Is underway! Good luck all.

The populating of the Immortal tier has begun!

Congratulations to bubbles20... the first to make it to Immortal in the 30th Global Challenge

May long it continue!

Just curious about a small elephant wandering around in the GC room. Has there been any further discussion about any possible changes to the way the new immortals are determined? The issue is the return play of an ever growing body of already immortal players drives the range of the ~30 new immortals ever further down the top 100 list.

I am sure this will spark a similar debate to the reoccuring one around the monthly badges for hourly games and the alleged dilution of the accomplishment since you dont have to place as highly on the list anymore. The primary counter argument is that all the return players benefit from experience and would not have placed as highly among the cureent pool of generally more seasoned players...as they did their first time through.

That debate could go in circles for a while but there is a practical issue to address either way. As I understood from a comment by Wesley several cycles ago. Currently only the top 100 list as constituted is used to search for eligible finishers. Something has to give because while I am sure it is a complex dynamic of old players dropping out and new players coming in, based on trending it seems very likely the top 30 non immortals will spill off the list next cycle.

At the very least if nothing is going to be changed, it should be announced clearly that the criteria is slightly different than it has been in the past. Something like "30 are no longer guaranteed to get in and you must make the top 100." So effectively, new potentials would be competing against already immortals, where they had not been before.

The game clearly states that:
The challenge will run until at least 30 players reach Division 10: The Immortals OR when all top 100 players are in the Immortal division.

The top 100 requirement was added as a backwards compatible answer to some concerns that the badge was getting "less competitive" with the threshold to get included gradually moving down the overall ladder and that the number of new Immortals should possibly be reduced.

It by the way has a parallel in real sports: In major golf tournaments, an amateur winner is only crowned if at least one amateur makes the cut. If no amateurs finish the first two days in the top half, there is no winner.

The difference being, I assume in such pro-am tournaments the number of entrants as well as the ratio of pros and amateurs is more or less fixed year by year whereas in the case of the GC, the number of "pros"...(pre existing immortals) making a serious run is growing every tournament. Players return and grow in proficiency with practice so the field is being top loaded with higher and higher percentage of Tiger Woods clones.

With the top 100 method, that was counteracted by the bar essentially being lowered every round with the exclusion of the "pre immortals" from the count. Now suddenly the newbies will be walloped with the whole load

Though I can certainly see basis for the argument that the number getting in might want to be reduced. (Of course this is a very simple analysis..the above idea of Tiger Woodsification is also counteracted by the one timers who get the badge and then fall out of the equation). At the same time, I think it is an unsafe assumption to say placing at #50 for instance has required a static level of play over the long haul nor do I believe it has necessarily just gotten easier constantly

Actually the number of slots available to amateurs at major golf events has steadily declined and the chance for one to make day 3 has gone down even more with the gap between the Pro Tour and the amateur sport ever widening. But that's beyond the point.

There are several reasons we see a higher percentage of Immortals in the top 100 - one of them is that we of course have more of them, but the other is also that we get fewer new players in every GC period. Signups have declined and fewer players are in each GC. We have 4247 players in this round; that count has been over 10,000 when I first played (GC 9).

We are monitoring the game stats and found that right now, adding the 100 requirement is the best and least disruptive correction to keep it viable. Should we see the objective difficulty of the Immortal badge see change beyond a certain range (we can measure that via averages and game length and there are target ranges for these numbers), we might adapt it again.

Thank you for the numbers. I am not meaning to be a pain. I was just curious. I can "see" you have it well in hand.

For golf ignorance I make no apologies though

There is a similar thing happening in “Obscurity”. At the moment the tenth person on the list for the monthly badge this month is in position 182. Even the leader for the badge this month is in 60th place.

Why? Why force people into playing the Global in a mode they do not want to play in? What is the point of making people unhappy in playing a game here? Why frustrate some people to the point they won't play the game at all?


There are many players that wish they were not in the Champion levels in hourly and daily games. They play those games less often or not at all. Or they play some of the games with little enjoyment because they are trying to help their teams for team standings. Why make another game here one of little enjoyment for players simply because they once survived to the end?

