Ok, can we stop this please. Anybody who responds to this thread after this is in violation of kdice terms and conditions ;)

*blib*

this post from me contains no text. :-)

Just to clarify, this thread is closed for the fuzzycat/Alpha1 friendly exchange of niceties.

Please feel free to post your experiences with
the new scoring system here.

Ryan can you answer my question about the new scoring system? Someone else had an answer, but I don't know if it's accurate, and I would like to.

Ronery, I think the thing to kep in mind is that the leader has no say about when the others flag. So, the new scoring will probably lead to earlier flagging by the runners-up, once they feel that they can't win. There is absolutely no point in hanging around any more, hoping to last long enough to be 2nd.

Now, in the case that you describe, where the leader seemed to be merely prolonging the game to run up his
Average Size score, if the others can't manage to band together to eliminate this clown, then they deserve what they get, eh? ;-)

Failing to move ahead and acquire more territory when you are the clear leader is a *losing* strategy. I have watched several games recently where the person who *should* have won didn't, because they fooled around instead of taking care of business when their opponents were weak. So, I see purposely prolonging the game as a bad strategy. Soon, people will wise up enough to take advantage of people like that.

It's a new game, really. Play it for a while, and come back in a week. There are always going to be folks who will like the old game better. Maybe some day Ryan (or someone else) will put up a "Kdice Classic" server for those folks. But at least give this one a chance. In all the games I played on the test server, I felt that the scoring was "fairer".

I do think, however, that it is going to be harder to rack up scores of 2100-2200 using the new sytem. We'll see....

Ronery:
The suicide strategy may give you a higher dominance but you are sacrificing the score you may get from surviving longer. Points probably balance to the same thing either way. I think it doesn't matter if you do this or not although personally i side with the surviving strategy since you never know what could happen later in the game.

Here's a "scoring" idea. First off, stop thinking of it as a "score" and go back to the concept of a "rating." It's mostly a conceptual difference, but a significant one.

The goal of the game should be to win. Winning should = being the last man standing. This was true in the old system, but it also rewarded being 2nd or 3rd, and so cowardly turtling and allying with the leader was viable. Why not just reward the winner? Only by winning the game will your rating go up. Losing the game makes your rating go down a fixed amount. 7th is the same as 2nd. This has the benefits of a) making everyone play to win, b) reducing ratings volatility, and c) minimizing the effect of luck on ratings.

Thoughts?

"Why not just reward the winner? Only by winning the game will your rating go up. Losing the game makes your rating go down a fixed amount. 7th is the same as 2nd. This has the benefits of a) making everyone play to win, b) reducing ratings volatility, and c) minimizing the effect of luck on ratings."

I have to say, this might actually be a good idea. I wouldn't mind some variance between how many points you lose as 7th vs 2nd, but let's face it, coming in 7th usually has more to do with bad luck than anything and currently feels very overpenalized.

Re: rewarding only the winner.

I agree this would lead to the most ideal gameplay and the current scoring system moves closer towards this than the old system. However the nice social aspect of game is lost and everyone is cut throat to get first. 1 in 7 people end up leaving a game happy. You could go 20 games without gaining points. This is frustrating and something that is avoided with points for other places. It makes games more social and fun. The old system favoured this too much and the new system is somewhere in between win/loss scoring and the old even place scoring.

@casio282
Penalizing 2nd through 7th the same sounds good only on paper. Players that have no chance of winning will have kamikaze behavior just to feel important (since there is no penalty in losing early). More chaotic games.
Players are selfish and easily offendeded. So revengeful game play, just to mess somebody that beat you in a previous game for eample, will be more frequent.