Bug: score un/train (in General)

When I untrain and retrain, my score drops but doesn't rise back up. This also happened to Monsieur Parenteau.

Rogue
Score 494
Power 1,121,716
MPR 1,011,507
Net Worth $39,777,892


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added this as a new reference on the known issues bug page in wiki.

Yup, noticed it myself and posted about it a couple of days ago too...

Hopefully this one gets fixed a little sooner than later, as we really don't need score sucked from the system. When I fight my way back up, it's going to really hurt on the score ladder.


Steve - I think I agreed with you on that topic.

Fixed.

Score gain (from retraining) is capped to new PR. (PR not MPR.)

Thanks Jon! :)

Score isn't capped right? Just score gain from retraining?

that should be the case NOW...but for a few minutes there, it wasn't ;)

"Score gain is capped to new PR. (PR not MPR.)"

Umm... so, if we have a score that's already higher than our PR, we gain absolutely no score ?
That's not right, most decent people HAVE a score higher than their PR.

Cap it to new PR*2 or something like that.

"Umm... so, if we have a score that's already higher than our PR, we gain absolutely no score ? "

only during retraining.

fixed the phrase to contain the word 'retrain' which this entire thread is about.

Sickone: this has nothing to do with gaining score from fighting ;)

I know, and I was talking about retraining.

So, in other words, say I'm at 5.5 mil score, 3.5 mil PR, 2.5 mil MPR.
I untrain about half my XP, end up at 2.75 mil score, then retrain.
My retrained score will be a bit under 3.5 mil score, as opposed to the initial 5.5 mil score.

Still not see this as a problem ?

http://www.carnageblender.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002ffM

This is what I was talking about

I agree a score cap of more than PR would be better

i see it as much better than the other buggy ways it was working. what would your solution be? the system likely has no record of what your score was at any given time. i guess a score save could be initiated as you hit unlearn, but even then your score previous to a retrain is in no way indicative of what score you can get afterward. starting over at pr and having to discover what score level you are since retraining seems very reasonable and logical.

I would simply put the cap somewhere between 1 and 2 x PR

untraining half your mpr would only take you down 1.25mill score and then take you up to around 5.3mill after re-training.

It might seem logical and reasonable but the further off it is the more score gets sucked out of the system.

Mine was to Sick

This might not be a bug. When I train my exp from fighting, I don't get any score

score goes up or down as a result of fighting not training.

A couple days ago, my score was going up when I trained

but now it is capped

the cap is for retraining though, not training.

doubt CB knows the difference.

if it didn't wouldn't all of our scores be migrating towards our pr?

No. As long as score > PR training has no effect on score

so, you are saying that if without training, my score fell below my pr, then my score would from that point forward be capped at my pr?

The score added by training would be, that is all

i seriously never knew score was added when training. are you sure that has always happened?

not always, but for some time until the recent change

the cap is for training in general... The only way it slightly hurts anything is when retraining if you have higher score than PR, but if your retrain was a worthwhile one, you should be able to regain your score quickly enough. Which also makes sense reallistically.

Score is like "reputation", basically, how much should another character fear going up against yours. While specialized strategies can skew this, essentially, the 5m score that a 3m PR char earns is earned by the fierce-ness of that char *as is*. If you retrain to something else, then why should it be seen as equally threatening? It shouldn't lose all of it's "reputation" due to it's current power, but aside from it's potential ability, it is an entirely new character in terms of battles fought (old ones don't count as they were fought with a previous version of the char). Fight a set of BA, and your score should go to the approximate whereabouts of where it should be ^_^

Considering retrains don't happen *too* terribly often, the blowback from this should be minimal. Now, if everyone at/near the top starts retraining every other day, we could see the rebirth of the "dead zone", but with gameplay mechanics as they are now, this zone would only last for as long as the top ranks were constantly retraining, and would be corrected within a few days after they stop ^_^

"The only way it slightly hurts anything is when retraining if you have higher score than PR, but if your retrain was a worthwhile one, you should be able to regain your score quickly enough."

The problem isn't with the fact you can regain that score, self score doesn't matter all that much to begin with.
The problem is that this last change made it so that score gets removed from the system more often, AND less score overall gets infused into the system.

