Server Upgrade

[admin]

Hi folks -

Just a quick apology for this morning's downtime. We were told by our web host that today's server upgrade would be handled with no downtime interruptions but obviously that wasn't the case.

Anyway, fingers crossed, things are looking good at this point and if you're seeing this message, you're on the new server. We probably lost a couple of hours of statistics during the downtime but hopefully apart from that there will not be any further issues.

If you notice anything on the site behaving differently or just plain broken, please email me at puzzlebaron@gmail.com and I will look into it immediately.

Thank you for your understanding!

Stephen

[genevoise]

Hi Stephen,
As the new scoring system takes into account performance against the average for a given puzzle would it be possible to rank competitors by their average point score?

Cheers, Genevoise

[sewaneesue]

That's already listed under "Fastest Solver Competition", Genevoise.

[genevoise]

sewaneesue - that was true before the recent change in scoring. The score you got WAS a direct relationship with your time. For example if you solved the puzzle in less than 150 seconds you got 800pts.
Now the score is calculated with respect to the average time for a particular puzzle, so solving a puzzle in say 200 seconds could give you very different scores on different puzzles.

[PatienceCrabstick]

I think genevoise is correct - under the old regime ranking by speed made sense, but now that scores are calculated versus average solving times ranking by average points is better. Otherwise, players who complete the longer puzzles are penalized (and I thought removing this was the main point of the scoring change).
Also - at least for a while - I think there needs to be some sort of "bonus points" awarded for the newly-introduced puzzles. I think this would entice more people into solving them, thereby producing more representative average solving times. Right now the averages seem skewed, and there's nothing more depressing than getting a new record by +200 seconds and earning only ~600 points for it because the average contains too few data points.

[sewaneesue]

How did you come up with "Patience Crabstick"? I hope no more changes are made; I'm old and can't handle it.
Sue

[PatienceCrabstick]

She's a side character in The Eustace Diamonds, by Anthony Trollope. I'm a big fan of 19th century literature in general and Trollope in particular, and really like this sort of name.

[admin]

I agree that the points system should be changed to reflect the size of a given puzzle. More than likely I will change it so that the maximum points for a puzzle is determined by its number of clues ... a 10-clue puzzle might have a max score of 250 points, for example, while a 26-clue puzzle might have a max score of 800 points (since the mean solve time of a 26-clue puzzle is roughly 3x the mean solve time of a 10-clue puzzle). Then your performance against the average solve time for a puzzle will determine what percentage of the maximum possible points you would receive at the end.