Rules and scoring thread

[Steve O]

@hozn 168983 wrote:

– Lowering the bonus per additional rider (50 points is a lot)
– Probably maximum bonus “credits” per ride. E.g. you can get credit for riding with 1 other person per ride — so riding with 50 people to the FS convoy isn’t going to give you a huge points bump.

Might be, but I think 10 is too low.
Good thought, although I think 1 person per ride is too low also. Maybe 3?

@hozn 168983 wrote:

Codifying MASS needs some clarification too, I think. Is there any renewed interest in incorporating freeze points or is the thought that MASS makes that redundant?

I think DRASS (Daily Rider Adjusted Scoring System) is better than MASS, and easier. Although I like MASS philosophically (rides are normalized to the median: on the median day an 11 point ride is still 11; a 36 point ride is still 36 points), using a set value like we did last year is simpler and accomplishes the same thing. I created MASS as an alternate to freeze points–trying to capture the idea of rides in “gnarly” weather being worth more, just like vvill was trying to do.

[hozn]

Yeah, I think the daily points system (DRASS) would be better.

Maybe @vvill has some suggestions on logarithmic scale for mileage; if I remember right there was an aspect of that in freeze points (?) I might not be remembering correctly, though.

[Steve O]

@hozn 168881 wrote:

@Steve O, what do you think about logarithmic mileage-to-points conversion?

Like it, and compatible with DRASS. Each accomplishes a different thing:
– logarithmic revalues daily miles to put more emphasis on getting out and riding and less on the way long miles. There seems to be a reasonable interest in this idea.
– DRASS scores rides in Freezing Saddles-type weather more than rides in May-like weather. Some sort of way of capturing this has been discussed for at least 3 seasons of FS, so it seems this would be a good year to give it a try.

[Bob James]

@Steve O 169071 wrote:

Here it is, and here’s hozn’s post that reflects my thinking as well:
I think one could pretty easily argue against a points system that simply rewards based on mileage (and some bonus for daily participation). This make it hard for folks who don’t have the luxury of being able to spend 4 hours a day on their bikes to ever hope to compete in the points competition. I think adding a social component to scoring could make it competitive to a much larger group and keep the competition more dynamic.

I don’t see a time luxury difference between spending 4 hours a day on a bike, versus spending 4 hours at a social event. I certainly agree with the desire to have as much “community” participation as possible. Most participants would ride to a social event and get mileage points doing so. The more events they ride to, the more miles they ride, and the more points they are rewarded with.

Yes, one could still earn points by just riding by themselves, but I don’t think this was much of a problem in the two years I’ve been doing FS. The pointless prizes, team spirit organizing group rides, and encouragement by event leaders to participate more seemed to foster enough motivation than trying to use the scoring system to do it, which I think causes more problems than it attempts to solve. As mentioned by others, participation is not just convoys and social events (which is time/availability/distance limiting to many participants, though should be encouraged as much as possible), but includes, as a small example, participating online in the forum, uploading pics for sock, coffee, beer, other pointless prizes, etc.

[hozn]

@Steve O 169074 wrote:

Like it, and compatible with DRASS. Each accomplishes a different thing:
– logarithmic revalues daily miles to put more emphasis on getting out and riding and less on the way long miles. There seems to be a reasonable interest in this idea.
– DRASS scores rides in Freezing Saddles-type weather more than rides in May-like weather. Some sort of way of capturing this has been discussed for at least 3 seasons of FS, so it seems this would be a good year to give it a try.

I’m rethinking the idea of logarithmic mileage. It might be too complicated [for people to figure out] and maybe wouldn’t really further the goals of the competition. To encourage daily riding we could increase the per-day points from 10 to 20 … but maybe we keep mileage/points linear after that.

While potentially complicated to implement, I like the concept of DRASS, though. DRASS + potentially other bonuses for capturing the community aspect might be sufficient shakeup in scoring for one year too?

