I think it might be wise to start thinking about a bonus point system where certain recordings get more points depending on confirmability states or if (a well quality analyzed and tested) mamete is used. remember ben jos, after you finish mamete we've got to test it to make sure it playsback just as well as the original mame and that the people who were able to hack m35tg3 (which i only know of for sure is me) can't hack it.

For a bonus point system, I'd suggest 2x the points for confirmed state and 5x the points if mamete is used. (i.e. 10x if mamete is used and confirmed)

all opposed, just don't reply :) or at least reply with an alternative system or why you don't like it.

-- Anonymous, March 21, 2001

Answers

I think this is a great idea, but it needs some tweaking. I'm not sure what the goal is here: give out points for confirmations for any version of MAME and/or get people to use mameTE. I don't like the first part because biases could appear (people not wanting to confirm others because of point doubling). Also, I think 10x is a lot of points to hand out.

My recommendation is to focus getting MARPers to use mameTE almost exclusively when it is ready. Do this by giving out +25% for using mameTE, +25% for a mameTE confirmed recording and +50% for a confirmed and verified via tourney level checks. This works out to a max bonus of 2x. No bonuses for any other versions of mame.

Another idea is to penalize all non-mameTE INPs by 10%, after a month or two increase the penalty to 20%, etc. until 50% is reached.

If there is a downside to all of this it means more work for the editors that possess analinp, because they hold the keys to giving out the maximum bonus.

-- Anonymous, March 21, 2001

Yeah, the goal here is to get people to use MAMETE exclusively and also to enforce people to playback their own recordings, i believe that isn't done enough. unforntualy confirming isn't done enough, but we are giving more people confirm status and as long as we have the confirm log to go by (it might be nice to include an ip address when confirm took place)... confirming is normally only done on the first two recordings, except for a few games where editors decide to just confirm them all since they have no life.

I don't think 50% is enough to really juice people up into using mamete. I think using mamete should at the very least get 100% more points.

Disadvantages: This could tick off new users who are waiting for their scores to be confirmed, when their recordings are sitting at 4th/5th and probably will be for life. Depending on the bonus percenage someone coould upload a 1/4th of bbh's recordings and become number one on the leaderboard. (i'd think that would just make bbh kick more butt but he would have to record more on mamete...) same goes for anyone else high on the leaderboard (not that i care about the feelings of who's on there or not :)

-- Anonymous, March 21, 2001

I don't think this would work too well. I can already see people making deals where they confirm each others' recordings just to get more points. Also, is a confirmed MAMETE recording really worth more than a non-confirmed one? I think it's only worth more if it has been confirmed by an Editor. So we'd need two confirmation levels in the scripts. And even then, people will start bitching that Editors are not confirming their recordings. Finally (at least as far as what I can think of in a few minutes), a lot of people won't like it at all if they basically have to do all their recordings over in MAMETE, and that includes at least some Editors.

While I think that a way to encourage people to, and reward them for, using MAMETE is a good idea, I don't think this particular idea would go over very well at all. At the moment, I can't think of any alternatives, though.

Cheers, Ben Jos.

-- Anonymous, March 21, 2001

We can't enforce this at least until a windows version is released frankly. And I think there should be a small bonus if used. Probably 25 - 50 % straight. No bonus for editor confirmations - that's:

a. too complicated

b. The benjos argument - too much bitching of us not confirming recordings recordings of their own.

We should have a checker on board that immediatly checks it and reports illegality result to the editors, not the submitter - he'd get ideas that way - but I'll save that for another thread. GB9

-- Anonymous, March 21, 2001

darn i wish there was a good way of enforcing people to playback their own recordings... i see now confirming bonuses have too many problems. However 50% bonus for mamete is not enough and here's why. Were not going to release many versions of mamete (i think) so probably one or two mamete per final version (mid beta version) of mame. During the time after the final version and during versions that we don't have a mamete version for, people will have lots of hundreds to gather up with lame recordings or recordings that cheat which we can't detect clone hunting or beta battling. This needs to stop, we need to give significant bonuses for mamete recordings to get these point hunters to play older games on mamete versions. And 50% is not an incentive enough for them to stop clone hunting on regular mame versions...

-- Anonymous, March 22, 2001

Another Note, if we do impliment a bonus scheme, I think a great thing to add for notifications of other players submiting scores in the same game "you" have submited in would be:

(X) tell me if someone earns more points than me in a certain game

So if someone submits a mamete version and gets 150pts, the people with non-TE recordings would be notified (if they had the above option checked) so they could resubmit a mamete recoring and get more points.

I think this would be a very delayable enhancement request that isn't necesary but certainly nice after all the other work is done to get the bonus points implimented.

I think implimentation of a multiplier on a recording with a certain type of mame exe used should be pretty reasonable. add a collumn to the mame version database table representing the bonus multiplier and then join on that collumn when reporting and adding scores.

-- Anonymous, March 26, 2001