Wooo whooo!... Well it was fun! Loved this idea and how creative it is.. Keep up the good work.

troy8d


FYI: 
IF we keep up the pace we set during the first 15 days of the contest, we will not only blow past 700 million points in the month, we will make 800 million! 

Keep in mind, however, that this will be increasingly difficult to accomplish as we will lose the boost we get from 'bucks folders' at the start of the month.

 

Im always in troy...shouldn't need to be told.
 
 
 

It wasn't really a challenge, just an observation.  In reality, I would be very surprised if we are able to pull it off.

Troy, have you considered another round at the end pitting the winner of each bracket against each other?  Unless things change in a significant way, one of the two highest-producing teams is in each bracket, so that seems like the most suitable finale.

well, there ARE 2 extra days in march 0.o

I don't know punchy...would it seem fair if CTFD won the bottom bracket (with diplomacy's special rig) and we wound up taking first against MAD (1) or Shykal(2)
 
we would have been in last without his additional output (Way over production)
 
it would leave too many sour mouths I think...
 
I'll settle that we do our best without trying to take advantages here or there

besides, i'm not going to participate in any such contest beyond what i signed up for, unless it is "just for fun" eg no prizes and no official changes.
 
i just wanted to shake things up and poke a finger in the eye of some of the folks who feel entitled to produce an extra million points here or there.

You do realize that if you hadn't stated that you intentionally tried to undermine the contest setup, people would be in awe of your production instead of up in arms about it.

I feel like I missed some juicy gossip.

Punchy


Troy, have you considered another round at the end pitting the winner of each bracket against each other?  Unless things change in a significant way, one of the two highest-producing teams is in each bracket, so that seems like the most suitable finale.

I'm all for that.. 

Last warning from me to stop the personal attacks around here. Please keep your differences to yourselves otherwise this thread will have to be cleaned / locked which would seriously ruin the whole contest. Thanks.

Cool.... And I had NOTHING to do with any of this :). Don't get me wrong... I thought about it ;)

shdbcamping


Cool.... And I had NOTHING to do with any of this :). Don't get me wrong... I thought about it ;)

 
Love it!

Sunday is a good day to ask yourself "if my team wins this contest, will I feel good about it?".   Realizing, of course, that what it takes to win is overproducing your team's predicted score by the highest margin.  Or put another way, the team with the most grossly underestimated score will win.  Is this really how you want to win?
 
I think what we should do is finish this second round (ending this week) and declare a team winner somehow (perhaps total points during the week, or from the start).  Honestly any bragging rights for this competition have been tainted by all the shenanigans anyway.
 
From then until the end of the month have a Monster Death Match(TM) pitting the two brackets against each other, no holds barred, bring everything you own.  With everyone (including Diplomacy) bringing all they've got I think that could be a pretty interesting matchup.  It also gives us a much better chance of making 800M as a team when everyone is involved in the final week+ of competition.
 
Anyone else interested?

Sounds fun to me.
 
 
 
 
 
*Looks for Library card*

Punchy,
if my team wins yes i will feel good.but i will feel just as good if we lose.We need to remember why we are doing this competition,it is not to win lose or draw.but to help the science.And in my eye,s the real winner of the contest is not the team has the highest points.it is the team that got closest to thier  predicted ppd. You know when you play online games you run into people that cheat the system to win,why would you think a folding contest would be any different.it is things like this that have made me quit folding 24/7,and only fold when a team mate has asked me to jump in a contest and fold.so i save money on my power bill and computer parts,so it is a win for me.if this post offends anyone,i am sorry.it was not meant to. it is just my point of view.

patchesanook


Punchy,
if my team wins yes i will feel good.but i will feel just as good if we lose.We need to remember why we are doing this competition,it is not to win lose or draw.but to help the science.And in my eye,s the real winner of the contest is not the team has the highest points.it is the team that got closest to thier  predicted ppd. You know when you play online games you run into people that cheat the system to win,why would you think a folding contest would be any different.it is things like this that have made me quit folding 24/7,and only fold when a team mate has asked me to jump in a contest and fold.so i save money on my power bill and computer parts,so it is a win for me.if this post offends anyone,i am sorry.it was not meant to. it is just my point of view.

Yo... Patches... Me thinks we are all thinking the same thing. I took Punchy's idea to be more about the "Cause" than the "Contest". So we could all go "All hands on deck" with no restrictions. 800 Million is pretty significant seeing as when we started 700 million looked to not be reachable... 

patchesanook


Punchy,
if my team wins yes i will feel good.but i will feel just as good if we lose. ...   And in my eye,s the real winner of the contest is not the team has the highest points.it is the team that got closest to thier  predicted ppd. ... 

I agree with the points above.
 
