Increase penalty for getting a question wrong?

[cktang88]

Score currently seems to be mostly representative of how many questions they've done, not how "good" someone is at getting questions correct (eg. it's more like a sum, rather than an elo-type ranking).

I think if we make penalties 50 instead of 30, it'll help alleviate some of this? Alternatively, we could weight questions differently based on what percent of people have gotten that question right so far, although this is definitely more complex and unintuitive.

[moshevds]

I don't think making the penalty 50 points instead of 30 points will help. Skill in the game relates to the average points per snippet.
If someone has an average of only 2 points per snippet, then they can just keep doing this until they are on the leaderboard. Increasing the penalty by a fixed amount will only decrease the average points per snippet, making it impossible for beginners to get a positive score.

My suggestion is to penalize in relation to a players current score. Probably max(30, score / 100) would work decently. Everyone below 3000 points would still get the 30 point penalty, but there will be a ceiling determined by skill. I average around 40 points per snippet, and I have a little more than half of them correct (So, I get 70 points on average per correct snippet). With this, my maximum score would become approximately 7000 points.

At that point, I would have to start playing strategically and make sure I get my average up. Right now I consider the game beaten because I arrived on the leaderboard easily but I would have to answer an additional 9000 snippets before reaching the number 0 spot (without any new skill required).

PS: This is not entirely true, because I think it would take a very long time getting to 385k. So perhaps this was reached by another strategy. 385k would be 3200 snippets even with a perfect 120 points average.

[ginnyTheCat]

The amount of snippets is limited. You can't just answer more questions if you have them wrong often.