what is the ASR doing wrong?

[stalkor]

btw the votes have been cast and next month delta will be 1 big enormous humongous titanic unbelievably large class.

one thing that will change with this is the way we give out prizes. I've already seen that if you are in delta you are having an advantage for getting whole league activity prizes etc and topazg pointed out (correctly imo) in chat that there are little to no perks for being in alpha. so were going to do things a bit differently and will post about that when i come back after the tournament in Brussels this weekend (yay, tourney time!)

what do you guys think, prizes too bottom heavy or not?

[Li Kao]

if i think about it i cant see a particular standard pattern, its all different.

We have the standard sign up and never play again.
The play, get promoted but then doesn't play anymore (for some reason ppl don't get that if you promote, you are playing next month. Also ''forgetting'' to tell ''i quit'' is common too )
the slow riser.
The infinite gamer who only stops playing go to crash into bed or worse.
The disappearer who is very active but doesn't tell he is on vacation for a month hence signing up a month later again.

Did i miss one? Probably:p

You forgot the "It's the already the 30th and I still need 3 games or I get mod killed. PLAY ME1!!11" type of player.

[ez4u]

I was playing with the class listings for the last few months (March through October 2011) to see what kind of picture they give of the activity in the league. Some (interesting?) facts:
* The league varied in size between 511 and 263 members in those months.
* There were a total of 1033 distinct members.
* A total of 591 people joined and 790 left the league.
* By class the average percentage of leavers was: Epsilon 39%, Delta 36%, Gammma 30%, Beta 19%, Alpha 14%.
It appears that there is a core group of about 90 members who persist across all the months. A third of all members appear for one month only, while three quarters stay for one to three months.

The challenge is to build an experience in the league that takes into account the significant range of people. Hopefully it is possible to make the league something that more people will be attracted to for longer periods of time.

[stalkor]

posted on site but posted here too for discussion

with the new implementation of the huge delta class we have thought about what this would do to prizes we give out. I've already said for a while that prizes are bottom heavy, this means that you have the best chance for prizes if you play in the delta layer. This is obviously not a good thing, because you worked yourself all the way to alpha just to have a minor chance for 1 prize. Furthermore the win% prizes are against the spirit of the league. you win points and you should be awarded according to that.

So we are making a change, making alpha a place with perks and more prizes.

first of all, all full league prizes will be from now on only from alpha to gamma, delta has a serious advantage towards activity prizes so they are therefor excluded from it.

alpha:
Top 3 prizes mainly the pro tgame, the kgs+ and an audio lecture. furthermore if you get 25+ points in place 4 to 6 you get 1 audio lecture.

beta: 1st prize is a donated teaching games from high dans (tabemasu or the likes), interchangeable for 1 audiolecture
2nd prize a audiolecture

gamma: 1st prize donated teaching games from mid to low dan, interchangeable for 1 audio lecture

delta: 1st prize donated tgame by low dan or 1 audiolecture

activity and kyu prizes remain the same but apply only from alpha to gamma.

we cant give away prizes if you dont help us out by donating! please donate here or speak to an admin about donating a teaching game or the likes!

[usagi]

ok now im seriously scared of the following conversation i had with a league member:

stalkor: yep looks like one big group is the outcome
AOA: I am asking because in all honesty, I so like this idea of a huge group that if it's the case I want to request to not be promoted to gamma
stalkor: gonna look ugly but oh well
AOA: I want to experiment this
stalkor: you will be promoted if you are in the promotion zone
AOA: well,
AOA: it is my right to request that otherwise I'll just rejoin on another account
AOA: your call
AOA: I decide what I do

this is a part, not the full convo but this seriously is something i cannot allow EVER (see eternal beta's thread)

It's a very large step you've taken, Stalkor, with making the bigroom. And I am very proud and excited for you and to be a member of the league. So I don't want to rush you. But I will be blatantly honest as I am known to be; there are still three things left to be done:

1. Before someone gets invited to the league, check to make sure they have 3 to 6 month's of existing game records.
Reasoning: Exactly the conversation above.