Score is mostly shifted around rather than created, the amount of score creation is minimal.
WAY BEFORE, we had the "dead zone", which was a direct result of how score was being created.
Then, we had a slight change to the scoring system, then also we had shortly after another change, where *training* created score too.
"The dead zone" was no more, and the status quo is the way we know it right now, with scores nicely covering a broad spectrum.

Now, this change, it made it so that NO SCORE IS CREATED BY TRAINING IF YOUR SCORE IS HIGHER THAN YOUR PR.
For most active players, and ALL half-decent active players, score IS above the PR, a lot above, sometimes even above double the PR.
You have effectively removed one of the largest score faucets from the game with this "fix".
Expect "the dead zone" to make a re-emergence within a couple of months.

Do you really want us to have a "dead zone" again ?!?

well if it is the case that training no longer gives xp when it used to because of this change and the system doesn't differentiate between retraining and normal training, then i think that should be the solution. the system should treat the two occurrences separately and differently.

"the system should treat the two occurrences separately and differently."

It's easy to say this, but how exactly do you propose to differentiate, and why ?
Do you want to keep an additional "XP untrained but not retrained yet" hidden value for each character ? Ok, say you could do that (although I believe Jon would frown upon it), what's the benefit of doing so ?
At least one person already said it, all it takes after a retrain and major score changes to get to the proper score you deserve is a couple of battles.
Why even bother artificially REMOVING score from the system (like this "fix" does now) when HIGH score for one person DOESN'T benefit that person, but those fighting him ? And as soon as they fight him, his score drops to where it should be, in case he had an absurdly high score for some reason.

So, capping score when retraining normally isn't really necessary, capping score when training normally isn't all that necessary either, the ONLY problem so far we had was people getting some INSANE score because they FOUGHT while having huge amounts of XP stored up, got up to an insane Score:PR ratio, then trained a lot to get some ridiculously high scores.
So, in order to "fix" the problem of people with Score=10*PR to Score=1000*PR or similar, Jon caps Score=PR (after train).
It's excessive and damaging.
I have said again and again that Score=2*PR is a much more feasable cap, and even Score=3*PR as cap wouldn't really be all that high anyway.

it doesn't have to be that complicated, just make it based off of a percentage of total xp on character. that way if people are training regularly, there is no penalty. it would penalize people that save up xp, but it would be more fair than what you say we have now and at least we, the user, would have a method of avoiding the penalty.

in effect, if xp being trained is greater than one percent of total xp, then apply the cap, otherwise do not.

Why put in a system that can be circumvented (granted, with a bit of effort) when you have a much simpler way of avoiding the unwanted effects (huge unearned score) while leaving everything else "normal" by just making the cap somewhat larger, to a level where under "normal" circumstances it wouldn't affect people at all ?

Increasing the cap to 2*PR would do exactly that (prevent bad effects, not needlessly penalize normal people), and would require minimal programming effort too.

You can already see the negative side-effects of this latest "fix" in the first score pages, and it hasn't even been a week yet since the change... a new dead zone will start to re-appear clear as daylight in a couple of months if nothing gets changed, and it will be back in full force in half a year tops (granted, slightly higher as we used to have it, but still, a dead zone).

I'm just going to make this change a bit more obvious by sacrificing growth for a little while, while double-tapping some higher-scoring people around.
I encourage everybody that finds me fighting them to sap as much score away from me as possible too.
I'm not doing anything that wouldn't happen anyway eventually, I'm just accelerating the process.

So to paraphrase, if I may...

"Mark my words, there will be a deadzone! No seriously, I mean it! Here, watch me make it!"

Best of luck to ya there, I don't see it working out that way though... ^_^

In not so many words, yes.
But it's not "watch me MAKE it", just "watch me speed up the natural process".

I couldn't possibly GENERATE a deadzone if the system wouldn't be predisposed towards creating one in the first place, and if I can "create" a deadzone it only means it will eventually happen anyway, with or without my help.

"Increasing the cap to 2*PR would do exactly that (prevent bad effects, not needlessly penalize normal people), and would require minimal programming effort too."

at the top though, most players score is not twice their pr. that could be manipulated to infuse fake score into the system by those at the top. this is why jon implemented the cap if i am not mistaken.

"at the top though, most players score is not twice their pr. that could be manipulated to infuse fake score into the system by those at the top."