[Bob James]

@hozn 169076 wrote:

I’m rethinking the idea of logarithmic mileage. It might be too complicated [for people to figure out] and maybe wouldn’t really further the goals of the competition. To encourage daily riding we could increase the per-day points from 10 to 20 … but maybe we keep mileage/points linear after that.

I like the idea of more points per first few miles to encourage daily riding over sporadic longer rides (e.g. skipping bad weather days). But a sleaze ride should be at least 3 miles, getting 10 points for each of the 1st 3 miles (33 points total). It’s too easy to ride one mile and then get rewarded for 20 or 30 points). It takes at least 3 miles to get sufficiently chilled to the bone, or drenched like a drowned rat.

If people are riding every day, for most that will translate into riding in more convoys and attending more social events.

[hozn]

I think the counter argument to longer sleaze rides is that for many 1 mile gets them to the grocery store & back or other errands. I don’t dislike the idea of lengthening sleaze rides given how high the % of those that ride every day of competition.

But I don’t see a problem separately rewarding community building. If a purpose of the competition is to grow community then it seems appropriate that the winning team should win in part because of how they have worked toward that goal.

But if you have a proposal for how one could better measure social aspect to riding, we’d love other ideas. I think the proposed concept can be structured in a way to keep it from overwhelmingly favoring one locale.

[LhasaCM]

@hozn 169076 wrote:

I’m rethinking the idea of logarithmic mileage. It might be too complicated [for people to figure out] and maybe wouldn’t really further the goals of the competition. To encourage daily riding we could increase the per-day points from 10 to 20 … but maybe we keep mileage/points linear after that.[/quote]

I think the notion of logarithmic mileage or some other form of diminishing returns was to dampen the impact of really long rides (i.e., to remove some of the scoring system’s encouragement to keep adding miles) by making the 50th mile of the day, for example, less valuable than the 5th. If that’s desirable, then logarithmic mileage would be a pretty straightforward calculation; the challenge would be in defining how quickly to “depreciate” additional mileage – would it be something constant like each additional mile on a given day is only worth 99% of the previous mile (a discount of 1%), or would there be tiers with different discounts? The former approximates as “miles * (0.9975)^miles” aside from the “you rode today” bonus. In that math, 1 mile is 1 point, 2 miles is 1.99 points, 20 miles is 19 points, 50 miles is 44.1 points, 100 miles is 77.86 points (by which point an additional mile is 0.58 points). The math is relatively easy to figure out once the desired outcome is somewhat defined.

I do think that’s a separate (but related) issue from the daily bonus and the idea that Bob raised a few minutes ago (and others raised in the other post) of having additional points awarded for more than just the first completed mile. That way, there’s still a strong incentive for at least a sleaze ride of a mile, but also a strong incentive to maybe tack on a little more to get that 2nd mile (or 3rd mile) bonus.

[hozn]

Ok, these are good ideas. I do like Bob’s idea is 10,20,30 bonus points for miles 1-3.

If someone wants to propose a diminishing mileage formula that seems reasonable, I’m generally in favor of the idea. I was trying to see if I could find other similar scoring systems that had been used elsewhere, but hadn’t turned up anything in brief research.

[LhasaCM]

@hozn 169081 wrote:

Ok, these are good ideas. I do like Bob’s idea is 10,20,30 bonus points for miles 1-3.

If someone wants to propose a diminishing mileage formula that seems reasonable, I’m generally in favor of the idea. I was trying to see if I could find other similar scoring systems that had been used elsewhere, but hadn’t turned up anything in brief research.

