all puzzles.


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Posted on: Sun Sep 30, 2012 5:37 pm




Posts: 65
Joined: Mon Mar 05, 2012 8:17 pm
Post Re: how many regular points are available?
looks like the person who currently has the most regular pts. (629) accrued them by solving all reg+killer puzzles for the past 7 days (523 pts) as well as 9 bonus puzzles (9 * 10 = 90 pts.) and also submitting a 3rd 12x12 puzzle during the past 7 days (e.g. by submitting previous Sundays 12x12 on Monday or Tuesday, submitting Thursdays 12x12 and now submitting this Sundays 12x12 today, thus gaining an additional 16 pts for the past 7 days). Of course, this additional 16 pts. rolls off on Monday or Tuesday based on when previous weeks 12x12 happened to have been submitted.

Total = 523 + 90 + 16 = 629.

BTW this is probably the current record for 7 day reg pts.!!!! Good job BRAM!


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Posted on: Sun Sep 30, 2012 8:01 pm




Posts: 17
Joined: Fri May 13, 2011 2:12 am
Post Re: how many regular points are available?
rickt wrote:
looks like the person who currently has the most regular pts. (629) accrued them by solving all reg+killer puzzles for the past 7 days (523 pts) as well as 9 bonus puzzles (9 * 10 = 90 pts.) and also submitting a 3rd 12x12 puzzle during the past 7 days (e.g. by submitting previous Sundays 12x12 on Monday or Tuesday, submitting Thursdays 12x12 and now submitting this Sundays 12x12 today, thus gaining an additional 16 pts for the past 7 days). Of course, this additional 16 pts. rolls off on Monday or Tuesday based on when previous weeks 12x12 happened to have been submitted.

Total = 523 + 90 + 16 = 629.

BTW this is probably the current record for 7 day reg pts.!!!! Good job BRAM!


richt I understand the math you used to achieve the total. But do you understand that I did every puzzle available, so he should be at the most 10 points higher than me. Not 46 points higher. That is my question.


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Posted on: Sun Sep 30, 2012 8:20 pm




Posts: 65
Joined: Mon Mar 05, 2012 8:17 pm
Post Re: how many regular points are available?
Ok .. I see your point! It is a great question as to why the divergence is so large. Perhaps you should have more points.. Best to have Patrick look into it...


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Posted on: Mon Oct 01, 2012 12:13 pm




Posts: 3296
Joined: Thu May 12, 2011 11:58 pm
Post Re: how many regular points are available?
rickt wrote:
Ok .. I see your point! It is a great question as to why the divergence is so large. Perhaps you should have more points.. Best to have Patrick look into it...

Ok, I've started to look into this.

The current (1 Oct 2012, 10.00 GMT) breakdown for tom is:

409 regular (which includes 2 12x12 puzzles = 32 points)
93 killer
50 bonus
(= 552 regular points in the rankings)

21 timed bonus
48 extra
48 book
(= 117)

so current 7 day total: 669


The breakdown for rickt is:

434 regular (which includes 3 12x12 puzzles = 48 points)
105 killer
70 bonus
(= 609 regular points in the rankings)

19 timed bonus
104 extra
66 book
(= 189)

so current 7 day total: 798

If useful, I can produce the same breakdown for "bram" for yesterday?
Or even the day-by-day breakdown of the regular points?

Patrick


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Posted on: Mon Oct 01, 2012 1:31 pm




Posts: 253
Joined: Tue May 24, 2011 4:55 pm
Post Re: how many regular points are available?
rickt wrote:
looks like the person who currently has the most regular pts. (629) accrued them by solving all reg+killer puzzles for the past 7 days (523 pts) as well as 9 bonus puzzles (9 * 10 = 90 pts.) and also submitting a 3rd 12x12 puzzle during the past 7 days (e.g. by submitting previous Sundays 12x12 on Monday or Tuesday, submitting Thursdays 12x12 and now submitting this Sundays 12x12 today, thus gaining an additional 16 pts for the past 7 days). Of course, this additional 16 pts. rolls off on Monday or Tuesday based on when previous weeks 12x12 happened to have been submitted.

Total = 523 + 90 + 16 = 629.

BTW this is probably the current record for 7 day reg pts.!!!! Good job BRAM!

Thanks a lot, rickt [thumbup] I actually entirely missed out on puzzling on Sunday Sep 23 because I was very busy IRL, and then on Monday Sep 24 I solved all the Sunday puzzles, including the 12x12. This, together with the fact that the book puzzles I am currently submitting once a day are the 12-point ones from 101 Advanced Puzzles (recommended!), helps explain how I had no less than 9 bonus puzzles unlocked in one week.

tom wrote:
richt I understand the math you used to achieve the total. But do you understand that I did every puzzle available, so he should be at the most 10 points higher than me. Not 46 points higher. That is my question.

tom, allow me to rephrase your question (for the benefit of newcomers to this thread) and make an attempt at answering it. As shown by rickt above, if two persons have both solved all available puzzles for a week and they don't have the same number of regular points, two variables may be taken into account to explain the diffence – firstly, the possibility of a 12x12 [regular] puzzle overlap (which would give the person with the overlap an "additional" 16 points) and, secondly, the possibility that they may have solved a different number of bonus puzzles (which would give the person who had solved n more bonus puzzles than the other within the past week n * 10 more points). It is therefore unsurprising that I would have 16 + n * 10 regular points more than you on Sunday Sep 30, but what you are saying is that it should not be possible that n > 1, meaning that the maximum difference should be 16 + 1 * 10 = 26 regular points. However, you observed a point diffence of 36 or 46, corresponding to n = 2 or n = 3, and you are asking how this is possible.

