SpielByWeb

seamusk · Joined: 05 Feb 05 Posts: 21

What about just changing the calculation to discard some extremities? My time per turn has fluctuated. It has been real good the last 3 months or so and was awful before that. But I think the older turns are keeping my average up (not that I care). Anyway, I wonder if discarding extremes on both ends (maybe 10%) and weighing a recent period (1 month) might solidify for anomalies. Otherwise someone who moves a lot today could get in a game but not mention that he just changed jobs and no longer has access as frequently as just 2 months ago. Just a though...

craw-daddy · Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2006 2:45 am Post subject:

I think that even if you're on vacation, then your times should still be tracked and used as part of your average turn time. To me the "vacation notice" basically serves as a means of saying to the other players "Please don't get annoyed at me, I'm not ignoring the game, I'm simply away on holiday (or work, etc) and therefore can't check in (as regularly as I might like)." On the other hand, you still are "holding up" the game (for lack of a better term), so why shouldn't the time be considered as part of your average turn time?

Besides this, if you *know* that you're going on vacation, shouldn't you avoid joining more games, at least if you're going away for more than a couple of days? After all, I'd consider it to be a bit rude if someone joins five games and then goes away for a week or two right after that. I mean we have to use some common sense here, right?

Another alternative is, instead of using the "average turn time", to use the median turn time. i.e. the time for which half of your turn times are shorter than that one, and half are longer than that time. This would mean more data has to be tracked in order to determine this median, but it effectively removes the "outliers" in a way that's less arbitrary than discarding the top and bottom 10% (or whatever) of the turn times. Using the median time might give a more accurate indication of your "real" turn times. Or, if both average and median times are given, this can give information about turn times. If they are about the same, then it really is a measure of your "true" time. If they are significantly different, then there's some outliers in one direction or another. In any event, just one statistic alone can be misleading. What's the old puzzle... if Ted Williams bats .400 in the first half of the season, and .400 in the second half, why is his overall average for the season less than .400? Averages can be deceiving.

Finally, I think we should all remember that nothing stops you from making your own games provided, of course, you're in "good standing" on the site, i.e. haven't been banned. So if your "average time" doesn't fall within the parameters specified by some player's open game, just make your own (and then use them to reduce your average turn time if you like).

eratos · Joined: 24 Nov 05 Posts: 16

Dyas of Wonder has a nice system whereby you have a Karma rating of 0/5. 0 I think indicated a banned user, and I don't know what karma rating you start at, but you lose karma for abandoning games and earn it for completing games.

The trick is that when you start a game you can specify a minimum karma rating, but that minimum applies to you as well. I think this is better than an arbitrary kind of turn length measure.

Abbacus · Joined: 01 Sep 04 Posts: 11 Location: Oslo, Norway

I also think that the median turn time is a better statistic than the average turn time.

Golux13 · Joined: 14 Jul 05 Posts: 209

I'm not too concerned about the vacation thing. Yes, you shouldn't join several games if you know you're going to be away (or if you do, you should give fair warning to the other players). But you can't control the other players, so you might join a game thinking you can get it completed before your vacation, only to find that the other players' slower-than-expected play has pushed the game back. You shouldn't be penalized for that.

One thing that might be easier to implement is -- along the lines I suggested earlier -- just have everyone select a group to be in, ranging from "Occasional" to "Obsessive," and allow the game creator to restrict to one or a couple of those groups. Since there is self-selection involved, you run the risk that someone will mis-classify themselves, but if you allow people to freely change their selection (without affecting current games, though it would be polite to tell your opponents if you're dropping into a slower group), I think you'll cut back on wildly mismatched playing frequencies.

Onceler · Joined: 10 Nov 05 Posts: 10 Location: Manhattan Beach, CA

median turn time works for me, and seems to be a more realistic measure of what others can usually expect.
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Who's turn is it anyway?

maelstrom · Joined: 30 Mar 06 Posts: 4 Location: Austin, TX

I am all for this. Please give us the option to exclude players with an average turn time higher than x hours. Pretty puh-lease.
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-joey

Sparrowhawk · Joined: 14 Mar 06 Posts: 16

I was looking for a thread regarding placing conditions on people joining games and this seems to be the closest there is.

I don't agree on excluding specific people from games at all, but I do believe there should be certain criteria you can place on who can join your game. This should enable more even games and more enjoyable ones.

1) Turn Length - you could have 3 groups for example - less than 5 hours, 5-10 hours, and over 10 hours. You could perhaps only select the group that you are in yourself.

2) Number of games played - <10, 10+. This would allow beginners to exclude experienced players, and vice versa. Again you could restrict people to selecting the group they are in if they want to add criteria.