2. Before someone gets invited to the league, check to make sure they have been playing at least 10-15 games per month.
Reasoning: How many people habitually play 1 game a month only to be kicked out the following month for doing what they've always done? I'm not talking about entry requirements. I'm talking about asking someone why they think they can make our "stay a member" requirements if they obviously have not been able to do so in the past. It's a simple check (like #1) Ask your admins to do it? ^^

3. Change the activity reward on a room-by-room basis.
Reasoning: Now that you have a bigroom, the 2 for 1 reward system of the past, which worked so well for lower levels, has become passe at top levels (alpha and beta). Please make them more competitive. This month in Alpha I only got ~2 reviews out of 8 losses. I played 23 games. Look at teach with 16 wins, and he didn't get even 3rd place. For Alpha, at least, the 2 for 1 system does not work so well. If you want to attract strength to the league, reward it. For alpha, please make 4 points for 1 point loss. For beta make it 3 to 1. You should think about this, Stalkor. Alpha is going to become more active than ever with the new promotion rules and the bigroom. Quelling the activity reward there is a very good thing. Seriously, teach should have been 1st place. Of course in a 4 for 1 system Teach would have been first place. So this is not a self-serving request. True strength should win in Alpha. The most active and the strongest players congregate there. We need to increase the competition there a notch. I am so tired of playing an alpha game and the player leaves immediately after the match. This would change that. Think about doing this please.

[ez4u]

ok now im seriously scared of the following conversation i had with a league member:

stalkor: yep looks like one big group is the outcome
AOA: I am asking because in all honesty, I so like this idea of a huge group that if it's the case I want to request to not be promoted to gamma
stalkor: gonna look ugly but oh well
AOA: I want to experiment this
stalkor: you will be promoted if you are in the promotion zone
AOA: well,
AOA: it is my right to request that otherwise I'll just rejoin on another account
AOA: your call
AOA: I decide what I do

this is a part, not the full convo but this seriously is something i cannot allow EVER (see eternal beta's thread)

It's a very large step you've taken, Stalkor, with making the bigroom. And I am very proud and excited for you and to be a member of the league. So I don't want to rush you. But I will be blatantly honest as I am known to be; there are still three things left to be done:

1. Before someone gets invited to the league, check to make sure they have 3 to 6 month's of existing game records.
Reasoning: Exactly the conversation above.

This seems to me to be letting fear drive the administration of the league. Note that the proposal is to essentially ban from the ASR all newcomers to KGS because someone might create a new user name to stay in Delta.

2. Before someone gets invited to the league, check to make sure they have been playing at least 10-15 games per month.
Reasoning: How many people habitually play 1 game a month only to be kicked out the following month for doing what they've always done? I'm not talking about entry requirements. I'm talking about asking someone why they think they can make our "stay a member" requirements if they obviously have not been able to do so in the past. It's a simple check (like #1) Ask your admins to do it? ^^

I went to the results page for October and clicked through to the KGS games of 15-20 of the people who failed to play four games. There were a few that fit the pattern above. However, they were actually very few. It is much more often the case that someone active in the past stopped playing or that someone is still very active on KGS but failed to play in the ASR. We should not imagine that we understand what is happening until after checking the available information. And the information is all readily available. League activity is detailed on the various results pages. All members' complete playing records in the KGS archives are directly linked to from those same results pages.

3. Change the activity reward on a room-by-room basis.
Reasoning: Now that you have a bigroom, the 2 for 1 reward system of the past, which worked so well for lower levels, has become passe at top levels (alpha and beta). Please make them more competitive. This month in Alpha I only got ~2 reviews out of 8 losses. I played 23 games. Look at teach with 16 wins, and he didn't get even 3rd place. For Alpha, at least, the 2 for 1 system does not work so well. If you want to attract strength to the league, reward it. For alpha, please make 4 points for 1 point loss. For beta make it 3 to 1. You should think about this, Stalkor. Alpha is going to become more active than ever with the new promotion rules and the bigroom. Quelling the activity reward there is a very good thing. Seriously, teach should have been 1st place. Of course in a 4 for 1 system Teach would have been first place. So this is not a self-serving request. True strength should win in Alpha. The most active and the strongest players congregate there. We need to increase the competition there a notch. I am so tired of playing an alpha game and the player leaves immediately after the match. This would change that. Think about doing this please.

Sorry, but if teach didn't get third place in alpha, who did? That said ( ), there are a couple of important points here:
* First is the low number of reviews received from stronger (at least winning) players. My understanding is that the opportunity to play stronger players and get reviews in all classes is what drives the desire not to concentrate the strong players in alpha. Is it a general experience that only a minority of games result in a review? Do we know? Why do/might people play in the league but avoid doing reviews? Do we know? Any thoughts on improving the situation other than concentrating the strong players in alpha, which obviously will only hurt the other classes exactly to the extent that it helps alpha!
* "The most active and strongest players congregate there..." Actually this does not seem to be true if I look at the last few months' results. Rather the strongest players continue to be spread across the league because although they are consistently strong they are not consistently active. Interestingly, if I look across the class results for June through October, alpha appears to be the class most consistently won by the most active rather than the strongest players. This may be because the current weighting of wins versus losses pushes the active players up more consistently than it does the strongest players. However, if that is true, then changing the rewards in alpha only will not change that. What it will do is allow strong players who become less active to remain in alpha (look at who was demoted from alpha in October and consider who would have remained with a different point structure). In order to concentrate the stronger players by promoting them out of the other classes, we have to apply a different point structure to all classes. Consider, for example, beta I in October or beta II in August. Any change in the point structure will change who gets promoted. However, it will be a pretty fundamental change in the league. What will the present membership think of the change? If we picked a new point structure, recalculated the results for each of the last three months, and published the results, would it be reasonable to poll the membership on which they thought was a preferable set of results?

