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Originally Posted by chuchnit
At times I also feel that you think you and hwbot know better than the users.
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The feeling is mutual: sometimes I get the feeling end-users think they know better than staff. I sometimes get the feeling that I'm arguing against people who just 'want to win' (or: 'want to see you get beaten') rather than listen to rational and logical argumentation.
A good example would be Rev3, where in the 48h after the launch people were overly negative ("all is bad"), but after a few months I actually got PMs of people stating that it actually a lot better than Rev2. It just took time to fully understand the system and to learn how it works. In the HWBOT staff, however, I think no one had (explicit) doubts about the quality of rev3.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chuchnit
Like you stated in your article, there is no easy fix nor perfect format for hwbot to pick up. One problem I have is all this hw sharing discussion. You say yourself that it is almost impossible to prove. Yet you speak as if you know for certain the size or scope of the problem. This surprises me since you are generally a fact based individual. My feelings towards the hw sharing is much of it is people bunnying because their ego burst when they get their arses handed to them by someone else or team. I know that sharing takes place, but what I don't know is the scope. Even you can't tell us that.
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I think it's safe to say that we have more acces to information regarding hardware sharing than you. Therefore, we can estimate the size of the problem better.
The problem is not only the actual sharing. It's also the perception of hardware sharing: people
think others have an unfair advantage. Regardless whether this is true, people are convinced others are breaking the rules.
What bummed me out is that it's already affecting group gatherings. I was at the ASUS tech meeting last weekend and ASUS was providing some overclocking gear. The main concern was not to prohibit hardware sharing (since none of the people there would do it), but rather how to make sure other people wouldn't start to accuse them. I think this perfectly displayed the problem.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chuchnit
So basically because our members have the means to bin CPU's and GPU's we hw share because these guys all found good hardware? That's pretty much what your article is suggesting. I can assure you that's not the case.
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My article doesn't suggest ANYTHING like that.
I wrote about hardware sharing, not about teams or members.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chuchnit
I'm not going to go into the team points discussion basically because of time and this post is too long. I will give my thoughts on hw sharing. hwbot has two very distinct paths to take here. First is to keep coming up with rule upon rule to fix this unprovable hw sharing problem. In turn with each and every new rule hwbot will take more and more fun out of it for the honest community members who follow the rules. Second is to take a supply side approach. Just let everyone do it. Take the fun and incentive away from the actual hw sharers out there. Basically for some you take the "thrill" away for doing something wrong. For others you take the incentive away since everyone else can do it. Sure at first it will most likely be a free for all with some teams. I think even in the short run this will fade. People don't want do let other people kill their shit. Golden or not. Of course as you said, they may just pull a Yang and hand over .3dr files, but you can't tell if and when it's being done right now. I think that is a moot point.
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It's not a moot point, it in fact perfectly suits my argument: we need to address the root of the problem, not the effects of it.
I thought I explained it well enough in the article. But I'll do it again in the thread here.
When you make hardware sharing legal and don't change the team points algorithm, you create a competition where two big loopholes/problems are present: team quantity and score sharing.
Team quantity: since hardware sharing is perfectly legal, every single person of the team is allowed to use a single piece of hardware to use for benchmark results. The bigger your team, the more you can share, the more points you have ... the higher you're ranked. This will lead to the merging of even more teams, where possibly a team of 10k members will be on top.
Are they on top because of the team quality? No. They are because they're the biggest team. Our idea of an overclocking competition is to rank overclockers and teams by skill (as much as possible). Having a league that rewards size mostly goes completely against that.
Score sharing/double accounts: in theory, when hardware sharing is made legal, every single member of the team is allowed to post benchmark results with a certain hardware sample. A problem one member might be facing is that his team mates want him to share his golden CPU to make a lot of points, but he wants to make sure it doesn't get killed in the process. This might lead to score sharing, where the owner of the golden sample makes X amount of scores and hands them out to his team mates. When being asked, he just claims he sent the sample to his team mates.
The double account is something that comes from the team quantity ruling over team quality. Since more members equals more points (even more than now), it will become very important for teams to get more members. The problem is, however, that the amount of members is limited. This could lead to the creation of 'extra' members: one person makes 10 accounts, adds them to the team and 'shares' his hardware with them. With a bit of technique, you could make this double account thing undetectable.
Now, to quote you again:
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Of course as you said, they may just pull a Yang and hand over .3dr files, but you can't tell if and when it's being done right now. I think that is a moot point.
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It's not a moot point, because your suggestion features similar problems as we have today. This is what I consider a band-aid fix: you fix one of the apparent symptoms without considering the side-effects. Your 'solution' has problems just like the one we currently have ... so please explain how this is a solution. In the end, your suggestion will also need fixing. Fixing of the root of all problems.
Fyi, by switching the team algorithm to a system where you actually take into account the team's performance in direct competition with other teams (eg: 'powerteam') and reduce the 1:1 user-to-team point scaling, you also reduce the effect of
score sharing. This effectively means that whereas your suggestion introduces a new problem, ours addresses an existing and a potential problem.
One guy finds a golden chip/vga and all of a sudden 30 folks get roughly the same scores. IMO it's better to look for a solution that's as good as possible (don't think there exist a bullet proof one here...) to reduce the sharing problem to a minimum.
