25AUG11 - Overall ranking and score

Hi Kimmyeo,

You can't tell me that someone is scoring so much right now, that most of us, at the level I am around have lost millions of points in the last 48 hours, while others have lost nothing. My perception is that you're playing favorites and changing things to make others happy. I have seen you do this before. So it makes me wonder why I am even trying to play this game.

Yep, read it and it's certainly the most likely answer but without facts we're still free to speculate.

I'm close to researching everything in all 10 cities (working on last town now) but there's still quite a way to catch up with the number one spot for research so I wonder if there is also an element of RP earnt as well as spent?

I think that raises a good point Rill. I guess at the moment the %age of your overall score that each skill contributes to (hence the size of your 'wedge') is based on your score relative to the top ranked guy's score... this is fine for something like pop or tech... also perhaps for something like attack/defense/quest/magic which aren't truly glitchable just need a huge amount of grind... but for stuff you that can just bomb up artificially (like trade) then everyone who doesn't glitch it is gonna have a very low score compared to the top guy.

My point about this maybe best demonstrated by an example: My trade and diplo rankings are both around rank #100 at the moment, they contribute to 1.9% and 1.78% of my total score, very low because the guys with the top scores can rack up huge scores artificially... at the same time I'm around rank #50 with tech and this counts for 40.9% of my total score because the people at the top cannot easily grind out huge scores above the framework of normal game play. Even for something like pop which is around #200 for me at the moment, its contribution to my total is like 20%... I don't get why that should contribute like ten times as much to my total score as other aspects like diplo when there's more than twice as many people above me in pop as diplo, just because the guy at the top of diplo grinds a LOT.

If you look at it another way... if you're the guy at the top of the trade rankings you can effectively nerf everyone else's 'wedges' by glitching out another 10B points...

Maybe a better way would be to include an element of people's ranking in the weighting towards their total score rather than 100% of the weight coming from your score relative to the top person's score.

And if you're reading this please don't interpret it is a rant. I would certainly enjoy it if the ranking system was upgraded to make it a little more meaningful... but obviously I'm not upset by how it is now. I'd much rather see dev work pushing the game forward than fretting about old and ultimately relatively inconsequential stuff like the ranking page. Also I appreciate that with the game running 2 years already you can't exactly easily nerf people's current scores by changing the system... cos even though I used words like 'glitching' there's actually nothing technically wrong or against the rules about grinding score out artificially and people that have worked hard towards a top rank won't want to lose that.

It's a tough topic I guess... but interesting to think about. Maybe I'll save some probing questions about it for the next live-chat.