#1 Issue was dropping the anti-sandbagging rules, combined with:
#2 Allowing HPCS users in.
 
I would suggest re organizing the next contest into 2/3 divisions:
Unlimited (sandbag all you want, bring as many physical/virtual systems as you have on game day) and Predicted points (and  HPCS based systems if they are still around).
 
The current thing we have going is not very competitive.

I have been pretty quiet in regard to at lot of the "debating" going on here, because at the end of the day it strikes me as trivial and insignificant.  Many people are losing sight of the larger goal here.
 

• First and foremost, this contest has presented several unique challenges we have not seen in the past that makes estimating points difficult to determine including:
  • A change in WUs and points during the sign up period
  • HPCS being utilized by members
  • Crunching giving many members "spare capacity" that they were not intending to fold on. 
• All of these factors have made it difficult even for those that attempted to provide as accurate an estimate as possible from doing so.
• Finger pointing and accusing others is entirely unproductive, especially because almost everyone (if not absolutely everyone) made their estimate in good faith.  I haven't followed all the drama too closely, but everyone that I recall off the top of my head being called out to my knowledge has made their estimate with the best intentions.
• In regard to Diplomacy:
  • Yes, Diplomacy has made it easy to vilify himself by attempting to "prove a point" (I still can't figure out what that point is?), but in reality what he is doing is no different than what everyone else is doing - he just happens to be capable of doing it on a much larger scale.
  • Furthermore, he has made it apparent that he could make the contest very lopsided, but voluntarily chose not to before anyone criticized him.  Though his methods may be controversial, his intentions are in the right place, and that goes a long way.

 
As for who is overproducing by how much, does anyone really care?  Who overproduced the most in last years contest?  Who underproduced the most?  As the person who probably knows the most about the stats of last years contest, I couldn't even begin to guess at either of those questions. 
 
What I do remember, is that as a team we set (at the time) a lofty goal of 500 million points in the month and we ended up raising the bar and producing 600 million points.  This year, we have a chance to do the same.  We set an initial goal of 700 million points, but have the chance to break 800 million points if we come together as a team and don't worry about who is producing what, how much it is over an estimate that I am sure almost everyone (if not everyone) made in good faith.
 
At the end of the day, we are all on the same team here.  We are all folding for Team 111065, so what is all the controversy about?  If becomes such that contests divide the team rather than unite it, I don't know that we will be running many more contests in the future. 

Most importantly, however, we are all on the same team working to aid research into some of the worst diseases that plague humanity.  Is it really more important that you win a rather arbitrary contest that you would sacrifice progress to the ultimate goal?  Without checking the site, can you name 3 people from last year's winning team?  So much effort is being wasted on the trivial.
 
As for me, I'm going to fold longer and harder than I had anticipated.  Not because I am overly concerned with winning the contest, but I think it would be really cool if we could make 800,000,000 points in a month.  If we can meet that goal, then at this time next year hopefully we will be shooting for 1 billion points in a single month. 
 
At the moment we are on pace to reach the goal of 800M points in the month, however, we have reached the point where bucks folders drop off.  We need to average around 25.2M PPD over the remainder of the month in order to achieve 800M, and every WU, every point counts.  Whether it is Diplomacy, werty, or whoever - restricting production shuts down a large increase in our team production, it is going to be that much harder for us to reach that goal.  If someone is overproducing at this point there is not much I can do other than to say good for them, lets get one step closer to 800M.

latenitec1

patchesanook


Punchy,
if my team wins yes i will feel good.but i will feel just as good if we lose. ...   And in my eye,s the real winner of the contest is not the team has the highest points.it is the team that got closest to thier  predicted ppd. ... 

I agree with the points above.

#1 Issue was dropping the anti-sandbagging rules, combined with:
#2 Allowing HPCS users in.

I would suggest re organizing the next contest into 2/3 divisions:
Unlimited (sandbag all you want, bring as many physical/virtual systems as you have on game day) and Predicted points (and  HPCS based systems if they are still around).

The current thing we have going is not very competitive.

Indeed...  I mean no dispespect to anyone, but the current competition has simply fallen apart; primarily due to immaturity and unplanned happenings (which is sad, but it happens, especially when there is competition)...  There were simply too many undetermined variables (as stated above) to keep the ruleset that we started the competition with, so then a vote was made and the majority agreed to remove the caps and go free-for-all (for better or worse) and then the minority felt upset about this and through a chain of events we're now all here...
 
I for one did not even completely understand the format before we began; I thought it -was- an overall output deal so I built a lot of machines specifically for this thing; then right before things got underway i realized that I didn't need them so I asked around and everyone said to run them anyways, so I did...  
Then I began making higher numbers, and again asked, but since we had other team members that had already dropped out for HW failure, etc. I was told to keep going, so I did... 
Then eventually we hit our mark as a team, but we were still in 5th place and dropping, and about that same time the vote came up and the production marks were dropped, so I kept producing...  for my team and for EVGA... 
 
