Pont system feedback

[cvcalhoun]

I’m another one whose contribution consists mostly of riding every day, because my mileage is nothing to brag about. But I don’t think we need more of a daily bonus. As it is, my 1.3-mile daily rides are doing as much good to the team as if one of my more active teammates added another 11.3 miles to his or her daily ride. I just can’t see them being worth more than that. And while we want to encourage everyone to get out there on a daily basis, a huge daily bonus might actually discourage people from taking longer rides, because they’d figure they got almost all of their contribution just in that first mile.

[jrenaut]

That’s fair. I definitely don’t want to discourage riding. And certainly if we changed the incentives, some behavior would change. I’m just trying to think if tweaking the points would make it more interesting.

[ShawnoftheDread]

Next year?! Good lord, I don’t know if I’m even going to make it through January this year.

[jrenaut]

@ShawnoftheDread 75938 wrote:

Next year?! Good lord, I don’t know if I’m even going to make it through January this year.

What? This year is great. I still have most of my toes.

[DismalScientist]

That the rank order by mileage and point are near identical is merely an artifact of setting the team handicaps equal and having a near equal number of members on each team. If, say, next year we would have small team of “Studs” with exclusively high mileage riders and a large team of low handicap riders, then team “Sleaze” would utterly dominate if properly motivated to get off their collective asses.

[jrenaut]

I guess I’m looking at this from the POV of a programmer helping out with the FS site – we could have a really complicated system of calculating the points that the computer would just do and we wouldn’t have to worry about it.

My priorities so far have been, in order:
1) Ride every day
2) No sleaze
3) Extra miles

And the standings suggest that I have those somewhat backwards. At the same time, if it wasn’t for the 10 point bonus and wanting to ride every day, it’s very likely that I wouldn’t have ridden on a few of the worst days – 13 points seems worth it, 3 points doesn’t.

[dasgeh]

I like the idea, but mainly because I’m in the ride every day category (and I love sleaze). Basically, I’ve had the thought of “I could not ride today, but I’ll need to do an extra 11 miles this weekend”, to which I say “nope” and get on the bike.

You could put a lot of thought into what’s the goal – every day rides, longer rides, etc – and change the system from there. Upping the per day points benefits me, so I’m all for it!

[Vicegrip]

I’m also a ride every day person. This weather has messed me up, not by making me not want to ride, I got the cold gear dialed in, but by making me spend ride time working. Snow, ice and equipment taxing cold is more work not gov wonk time off. The sleaze is killing my soul but I get a chance to tack on a couple of team points even on bad days.

[vvill]

I think 10 points is just about right, being roughly an order of magnitude higher than what you would otherwise get for doing a 1 mile sleaze ride. Getting those points instead of riding 10 miles another day is a good incentive for me, especially given the trying winter conditions we’ve had.

If we want to make something more interesting or make more of the data / computing at our disposal I think we could come up with some more interesting visualizations, or metrics for rankings.

[Steve O]

I agree with vvill. 10 points worked last year and seems to be working this year, too. It benefits from being simple to understand. However, it doesn’t seem to be quite enough motivation for about half my team members; hence our 8th place standing.

[Author]

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