Dissapointed in the team races.

like the subject says im not too happy with the team races. its not very fun cause theres really no way to put together a bunch of random people and make fair teams. i still think it should have been WU/day improvement over your teams current WU/day average instead of first team to 7000. i understand its not a real competition in that you don't win anything but the point of it is to try to get people to crunch a whole lot and upgrade their farms. and i gotta say im not very motivated to buy more crunchers by this team race deal. in fact im kind of annoyed cause i stopped playing games for a while just so i could crunch the mad WU's and now its pretty meaningless considering the placement of my team. so in other words im not gonna try doing a team race again unless the goals are revised so that its a real competition and not...well... what it is now! phew! well sorry if this makes anyone mad or if you read through this whole post and you don't care and i made you waste all that time. i just like the team race idea and i want it to be fun/motivational.

Just My View

After reading your post entirely my only reaction is why you would feel that people would get mad. You have a perfect right to express your dissatisfaction and ideas. I may or may not agree with your position, but I support your right to voice your opinion in a responsible manner, which is the approach you took. Had you come on with fire and brimstone full of curses and foul language you would have been wrong but you simply stated your feelings and for that you can't be wrong.

SkyHook

I thought perhaps it would be better to race for a certain length of time, and the team with the most units at the end would be the winner. That would still be based on overall units, but I think there's still encouragement in that style to do all that you can. I'm putting together another computer just for this race, although it will likely be too late to have an affect. You are welcome to voice your opinions. Without that we can function as a team and make decisions that most everyone is happy with it. Of course you can't please everybody 100% of the time.

skyhook, thanks i just didnt wanna offend whoever thought of the team race thing

TC, that sounds like a slighly better way to do it but i would still like to maybe try for a few weeks (or however long these team races usually go on) doing the relative improvement race idea. if anyone else likes it.

Demont,
Sorry that Team Horsemen isn't doing too well. I would feel the same way if I'm in your place. During the team choosing process, The Four Horsemen was one of the big hitters. I believe TC(?) choose the team very evenly based on avg_WU/day. What happened, and I'm sure you're aware of, and which is unfortunate, was that the Four Horsemen weren't allowed to use the University computers any more shortly after the race started (I think this was the case). Thus throwing your team's production way off.

As for myself, I asked my friends and cousins, who are running SETI under my account on their computers, to leave their computer on as much as possible for the during of the race. I also put my laptop back on crunching just for the race. So in effect, the race did motivate me to produce more.

actually i think it was that the horsemen were about to go back to school, they hadnt actually started using the university computers yet. btw, which team I'm on doesn't really change how i feel. if i were on the winning team i would still look back at the losing teams and think that this race isn't very fair! the only thing i was slightly frustrated about was that i tried to crunch extra WU's and it didn't really help the team in any way. glad some people got motivated to do some extra crunching like i did. (emphasis on the fact that i dont plan to do any extra crunching as of now!)

The problem with the Horsemen is correct as stated by Katelin, but I still find your attitude a bit puzzling. A race afterall is a race, and it has a winner and quite a few losers. Hopefully it's fairly even to start with, but everybody has to try as hard as possible to win and that's the motivation part. I can understand how you feel given what happened this time around, but imagine if next time all of the teams are within say a 50wu range of one another. Wouldn't that motivate you to try for a couple extra wu's per day in order to put your team across the finish line first?

...and not everything is as it seems. We may have a small lead now, but some systems probably aren't going to be available for the duration. That will give somebody the ability to catch up. Had we not been gifted with the use of those systems, we would have been about 450 behind Team Landshark. Trying to draw even teams is quite a difficult undertaking.

If you look at some of the heavy hitters, Gary and hallen have both increased their output for the races. I look at it that if our team gets beaten, it's still good for OCSETITeam. In that case, we all win.

I wouldn't mind seeing two teams in a race. More folks per team will probably act to better balance the field and some unforseen circumstance won't necessary kill a team. The other upside is that only half the group will be losers.

TC said:

The problem with the Horsemen is correct as stated by Katelin, but I still find your attitude a bit puzzling. A race afterall is a race, and it has a winner and quite a few losers. Hopefully it's fairly even to start with, but everybody has to try as hard as possible to win and that's the motivation part. I can understand how you feel given what happened this time around, but imagine if next time all of the teams are within say a 50wu range of one another. Wouldn't that motivate you to try for a couple extra wu's per day in order to put your team across the finish line first?

Click to expand...

my attitude is that i find it very unlikely we will see teams in that close of a race for any significant amount of time. of course 4 teams 50WU's apart would be incentive to crunch but i just don't think its gonna happen! a race is afterall a race but i would like to see this particular race rethought in some fashion so that its not so difficult to make even teams and so its not so based on the performance of the one main cruncher. again id like to point out, my teams current standing has really nothing to do with my thoughts on the race in general.

Greg M said:

I wouldn't mind seeing two teams in a race. More folks per team will probably act to better balance the field and some unforseen circumstance won't necessary kill a team. The other upside is that only half the group will be losers.

Click to expand...

2 teams sounds like a better idea. its a start at least.

first of all, u have every right to show ur opinion in a reasonable fashion (which that's what u r doing!! ) and everyone's opinion is very very welcome and the strongest point to make this team grow and hold!

this round is a bit hard for TC to make even start 'cos me, GregM, and Horsemen's unstable output. but he tried his best and if Horsemen isn't able to crunch as much as they could (remember, they did 1000 in one day!!!), it could be a more interest/close race.

as for 50wu apart between teams. well, we HAD in the past team race! after 7-8 weeks of battle, the first and second place decided w/ 21wu apart!! so, it could be a very close/interesting race! i remeber i keep tracking on the stats on the last day on the other hands, there was also a few members that joined the race but stop crunching after the first week or so.

TC's idea is great and should help to balance out more. and so does GregM's 2 team idea too. i guess we could try both in the future. remember, we all r still learning (everyday) and every opinion/suggestion/advice would be helpful!!!

if it's needed, i could side step from the team race to make thing a bit easier/balance out.

lastly....................remember, at the end, it's all going back to OC.com SETI Team!!!!

Crunch On!!!!

While we're discussing the Team Races I'm just going to add a thought I had.

It's quite hard to acurately figure out each individual's average output. For instance I think mine was taken as something between 6.5/day and 7/day (might have been 6.8, I can't remember). However the week the averages were taken was a preticularly strong week for me. My actualy average output os probably more in the range of 5-5.5. Doesn't seem like a big difference, but when you take into account that the race lasts 6 weeks or more:

6 weeks x 7 days x 1wu less than average taken = 42wu less than predicted.

It's not huge, but it's significant. Problem is I'm not sure how this can be corrected in the future. The only thought I have is to take each individual's output for a month and calculate the average based on that. That actually probably wouldn't be that hard since our website has 4 week averages posted on it. The numbers might not be right on even after that, but at least they should be close.