[stalkor]

Stats for this month (october)

Total number of players registered this month: 312
Players not yet completed enough games to stay in: 95 (30.4% dropout)
Total games played this month: 1272 out of a possible 7394 (17.2%)
games per active player (>4 games): 5,86 games
games per player: 4,08 games
average games per day: 41,03

a much better month imo

[xzenith42]

Hi there-

I'll admit I didn't have the time to go read through all the responses to this section, so I apologize if this is redundant. As a whole, I really like the ASR League, I enjoy reviewing for weaker players and relish the opportunity to play 3-5d's in even games, even if I rarely even put up a fight. For me, the most frustrating thing is the way the promotion system works right now. I find that really it doesn't reward skill, but just how much time one has to play. I work 60+ hours a week and only have so much time for go, some of that I like to spend playing rated games. For me the draw to the league has always been the opportunity to play stronger players. However, what I've found many times is come the end of the month I may be 8-0 or 10-1 and end up losing out to a player who is 2-20. Now, nothing against this player and I'm glad to see them playing as much as they do, but personally, I can't imagine they enjoy losing nearly every game every month. Given that 13ks get very little extra from playing a 4d than they do a 3k it seems silly for this player to move up when stronger players with better records do not. I should probably preface this by saying I did in fact promote this last month (and should this new system be enacted, I would find it difficult to promote up from beta as a 2k, so I'm not whining so much as giving my opinion). Perhaps my view of playing in ASR not so much to move up the ladder but to earn the right to play players stronger than myself is mine alone, but what I would like to see is wins worth more.

example
1-0 3 for a win 1 for a loss
2-0 4.5 for the winner, 1.5 for a loser
1-1 3.75 each

This certainly will promote stronger players (assuming they play a reasonable number of games) to move up and will keep weaker players in the lower levels (barring those who play outrageous numbers of games), but my thought is that there will still be stronger opponents for the weaker players (new players and players who were mostly inactive a previous month), but they will also get more games against players their own level, thus promoting improvement for players who wish to move up the ladder.

Also, given that finding games can be a chore, especially in certain time zones, I would prefer that the diminishing return for wins be removed. (ie with the current system: 2 points for a win, 1 for a loss regardless of how many times you've played the person)

[oren]

2. Before someone gets invited to the league, check to make sure they have been playing at least 10-15 games per month.
Reasoning: How many people habitually play 1 game a month only to be kicked out the following month for doing what they've always done? I'm not talking about entry requirements. I'm talking about asking someone why they think they can make our "stay a member" requirements if they obviously have not been able to do so in the past. It's a simple check (like #1) Ask your admins to do it? ^^

I disagree with this. I have never played 10-15 games/month on KGS, but I don't think there's any reason I can't participate in ASR.

[jts]

Fwiw, xzenith, this month your description of your W-L is accurate, but you did promote; last month you went 5-4, and did not; August, 8-6. I'm not trying to call you out, but I know how our memory can be completely warped a few months on. If it were true in general that 2-20 13 kyu were promoting and 10-1 2 kyu were not, that might call for careful thought. But since that's not the case, it's not worth compromising the ideals of the league.

The underlying principle is that the ASR promotes the playing of lots of serious (=long time settings and reviews) games. "Lots" is key there. It's easy to play two serious games a month, or to play bunches of quick and sloppy games, but the ASR wants to martial us to play games that are both time-intensive and time-extensive. So showing up and committing the time to play all those games is a more important contribution to the league, and a better embodiment of its ideals, than winning. --- And I completely sympathize with not being able to play as many games as other people. I think I had time for fewer games than you this month, and in the past I've been forced to drop out of the ASR because I was too busy. But at the times in our lives where we have no time for go, we want the ASR pushing, pushing, pushing us to play go anyway; and where we genuinely have no time, well, those are months when the ASR is not what we need, rather than months when the ASR needs to change for us.

