Dear Vertigo,
I just flought a few LLC tasks, having joined Condor community less than two months ago, but here below my contributions:
I propose taking only 1 result per pilot per day: the worst result with a valid race start per pilot, even if the worst one is a crash. Any others (duplicates on different servers, and flights with no start) will be dismissed.
I agree with the principle, but:
1. I don't understand what a "flight with no start" means.
2. I have some reservation in case of early disconnected flight: I personally preferred in the past to quit the race and re-start on another "late start" server, as playing online is so much more fun than spending 2 hours on your own...
to give each pilot a webinterface that allows him to upload the IGC, and fill out his own result in a form. We will take this result as the truth, automatically score it and let all other pilots (who can download and check the IGCs) report irregularities.
I disagree, as I believe is up to the organising committee to guarantee a systematic and reliable ranking. A self management based system would open the door both to mistakes and cheats, and both would be a fireback on the credibility and prestige of the competition.
This has been debated extensively, and I know SL disagrees, but when not counting each day, I still think each day should have equal weight. I therefore propose to drop the dayfactor (set it to 1), but keep the speed/distance points system. Another alternative I might find acceptable is a place scoring system for days (as well as months).
I'm not an expert in scoring system and I believe I only raced on dayfactor 1 competitions. Anyhow a possible alternative solution could be to adopt a scoring system that take into considearation also day factors. Something like for example "result of the month=best 3 tasks with dayfactor 1 + best 3 tasks with dayfactor=2".
introducing a place point penalty for each crash, regardless if the dayresult or even month result would be counted or not. For instance, first crash of the season would cost you 10 ? overall points, second crash 25, third one would reset your score to zero or even below zero if you had less than 25 points, otherwise the first two/three races people could crash with no real penalty.
I agree only partially as frequent crashes can be related to poor soaring skills: a beginner could take 8 competitions/month, crash 4 times and arriving 120th for the other 4... why to take away from him the satisfaction of benefitting of those few points?
I see your point, but then I would rather penalise crashes in relation to other results. Two possible factors to be considered here:
1. Only those crashes that are in the "dropped part" of the results of the month should be counted for penalty.
2. Pilots who are hight in the rank should get higher penalties for crashes (as it's more likely these are the fruit of having taken too much risk), pilots that are low in ranks should ge lower penalties (as it's more likely their crashes are due to inexperience).
the above rule (place score penalty for each crash) would encourage people disconnecting on purpose to avoid this penalty. To counter that, I would consider *each* disconnection a crash (!) until proven otherwise.
I understand the concern but I disagree on the solution, because there are conditions (certain kinds of PC crashes) that make impossible for the pilot to demonstrate (s)he didn't disconnected because of an imminent glider crash. Of course in order to implement the crash penalties (previous point), we have to tackle this other problem first... but I don't have any good idea at the moment, sorry...
Also, if my computer crashes and a server is stil open, I would definitively try to race again, rather then let my computer decide my ranking...
i propose to drop cloud flying penalties since these can be arbitrary/incorrect in condor (esp patch 8 ), and the benefit of cloud flying might become questionable with patch 9.
I have no sufficient experience to express an informed opinion, but I remember some advocated in other threads for eliminating CFP because in their country, in RL, this is the normal way of flying. Why not to keep it as a factor taks-dependent (meaning that you could chose if having it or not according to the task)? This would also allow to work around possilble temporary bugs of Condors introduced with patches.
It needs an overhaul, with a simple content management system behind it and automated navigation so one doesn’t need to know FrontPage to maintain it
I would also say: a free/open CMS, so that other members of the community could also re-use the code for organising other contests... My personal choice would be Drupal (drupal.org). Very well coded, accessible, modular, with a built-in system of tweaking performance according to server workload...
A redesign wouldn’t hurt either, if anyone feels the desire to submit some designs, I would certainly welcome them. Drop me a line if you have some skills in this area and are willing to make a template
Two things that personally I find improveable:
1. frames (that keep the URL never changing) and make impossible to retreive the URL of a given page directly from the history.
2. during update of the data, the site display lots of script errors and warnings.
I see little reason not to allow some flexibility and having servers at slightly different times, as long as no servers start after initial results and IGCs are published (so, say a 1 or 2 hour time span between first and last servers).
With the "only one result" per race thing, I agree. This would for sure increase participation.
Not so sure if I want to keep the "country cup" or if it could not be replaced by teams that people can create/join as they see fit.
I have an alternative idea: teams should be randomly set up by the LLC organisers, taking only those pilots that gave availability for that. Each team should have the same number of members and prizes should be given to the best teams at the end of the season too.
This way pilots would be fostered in co-operating, sharing, supporting each other in the teams... I think this would make LLC even more exciting!
I have nothing against keeping the country cup (although it doesn't say much to me). I would simply add - in this case - a team for those who don't feel to belong to a single country. A kind of "united countries" team, but with fixed members.
There are other things, but I think this is long enough already. Let’s hear your input
That was my personal 2 cents. I appreciate very much the fact that you keep LLC a "participative" collective exercise.
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