As “food for thought” – here’s a quick example of a “tiered” system of diminishing returns for the number of miles ridden in a given day, separate from the bonus points idea. This is setup so that after every 10 mile increment, the value of the next incremental mile is reduced by, for example, 10%. In other words, 1 point per mile up to 10, 0.9 points per mile for anything between 10 and 20, 0.81 points per mile for anything between 20 and 30, etc. The Excel formula to calculate that is: 10*((1-0.9^ROUNDDOWN(MILES/10,0))/(1-0.9))+MOD(MILES,10)*(0.9^ROUNDDOWN(MILES/10,0)) That decreases a little bit faster than the previous example, with the 101st mile being worth 0.35 points. You can make it diminish faster or slower easily enough by changing the 0.9 figure either lower or higher. The table below shows what happens every 10 miles for 0.95, 0.9, 0.8, and 0.7.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]15806[/ATTACH]

One could mix and match so that you have a similar tiered idea, but with accelerating discounts (i.e., maybe you start with a 0.9 factor but make it 0.8 after 40 miles and 0.7 after 80 miles or whatever). Again – it all depends on what you want the results to look like.

[SurlyTed1187]

@LhasaCM 169084 wrote:

As “food for thought” – here’s a quick example of a “tiered” system of diminishing returns for the number of miles ridden in a given day, separate from the bonus points idea. This is setup so that after every 10 mile increment, the value of the next incremental mile is reduced by, for example, 10%. In other words, 1 point per mile up to 10, 0.9 points per mile for anything between 10 and 20, 0.81 points per mile for anything between 20 and 30, etc. The Excel formula to calculate that is: 10*((1-0.9^ROUNDDOWN(MILES/10,0))/(1-0.9))+MOD(MILES,10)*(0.9^ROUNDDOWN(MILES/10,0)) That decreases a little bit faster than the previous example, with the 101st mile being worth 0.35 points. You can make it diminish faster or slower easily enough by changing the 0.9 figure either lower or higher. The table below shows what happens every 10 miles for 0.95, 0.9, 0.8, and 0.7.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]15806[/ATTACH]

One could mix and match so that you have a similar tiered idea, but with accelerating discounts (i.e., maybe you start with a 0.9 factor but make it 0.8 after 40 miles and 0.7 after 80 miles or whatever). Again – it all depends on what you want the results to look like.

For the “average” participant, I do like the idea of this tiered system to keep points closer between long distance riders, and around the block riders.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Bob James]

@LhasaCM 169084 wrote:

As “food for thought” – here’s a quick example of a “tiered” system of diminishing returns for the number of miles ridden in a given day, separate from the bonus points idea. This is setup so that after every 10 mile increment, the value of the next incremental mile is reduced by, for example, 10%. In other words, 1 point per mile up to 10, 0.9 points per mile for anything between 10 and 20, 0.81 points per mile for anything between 20 and 30, etc. The Excel formula to calculate that is: 10*((1-0.9^ROUNDDOWN(MILES/10,0))/(1-0.9))+MOD(MILES,10)*(0.9^ROUNDDOWN(MILES/10,0)) That decreases a little bit faster than the previous example, with the 101st mile being worth 0.35 points. You can make it diminish faster or slower easily enough by changing the 0.9 figure either lower or higher. The table below shows what happens every 10 miles for 0.95, 0.9, 0.8, and 0.7.

One could mix and match so that you have a similar tiered idea, but with accelerating discounts (i.e., maybe you start with a 0.9 factor but make it 0.8 after 40 miles and 0.7 after 80 miles or whatever). Again – it all depends on what you want the results to look like.

Diminishing returns appears to directly penalize for riding more. Riding a century in sub-freezing weather (add in wet conditions) is pretty miserable, with each mile becoming worse, and often necessary for those living farther away for commutes and attending events. Adding bonus points is a direct reward and encourages daily riding and can accomplish similar “leveraging” results without giving the appearance of being punitive. Accelerating returns seems more positive and encouraging than diminishing returns.