Part of the explanation may be what I wrote earlier in this post about having submitted 12-point book puzzles. Book-puzzle points, like any other points, count towards the target number of points for unlocking new bonus puzzles. (Also, I don't know if you may have missed a bonus puzzle at some point, that is, if you did not solve it before the next one was unlocked. Being a seasoned calcudoku.org user, though, you are probably watching out for newly-unlocked bonus puzzles, so that possibility can probably be discounted.) A more important factor may be the one rickt mentioned in his first post in this thread: "The more all time pts. that you have accrued (longevity) hinders your bonus puzzle opportunities the way things are currently set up." What he meant by that was that the diffence between two neighbouring bonus-puzzle targets is no longer fixed at 111 points but is calculated individually according to a formula that includes the number of bonus puzzles previously solved by the puzzler (as suggested in the two first posts of another thread). Since your all-time point total is currently 45533 to my 22312, you have probably solved about twice as many bonus puzzles as the 200 I have solved, which puts you at a disadvantage if such a formula is indeed used.

In that thread, I actually suggested doing away with bonus puzzles entirely, and starling seconded that, explicitly mentioning that they contribute to a certain degree of randomness in the short-term rankings. This would also be in keeping with the general idea of reducing the number of puzzles (while increasing variety) mentioned in this important new thread about what to change about the site to attract more visitors.

I would also like to direct your attention to another long-winded post of mine [smile] the first part of which also deals with factors affecting the 7-day rankings. Among those, the most important is that "you can earn points for extra puzzles for up to one month, which means that you could deliberately refrain from submitting them for some weeks and then submit a month's worth of extra puzzles within one week (or someone could be simply "catching up" on extra puzzles without being concerned about the rankings)". This is of course also relevant in the narrower context of the number of regular points since the up to (30 – 7) * 8 = 184 "additional" extra points may earn the puzzler a couple of extra bonus puzzles that week.

I think it is near-inevitable that, for the reasons mentioned in that post, even puzzlers who have solved all the puzzles in a given week may have a different 7-day ranking, both in regard to the total number of points and, more specifically, to the number of regular points (which is the point you brought up). It is likewise inevitable that the occasional bug (e g this recent one) will pop up from time to time. (The fact that that bug also has to do with my ranking is a pure coincidence, I swear!) While I don't see this as a major problem, I know that some puzzlers get frustrated about the difference in 7-day rankings between "complete" puzzlers. To make up for these (small and insignificant) shortcomings of the ranking system, I would like to repeat my suggestion from that post that,
bram wrote:
If someone earned a gold star on the current and the preceding six days, their gold star could turn into a special "7-day gold star" (bigger, with more lustre or something like that) or a diamond. That way, even if for some reason others made it past them to the top of the rankings, they would have a visible symbol that they belonged to the select group who managed all of the regular puzzles of the past week. Which would probably make all of us less prone to being annoyed about others having more points because they were better at timed puzzles or put in more time to solve book puzzles or used some of the tactics listed above or whatever. (To encourage subscription, Patrick could make the special gold star – and the regular one, for that matter – dependent on users solving not just the regular puzzles but also the extra puzzle of each day.)

pnm wrote:
If useful, I can produce the same breakdown for "bram" for yesterday?
Or even the day-by-day breakdown of the regular points?

No objections [smile] I was vain enough to take a bunch of screenshots yesterday of my 7-day, 30-day and all-time totals as I like to contemplate my successes from every possible angle :-)

(Note: This post was re-edited and monstrously expanded in order to comprehensively address tom's concerns. Sorry to him and everybody else that it ended up being so long. I only submitted the re-edited version after sneaklyfox and Patrick had made their 4:27 pm and 4:32 pm comments. If they appear not to have taken my mega-post into consideration, it is for the simple reason that they couldn't because it was not available to them at the time of writing.)


Last edited by bram on Mon Oct 01, 2012 7:02 pm, edited 2 times in total.



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Posted on: Mon Oct 01, 2012 6:27 pm




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Post Re: how many regular points are available?
Sometimes I think that bonus puzzle makes too much of a difference. I mean, I have done so many bonus puzzles that it's almost impossible for me to get at the top of the rankings now because I'm always 30-40 points short from less bonus puzzles. Others will be able to make those extra 30-40 points from bonus puzzles each week for a long long time because it goes up really slowly for subscribers. I don't like it as I think it's not very fair...


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Posted on: Mon Oct 01, 2012 6:32 pm




Posts: 3296
Joined: Thu May 12, 2011 11:58 pm
Post Re: how many regular points are available?
sneaklyfox wrote:
Sometimes I think that bonus puzzle makes too much of a difference. I mean, I have done so many bonus puzzles that it's almost impossible for me to get at the top of the rankings now because I'm always 30-40 points short from less bonus puzzles. Others will be able to make those extra 30-40 points from bonus puzzles each week for a long long time because it goes up really slowly for subscribers. I don't like it as I think it's not very fair...

I suppose you're right.

Prob. better to switch to (1) fewer bonus puzzles, (2) same points difference for everyone
(but prob. keep the subscriber/non-subscriber difference)


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