| It shows, though, that people aren't racking up an enormous number of games. |
The current metaverse scoring penalizes greater number of game submissions. By the 32nd game you only get credit for 25% of your points from a new submission and this percentage gets lower the more games you submit. This is because the score total is divided by the number of games to the 0.4 power. This is a bit less than the square root of games submitted. Added to this was the 5% decay factor down to the minimum of 65%.
I suspect that this was done as a compromise between using an average score, which would be score total divided by the number of games, and a straight cumulative total.
The net effect was that long time players would pretty much have to reset their characters or start new ones because they would be more and more penalized. It also penalized people who liked to play shorter and therefore lower scoring games, but made up for it by playing more of them.
No system will be perfect. But this one has a number of advantages. One is that you get full credit for each new game you submit. The other is you aren't forced to play gigantic games just to compete. The decay down to zero allows new players to compete and keeps old players from sitting on their laurels. If a player wishes to carry more than one player it makes no difference to the empires score. The one real downside that I see to this method is that it does tend to favor people that can spend more time playing the game, but as others have said to me and I agree, no system is perfect.
Also at this point there's some technical difficulty that causes only people in the top 50 empires to be counted. I don't know if this could be corrected over time, but at least in my opinion that's not necessarily a bad thing. It give folks a little more motivation to join an empire. I think an empire gives you a bit of camaraderie and shared purpose that you otherwise wouldn't get, but that's just my opinion.
At this moment, I'm 19th in the "real" metaverse and 31st in the "alt" metaverse. They're really not orders of magnitude different and, in all honesty, with only three games submitted, I think 31st is more realistic of where I should be.
Finally, this in no sense replaces the current metaverse. Plus the detail and display are cool and, I think, help you see your progress better. It's just another way of looking at pretty much the same thing.