Congratulations to Radain, the first *new* Immortal of the curent Global Challenge

Congratulations to Radain. I believe the addition of the Top 100 requirement for receiving the Immortal badge is a good one and its effects will be self-limiting with a reasonable equilibrium achieved in several runs. The reason for this is that as the number of Immortals decreases below 30, the rate of increase in total Immortals from run to run will decrease and will be offset eventually by the natural attrition of past winners from further aggressive play in the GC. I believe that equilibrium (which may take a few years to achieve), will result in an average of 15-25 new Immortals being crowned with each subsequent GC run. I do not believe further measures are necessary and certainly disagree with the idea that past winners should be restricted to Hardcore mode or any other restrictions, for that matter. They will eventually moderate their play anyway. Of more concern to me is WesleyCrusher's correct observation that overall participation in the GC has been declining for some time now. This is not a fluke - it is a clear long term trend. If anything, we don't need to do *anything* which could discourage GC play. We may need to develop new incentives to get more people to play, particularly those who have not already won the Immortal badge. Punishing previous Immortals will not help solve this trend. As I understand it, a player is considered a GC participant if they have played even so much as a single game in a GC run. The fact that we have so many FT players who do not bother to play even one GC game and that this number steadily increase suggests to me a need for stronger incentives to encourage casual play than presently exist. I will admit that in my case, the Daily Challenges are the only reason I bother to play the GC anymore. Perhaps we should create other incentives.

I agree with:

1. Not restricting past Immortal winners to Hardcore mode. That would likely reduce participation more, as others have noted.

2. Concern about decline in participation.

3. Need for more incentives or rewards.

Along the lines of more incentives, perhaps:

1. Some sort of badge or badgelet for scoring a certain number of points in Impossible. Perhaps approach it in a way that's similar to the Obscurity game.

2. Some sort of badge or badgelet for finishing at the top of any double-starred or starred category.

3. Some sort of badge or badgelet for reaching other levels besides just levels 9 and 10. I don't mean give a badge for reaching all levels -- I don't know what makes sense here. Badgelets at levels 3 and 6?

4. Some sort of endurance badge given to folks who play a certain percentage of rounds throughout the challenge. For example, someone who plays 6 games plus the Brain Twist twice a day for the duration of the challenge deserves some sort of reward, in my view. And even people playing 90% of the total possible games could get an endurance badge.

5. Since this is a marathon, and this is FunTrivia, maybe a couple of badges with goofy names, like an energy bar badgelet; change of sneakers badgelet; you've been running too long and are starting to smell -- take a shower badgelet ; I'm dying of thirst, give me some water! badgelet.

Thanks for listening!

With regard to your #3 suggestion, the division 3 badgelet already exists; it's part of the intro challenges.

The main problem with any badges is that they'll only award once, so they won't give an incentive to try again and any ideas that reward repeat participation at a high level would attract more repeat Immortals - the opposite of "we want more non-Immortals to try for top 100". The "highest division reached" could have helped, but it's been broken for years.

Maybe an optional third play mode accessible only to Immortals (or even Hardcore Immortals - keep it exclusive) could help the main list - I am thinking of using game mode instead of HTML mode and a changed scoring table rewarding asterisks and 10+ scores more than in the regular without entirely disqualifying lower results. Effectively, this would result in an experience somewhere between Normal and Hardcore along with a stronger research disincentive than what the main game provides. Could be fun...

I'd go for it!

I specifically chose the term "incentives" because I do not believe creating new badges or badgelets is the answer. We already have too much "badge inflation" at FT, in my opinion. Personally, I would go along with a complete moratorium on all new badges that only high-level players could win. We are creating too many of those, again, in my opinion. The rich keep getting richer. Even badges that are ostensibly designed for lower level players contribute to badge inflation because the higher level players get them automatically by grandfathering. What FT really needs (again, in my opinion) are stronger incentives (not badges) for lower level players to stay engaged rather than drop out. The Daily Challenges are good at this, as they are adjusted for level, but they are not enough. More creative thinking is needed here, not just reflexive "hey, let's create a badge for XYZ." To address the specific topic at hand, without creating a badge, what could FT do to encourage lower level players who don't play the GC at all to at least play it occasionally? These types of players are not immediately going to be motivated by the prospect of going for the Immortal badge. They will see that as out of reach, and would still see it as out of reach even if we took the draconian measures some have suggested to pull out previous Immortals from the Top 100. What we need are incentives for casual GC play. Play a little now, maybe play some more later, maybe some day go for Immortal. We need more low and intermediate steps in our incentive "ladder". The GC 3 badgelet and the GC 9 badge are good, but not enough. What non-badge incentives could we come up with?