Yes, but then again, at the top, if you forcibly remove a lot of your XP, first off you lose a lot of XP in the process which you can't easily get back, and second, if you try to fight that way you will more than likely find you'll have to fight much lower than you did before, therefore negating any significant score boosts you could exploit from this.
In the end, you'd end up only hurting yourself, so there's no incentive to do it at all in the first place.


"this is why jon implemented the cap if i am not mistaken. "

He implemented the cap to prevent low-(M)PR characters from fighting with the aid of the familiar to a reasonably high score (for their VPR), only to gain a ridiculous Score:(M)PR ratio with all the untrained XP (since the familiar could win some fights by himself), which would then translate (after training up the XP) in absurdly high scores.

So would this not be exploitable?

Untrain base decay (Or anything for that matter), with 5.5M Score, 2.5M PR. Retrain to be at even 2.5M PR & Score. Then when people try to fight you they will get significantly lower rewards because your score dropped 3M?

Talk about uber defense ammo. Maybe I don't understand the fix completely, but this is what I get from Jon's "fix" descriptions.

Small, score drop is relative to the amount of xp you unlearn.

still seems as if you could untrain enough to drop your score significantly to make people mad and still not worry about the untrain penalty.

Unless you want to throw your mpr away that is not really an option

Actually, it also seems that (at least occasionally?) if you untrain something like a base decay, score DOES drop a lot more as it should anyway, so what smallpau says might have some merit. Not 100% sure though, needs some testing.

of course the other option is to compensate for lost score in training by once again increasing rewards from fighting and avoiding the dead zone in that manner. that is likely the simplest and safest solution of them all.

Yeah, let's try to alleviate the symptoms, god forbid we should address the problem itself instead :P

i guess that depends oh how you define the problem. a lack of score in the system creating a dead zone would be directly remedied by an increase in score coming into the system.

the fact that it cannot be exploited just makes it all the more appealing. ; )

Do people really retrain with such frequency and severity that this is a pressing problem?

This doesn't affect regular old training (just untraining) so I have hard time believing people are taking a daily beating to their scores.

Sure score loss in any circumstance is less than ideal, but 49 posts?

/me doesn't get it...

AFAIK, Jon didn't touch that part at all (the amount of score generated), just how much was being moved around when the dead zone started to dissipate, the main thing he did that was different from before was to make it so that training increased score, and at that time, the deadzone all but completely evaporated.

Jon would have to seriously tweak the amounts of score generated to fix that again with the current rules and caps on score adjustment from training - pretty much every N*B no longer adds a massive amount of score into the system as they grow, then that score no longer levels off as it starts to feed the people that would be in the new dead zone, slowly creating the dead zone again.

It would have to be a pretty big tweak towards score generation then... think at least a doubling, if not even more.

"Do people really retrain with such frequency and severity that this is a pressing problem?"

When most minor retrains have the potential to drain away millions in score from the system, doesn't really matter how often that is, it adds up to quite ugly numbers, slowly but surely.


"This doesn't affect regular old training (just untraining) so I have hard time believing people are taking a daily beating to their scores. "

WRONG. It *does* affect regular training.
Well, that is to say, it affects the normal training score adjustment that made the dead zone almost completely go away in the first place.
In case you haven't noticed, for a good while now, we GAINED some score each time we trained, even after just a couple of battles.
Now, since a couple of days ago, as per Jon's "fix", we no longer gain any score at all if the score we have is above our PR (which is the case for just about all people in the lower 6/20 and below).
So, yeah, it DOES affect normal training too.

Let me put it another way : IT'S THE N*B's FAULT.

At least when we had the "training increases score" feature, the XP growth of N*Bs was being matched by score growth... actually, since those N*Bs had Score/PR ratios *above* 1 (closer to 2 for most, or even above that for some), the Score/PR ratio in the middle AND higher ranks was being constantly improved.
Now, we no longer have that, thanks to the latest fix.

If we had no N*B, then everybody would have to grow by doing a lot of fighting, which would result in a lot of score being generated.
But since score generation is the same for a N*B or a regular character, but the XP gain is much higher, this means PROPORTIONALLY, each N*B that climbs closer to the top compounds the problem by dilluting the overall Score/(N)PR ratio.
This is even further compounded (to a lesser degree) by the fact most people just give up a high-score character (effectively removing all that score from the game too) to start a NCB - either they retire it, or they sell it... and those they sell it to, they tend to retrain, so, there you go.