CAN WE AMEND LADDER/SCENARIO RESULTS TO INDICATE FORFEITS

[Belisarius]

I was wondering if it would be possible to amend the ladder and scenario results to indicate if a game ended in a forfeit (Opponent disappeared, or gave up very early).

Sometime it is deceiving looking at the sceanrio results, especially for campaign games, when it shows that both sides have recorded victories.

I think it would be informative to know if these games were played through or stoped early.

Any thoughts out there?

BELISARIUS

[Peter Szabo]

Belisarius,

I am not one of those people who maintain the results database; so I would appreciate if they said that a change would be unreasonable.

Just a thought, however: the statistic you most likely need is the number of turns played in each game. It does not really matter whether the game was formally surrendered or an opponent disappeared.

My guess is that long campaigns are rarely played to the end, and they often end long before the time limit is reached (so far my own experience from big games is 35/180, 8/70, 16/120); there are exceptions though.

Peter

[Sgt Fury]

On the star-ranking of the game result, players are free to enter some free-form text. This information could be placed in that field.

Fury

[Dog Soldier]

The question would be....is it enough of an issue on a majority of ladders?

Changes to the database like this are global to all the ladders I think. I have raised the question with the rest of staff, since I think it would be worthwhile if enough ladders would benefit form the bandwidth expended by the staff.

Dog Soldier

[Steel God]

On Brian's point, yes changes to the ladder scoring database are global, so a change on OpC effects all ladders. Therefore any changes would have to be viewed in the impact to all ladders.

On the general subject itself...as it pertains to the OpC Ladder, there is a way you could figure out if a CG had been played to completion, but it would be a pain in the butt. Find the result, then click over to the players profile screens and see if they were awarded the CG bonus for the game. If so, it was played to completion, if no bonus, it was not played to the end. I venture to say, only a very small percentage of the CGs recorded here are played to the very last turn.

If such a change were implemented, I do believe we would be better off going with the suggestion that entered a number of turns played, as opposed to a game completed check box.

But the bottom line as always, is the juice worth the squeeze? If we make the programming effort to change the database what is the benefit? I'm not really sure there's a tremendous value here because the rating systems for the scenarios is so subjective to begin with. What I mean is, the vast majority of the time the results are entered by the victors...given that fact, human nature says the reported balance will be reported as more "even" than it really is (since most winners tend to think the fight was more balanced than it was). SO how is another data element in a very subjective system going to benefit us?

Paul