Thanks! Somehow I overlooked that even though I've actually won the badge myself!



Excellent point.



Thanks for the clarification! Being still fairly new, badges or badgelets as incentives were all I could think of. I look forward to seeing ideas that will sustain interest over the long term.

I am less opposed to badgelets than to full badges, although I would hope for a strong case to be made even for the creation of new badgelets. As to non-badge incentives, I have already mentioned the Daily Challenges, which have the particular benefit of being recurring, as opposed to a one-off. Perhaps some tweaking there, maybe an Easy challenge for playing one game in the GC or a medium challenge for playing a full set of six games in the GC without a score minimum but targeting such Challenges for lower level players, particularly those who have not won the GC 9 badge, if possible. In addition, I think team challenges are an underutilized resource here at FT. The Halloween challenge has worked very well to build team cooperation. Maybe a different minor holiday (Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, or some such) could be chosen to construct a team-based GC challenge.

I actually proposed a general (and quite elaborate) team challenge idea to Terry but with the redesign, new big things are somewhat on the back burner right now.

Also, just as an observation - incentives that help promote occasional GC play and thus give a higher overall count won't do that much towards getting more players trying for Immortality and pushing the cutoff back up from the current ~90th rank (which is where the discussion started).

The creation of a third GC mode open to winners would relieve the pressure, but I would also consider that to be a major project. I agree that promoting occasional play would not help the Top 100 problem, at least not in the short term of a few GC runs, but it may help the long term decline in GC participation which is continuing. Observations from my own team suggest to me that many players do not even consider a serious run for the Immortal badge until they have played the game casually for many runs first and have gradually built up confidence, which helps when experienced team members offer their support to less experienced members. Also many players I have seen never bridge the big gap from the GC 3 badgelet to the GC 9 badge. It actually isn't that difficult to reach Division 9. A player that plays 85-90% of the possible games in a run, even allowing for playing the Brain Twist rarely or having a high failure rate in it, will still likely reach Division 9 even with mediocre scores, but many players cannot maintain such a high participation rate over a four month period without seeing how much progress team members can make over shorter time periods with a higher percentage of games played. It is also easier to answer questions within the team setting than in the General FT Boards or these Forums, where some players be reluctant to ask beginner-level questions. Teams are especially helpful in helping newer or less-frequent players find their ways around the vastness of FT. I think we should try to find some way to help teams get out the word about how the GC works and why it is useful to play occasionally to build up experience. People who do not play even a single GC game in an entire run are not withholding their play because they counted the 30th new Immortal slot at #93 on the Top 100 list. That is something wonks like me do. A ladder with too many missing rungs in the lower portion is eventually only going to be climbed by the most courageous and dauntless, and once such people do get to the top, they tend to want to stay there for quite awhile. We need to find some way of encouraging casual GC play for the long-term health of the game.

The global challenge (my first serious attempt) has been a lot of fun.
I've tried to find out the scoring details and received a lot of helpful input (I cant quite understand the mathematics still but that is probably my fault).
For level 10 what is the underlying logic behind the advancement being so slow...if there aren't any rewards for advancing within it, is it just a notional category -- or an opportunity to answer very hard questions?

The underlying logic behind the super slow advancement in Division 10 is twofold: First, it ensures no one can possibly advance out of Division 10 once there, since Division 10 is the last Division. Second, it ensures there *will* be some measurable advancement. The reason for making sure there is reasonable advancement in Division 10 is to provide an incentive for players to continue to play when reaching it; since there is still *some* advancement, players who stop playing can be passed in the overall rankings by other Division 10 players who continue to play. The small amount of advancement possible allows for a continued merit-based ranking system to exist after players reach Division 10. Playing in Division 10 does afford players the opportunity to see a few questions there they would not have seen in any other Division.

You play in division 10 for the ranks (and, if you're really good, for those virtual medals listed in the GC statistics thread. The advancement percentage is irrelevant, it would work just as well if the target "next" level were so high that no one could ever leave 0.0% territory - the rankings compare absolute points, not percentages.

You can think of each 0.1% as a victory lap