TriviaCow Scoring Plans

Almost ever since I wrote the TriviaEngine script, I’ve been planning to redo the scoring system on it. The original scoring system was based on the #newbies (spit :argh:) script, which just kept adding to your score. This meant that people who were around all the time (in the longer term) would get unassailably high scores which would just put new people off from playing (when the person you’re chasing has a 5000-point lead you stop caring).

The current TriviaCow scoring system resets the scores to zero Friday night (or Saturday night, I forget which). It does maintain the scoring history, but the code isnt’ there to do anything with it.

The new plan modifies the current version a bit to keep it fun on a week-to-week basis, but also adds a bit more of an element of competition. I hope.

The way it works is:

• Everyone’s score resets to 0 at the end of the weekly period. Currently, this is set to midnight Saturday (i.e. last thing Friday night).
• At the point it resets the top 5 people from that week are awared 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 points to their overall score (which isn’t affected by the number of questions you get right). This gives us a leaderboard of weekly performance.

That’s it.

It looks pretty simple but getting the code right is much more complicated, but I think I’ve figured out how I’m going to do it properly now.

To make for an exciting and dramatic adventure, the script will start counting down to the end of the scoring period as the deadline approaches, possibly encouraging people to play by pointing out that they can gain a place by answering X more questions.

Any other ideas, suggestions or thoughts on this scoring system are welcome as comments against this post.

Once the new scoring system is working properly, I’ll adjust the website to work again :)

ok GO