The spread between the #1 team and the #22 team is currently 65%. I just ran 10 randomized sets of teams. The average (and median) spread last to first was 74%, so only barely worse than what we have. 2 out of the 10 randomized teams were actually better than 65%.
This thread included a well supported discussion of ideas that might reduce that spread, which would tighten the competition and potentially make it more fun. One idea that had a good deal of traction was to count miles 3, 4, 5 more than miles 63, 74 and 85. A couple of those ideas are copied below.
We left this thread with the suggestion that some alternative scoring systems be beta tested this year, so we would have 9 months to argue about them. I’d be curious to see how the below ideas might tighten the scores among the teams. Is there a chance that these could be test-driven? Perhaps simply add columns to the current DRASS leaderboard rather than create entirely new ones.
@Bob James 169087 wrote:
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).
[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.
@hozn 169081 wrote:
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 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.
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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.
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