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Subject: Team vs Team Scoring Explained

Posted by: Terry
Date: Feb 24 10

Team vs Team Scoring Explained

Our team vs team scoring is slightly complicated, so I thought I'd post this to hopefully clarify how it all works. I had hoped for a simpler scoring system, but in the end the following was the fairest way to do it, and that's really what's important when we're comparing teams and scores.

For those of you who don't have the patience to read through this, the important point is as follows:

You CANNOT decrease or harm your team's team vs team score in any daily or hourly game by playing and scoring horribly, EXCEPT in the special "team vs team daily game". If you play these daily and hourly games and score well, you can increase your team's team vs team score in that game for the day. If you score poorly, your score has NO EFFECT. Everyone should play often to attempt to increase their team's daily rank! My most important design goal when implementing this scoring system was to make sure everyone could play without worrying about harming their team. Details below.

GOALS:

A. Allow for comparisons of teams of different sizes.
B. Create a system that does NOT discourage players of lesser trivia talent (like me!) from participating.
C. Create a system where sheer # of plays or players doesn't overwhelm quality of play.
D. Create a system that can deal with ranking hourly games too, without forcing everyone to play 24 hours a day and be sleep deprived.

1. The Leagues

It makes no sense to compare a team containing 4 active players against a team with 300 active players. You simply can't rank these teams against one another because there is no sensible or fair way to do it. The solution is to break our teams into three leagues, and place all of the teams on FunTrivia into these three leagues based on how many active players each team has. Our three leagues are as follows:

A. Large Team League -- Those teams having over 100 active players.
B. Medium Team League -- Those teams having 30 to 99 active players.
C. Small Team League -- Those teams having up to 30 active players.

We determine what league each team belongs in on the first day of each month. An "active player" is one who has visited the website fairly recently. If your team is placed in "Medium Team League" on Feb 1, then your team will remain in that league for all of Feb. At the start of March we check your team size to see if your team moves into one of the other leagues.

These leagues solve MOST of the "comparing teams of different sizes" problem.

2. Team vs Team Scoring

The following is for the Daily Game, Mind Melt, Who Am I, World Quiz, Pot of Gold, Team Heroes, Who's the Smartest, etc, starting in March. Pretty much every game except the "Team vs Team Daily Game", which is outlined in the next section.

We mentioned earlier that leagues solve some of the "different sized team" problem. There is still, of course, a big difference between team sizes within a league. For example, the medium league may have a team with 31 daily participants and a team with 90 daily participants. If we were to rank these teams by total points, the team with 90 participants easily wins every single day, even if their individual scores are horrible compared to those of the 31 player team. And if we were to rank them based on average scores, then players would be scared to play for fear of harming their teams. The solution? We only consider the top X scores per team each day, where X is the same for all teams in the league.

Instead of comparing all 31 and 90 players, we instead look at only the top 10 scores from each of those two teams at the end of the day and compare them. This way, we are comparing Team X's best 10 scoring players with Team Y's best 10 scoring players. Team X, with 90 players certainly still has a potential advantage because it has more players and therefore more opportunities to put up good scores, but at least Team Y has a fighting chance to compare favorably or even beat Team X if the smaller team's top 10 players are better than the larger team's top 10 players.

So in the medium league, we take every medium league team's top 10 player scores for the day and then award Team vs Team contribution points to the top 200 of those league players. All 200 of those players earn contribution points for their team. The player ranked #1 in the league earns 200 points for his team. Rank #2 earns 199 points... etc... down to player ranked #200 earning 1 point. We rank medium league teams then by simply adding up everyone's contribution points and ranking those. So each medium team can have a max of 10 players in the top 200.

As you can see, since we are only considering the top 10 scores for each team, then only GOOD scores score team vs team points for that day. You cannot possibly harm your team by participating, since we don't care at all about "average" team scores. Playing can only help your team.

The number of top scores per team each day that we consider is Top 15 for Large Team League, Top 10 for Medium Team League, and Top 7 for Small Team League. The exception to this is the Team Heroes game where we use fewer players (10 large/7 medium/5 small) since we're looking to compare "heroes" (best of the best of the best!).

Team monthly ranks are kept for each game throughout the month, and reset on the first of each month.

3. Hourly Game Team vs Team

We will be ranking teams in hourly games such as "Who's the Smartest" in exactly the same manner as above, except that we only consider every player's BEST score of the day to perform the "top 200" ranks against (with a max of 15/10/7 players per team in the top 200 as explained above). So if you play 12 times in a day, we take your best score and consider that score to be your "daily" score for that day in the hourly game. This means that the more often you play the more chances you will have to better your score for the day. At the same time, it prevents players who play often but poorly from racking up huge contribution points. It is therefore quite possible to score good points for your team only playing once or twice per day.

4. The "Team vs Team Daily Game"

This special daily game is the exception to the scoring system outlined above. In this game, we consider a simple average score for all players playing that day per team, as long as 7 players play. It is possible therefore that your score may move your team average up or down in this game. We wanted a game that had a little more "pressure" to it, and this team-average method certainly adds a little more angst to the game. Your final score truly is a team effort.

I think you will find that most teams couldn't care less if you drag down their score with poor showings in this game. It's all for fun. And if they do care about your poor score? Then it's probably time to find a friendlier team!

Anyway, that is our team vs team scoring in a nutshell. I hope it is fairly clear how it works. Now go out there and try to make it into the top 200 in your league to earn some points for your team!