At this point I figred that as a group we all knew that things had gone sideways and the contest was now sort of one-sided, but I thought that since we were all adults and that we had voted (as teams) that we could all just continue on, but now it seems that there is still a lot of anomisity floating about because of this decision...  I know I have received nasty notes from folk, and FWIW I get it (sort of) but at the same token this was now the agreed upon method, for better or not...   (The bummer for me is that some of the same people now sending me such words are the same folk who wanted the caps lifted, which just seems oxymoronic, but it's not my job to teach them logic so I simply ignore it, and keep producing...  for my team and for EVGA)
 
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not defending the cap argument one way or the other, the cap removals have basically removed chance from the game; and trust me, my team -will not win- now because of it, but I am an adult about it and simply continue to do my part and try to enjoy it for what it is...   I will not be quitting and whining, nor will I turn F-atHome into F-atWork to try and keep up (this is still technically against the rules anyways, but I know some have done it to try and maintain), I will just do the best I can to continue producing...  for my team, and for EVGA, and see how it all plays out...
 
I really hope that everyone else can just do the same... 
 
Some lucky winner will receive a laptop from me, and I will more than likely pass on a prize (especailly since many folk on here have made it obvious that I am undeserving of such)...  At the end of the day it was never about a prize for me anyways, it was the fun, camaraderie, and joint goals for all of us that made me interested in this to begin with; I started this in mid January and though it was cool and that I could help the team out...  It doesn't seem that these were the same goals though for many of you though, and that's fine, but it does sadden me and I will certainly have to think hard before ever signing up for another competition with this group again; as a whole I think that most everyone here are at their core good intentioned people (even the ones pulling antics to prove a point, or sending me nasty emails), but the maturity level is just a way too low to ever successfully maintain a truly dignified/gentlemanly competition...
 
That's all...

I think I said this in the last "balanced" contest, but I'll repeat it anyway - "balanced" contests are by their very nature doomed to failure.   If everyone produces at exactly their estimate, the end result is a boring tie.  "Balancing" teams leads to an expectation of fairness; if people start overproducing; then we look at solutions like the Handicapper General in Orwell's "1984".
 
If I think back to previous contests which by their very nature were unbalanced without artificial intervention, such as the TZC 2 contests ago, there was not nearly the anguish that this contest has seen.  The teams were naturally unbalanced by the somewhat random factor of where everyone lived.  It was also clear that one team could easily win, yet there were spirited contests for other places, production went up, and no complaints about overproduction (which is the one complaint we should strive to never see).  Randomness in team assignment may not be a bad thing.
 
There are a lot of promising ideas for future contests in AB's "Future Contest Idea" thread.

How do you check what your PPD per week is if you all dont mind me asking? 

By the way, I think troy should be awarded a blue ribbon for this if he hasn't been already? =P

I am just folding until the end of this whole thing at full speed just trying to reach the 800 mil deal.

esCob4r


How do you check what your PPD per week is if you all dont mind me asking? 

Use this link for team 111065 http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_list.php?s=&t=111065
Use this link for you stats http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_summary.php?s=&u=605409

redcloud

esCob4r


How do you check what your PPD per week is if you all dont mind me asking? 

Use this link for team 111065 http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_list.php?s=&t=111065
Use this link for you stats http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_summary.php?s=&u=605409

 
Yeah I check that but I am confused as to when the week begins and ends. as you can see I have 100k points listed for the last weekly production. Now this weekly production is only 15k? So I am assuming Sunday begins the week and Saturday ends the week? 

esCob4r

redcloud

esCob4r


How do you check what your PPD per week is if you all dont mind me asking? 

Use this link for team 111065 http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_list.php?s=&t=111065
Use this link for you stats http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_summary.php?s=&u=605409

Yeah I check that but I am confused as to when the week begins and ends. as you can see I have 100k points listed for the last weekly production. Now this weekly production is only 15k? So I am assuming Sunday begins the week and Saturday ends the week? 

Your assumption is correct

Ok cool. 

would still like to see the monster teams balanced as much as possible in the 4v4... not just the 4tops vs the 4bottoms+diplomacy, especially because I'll not be running anything but the 3930k for *most of the contest even if it were no-holds.
 

troy8d

• In regard to Diplomacy:
  • Yes, Diplomacy has made it easy to vilify himself by attempting to "prove a point" (I still can't figure out what that point is?)

 

Punchy


Realizing, of course, that what it takes to win is overproducing your team's predicted score by the highest margin.  Or put another way, the team with the most grossly underestimated score will win.  Is this really how you want to win?

 
question, meet answer