Below is an example, of accelerating returns/points. At first it appears no difference in point spread, but if that century rider skips a day of riding and a daily rider does 10 miles, they would gain 65 points on the sporadic century rider (and more importantly team points). Again, with the theory that daily riding for most will also translate into more participation, such as convoys, social events, Strava titles, pointless prize competing, forum posts, etc…

[ATTACH=CONFIG]15807[/ATTACH]

If someone rides at least 10 miles a day, there is no loss of points, i.e. no penalty for riding more, but was dramatically encouraged to ride daily by the scoring system. It would be very difficult to voluntarily forfeit up to 55 bonus points just because it was sub-freezing temps and/or wet conditions. It’s not really a change to the current scoring system (1 mile is still 11 points), but an extension of it, with the same goal of encouraging daily riding.

[aaronwelsh]

@Bob James 169087 wrote:

Diminishing returns appears to directly penalize for riding more. Riding a century in sub-freezing weather (add in wet conditions) is pretty miserable and often necessary for those living farther away for commutes and attending events. Adding bonus points is a direct reward and encourages daily riding and can accomplish similar “leveraging” results without giving the appearance of being punitive. Accelerating returns seems more positive and encouraging than diminishing returns.

Below is an example, of accelerating returns/points. At first it appears no difference in point spread, but if that century rider skips a day of riding and a daily rider does 10 miles, they would gain 65 points on the sporadic century rider (and more importantly team points). Again, with the theory that daily riding for most will also translate into more participation, such as convoys, social events, Strava titles, pointless prize competing, forum posts, etc…

[ATTACH=CONFIG]15807[/ATTACH]

If someone rides at least 10 miles a day, there is no loss of points, i.e. no penalty for riding more, but was dramatically encouraged to ride daily by the scoring system. It would be very difficult to voluntarily forfeit up to 55 bonus points just because it was sub-freezing temps and/or wet conditions.

I think “losing points” and “being penalized” are not the right way to think about it. More miles will always equate to more points, just the rate of point accumulation will change as you ride.

[DismalScientist]

@LhasaCM 169084 wrote:

As “food for thought” – here’s a quick example of a “tiered” system of diminishing returns for the number of miles ridden in a given day, separate from the bonus points idea. This is setup so that after every 10 mile increment, the value of the next incremental mile is reduced by, for example, 10%. In other words, 1 point per mile up to 10, 0.9 points per mile for anything between 10 and 20, 0.81 points per mile for anything between 20 and 30, etc. The Excel formula to calculate that is: 10*((1-0.9^ROUNDDOWN(MILES/10,0))/(1-0.9))+MOD(MILES,10)*(0.9^ROUNDDOWN(MILES/10,0)) That decreases a little bit faster than the previous example, with the 101st mile being worth 0.35 points. You can make it diminish faster or slower easily enough by changing the 0.9 figure either lower or higher. The table below shows what happens every 10 miles for 0.95, 0.9, 0.8, and 0.7.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]15806[/ATTACH]

One could mix and match so that you have a similar tiered idea, but with accelerating discounts (i.e., maybe you start with a 0.9 factor but make it 0.8 after 40 miles and 0.7 after 80 miles or whatever). Again – it all depends on what you want the results to look like.

These formulas look like they are being written by tax-writing legislators. Just make points=miles**a, where a is .9 or something. Similarly, the 3 mile bonus scheme can be calculated as ARGMAX(10*miles,30). This limits the non-differentiability of the resulting point function. With this, I retire back into complete apathy regarding this issue.

[Bob James]

@aaronwelsh 169088 wrote:

I think “losing points” and “being penalized” are not the right way to think about it. More miles will always equate to more points, just the rate of point accumulation will change as you ride.

hmm…you could have a point As a long distance rider, I see a goal to devalue miles as negative, versus a goal that encourages daily riding as positive. At the same time, I am more impressed by those who ride 5-10 miles (or more) a day, making multiple commute, errand and social rides, over myself riding a recreational half or full century (yes, even I would consider going to Krispy Kreme or visiting the local cows as recreational).

I’m not advocating for any change in the current scoring system, but only commenting because “some” change is being considered.

[Author]

Posts