I would be more open to usagi's suggestion of tinkering with the win/loss point balance for alpha if it were actually true that inactivity steadily declines as you go up the divisions, such that alpha never has any problems with inactivity. But although this month was a very good month for alpha, it only gets really impressive levels of participation (=substantially higher than beta) about every other month. If you only get impressive levels of activity half the time with activity encouraged, then removing that encouragement means even less activity.

[xzenith42]

You're right about my record Jts (though i was 8-0 in july ). I wasn't trying to say for me in particular, just something I've noticed in general in the league. If you look in August for example, I see an 8-22 promote over a 13-1; a 4-13 over a 9-1; and an 0-15 over a 6-1. it's true this isn't exactly the rule, but my guess is that the way I look at the league isn't the same as everyone. To me, the players who play lots of games and yet go 0-15 (or similar), their "prize" rather than promotion is 15 teaching games with stronger players whereas those who have high winning %'s (and a decent number of games) get to move on to face stronger players.

Ah well, not like i expected things to change, just wanted my opinion out there.

Cheers.

[ez4u]

...

Ah well, not like i expected things to change, just wanted my opinion out there.

Cheers.

Nooooooooooooooooo! Expect change. Just don't expect it to be easy or expect that any of us start out understanding the problem, much less the best way to change.

I thought the insights coming from your experiences were an interesting and welcome addition to this thread. Please continue to participate.

[usagi]

2. Before someone gets invited to the league, check to make sure they have been playing at least 10-15 games per month.
Reasoning: How many people habitually play 1 game a month only to be kicked out the following month for doing what they've always done? I'm not talking about entry requirements. I'm talking about asking someone why they think they can make our "stay a member" requirements if they obviously have not been able to do so in the past. It's a simple check (like #1) Ask your admins to do it? ^^

I disagree with this. I have never played 10-15 games/month on KGS, but I don't think there's any reason I can't participate in ASR.

There isn't, as far as I know. The idea was to make it so people didn't gum up delta by playing 2, 3 and 4 games a month for the duration of their time in the ASR and thus make it difficult or impossible for people to find games. Introducing a 3 month ban on people who didn't play 4 games a month would have almost the exact same effect as requiring people to demonstrate activity before joining the league. But I suppose in retrospect my idea makes no sense anymore because of the bigroom.

All hail the bigroom!

[usagi]

I would be more open to usagi's suggestion of tinkering with the win/loss point balance for alpha if it were actually true that inactivity steadily declines as you go up the divisions, such that alpha never has any problems with inactivity. But although this month was a very good month for alpha, it only gets really impressive levels of participation (=substantially higher than beta) about every other month. If you only get impressive levels of activity half the time with activity encouraged, then removing that encouragement means even less activity.

Of course inactivity steadily declines as you go up the divisions. People who have been in alpha have demonstrated their ability to stay active in the league. Alpha is almost always the most active class. Look at this year; in january, february and march, alpha was the most active league. In april, beta 2 had a higher % of completed games, but six people were removed for inactivity versus alpha's one. In may, june and july alpha was again more active than beta, at times almost twice as active as the least active beta. In august beta II was more active by games and had less dropouts. This was the only time, all year, that one of the beta rooms was "more active" than alpha, save the following month when I was in Beta II.

At any rate, if activity was such a concern, why not make wins worth 1 point and losses worth 1 point too? Seriously, and have activity as the only reward. Seriously.

To assume that 2:1 is perfect because it was the first number we used is kind of weird, actually. Why are people so unwilling to take a look at this area and make a few logical, well-thought out improvements? Do you really think 2:1 is the best ratio? If you do, and the reason is because "this is how it's been done for billions of years" I think it's time to stop and think. It's kind of obvious that the ratio needs to be changed. I'm just wondering how long it's going to take people to figure this out.

[stalkor]

seriously, stop proclaiming yourself as if you are always right and just form an opinion that doesnt belittle others.

The point of the current structure is not only to give an advantage to ppl who win league games but (and this i find very important) is to prevent strong lazy players.

A player who is 4d+ should never go thinking ''oh i will churn out a quick 10 games and win easily, because no one can touch that''. Instead they should aim to play a lot and win that way. The league is based on points, and activity is key to getting those, changing it in favor of a winner too much creates laziness (see the poll i had on the ASR site, many players use the league as a way to make themselves play games!)

playing games is vital to your growth in go and it should be motivated to play games, not be held back(a reason i like points over winning%, but thats a whole other topic)

i know that a lot of you have busy lives and jobs but then accept you will not be in alpha or beta but be content that the league is there to make you play at least some games, maybe you wouldnt have played if you weren't in the league.