Why I think some of the point allocations should change

Everyone knows I love this site and this is certainly not a complaint or demand just my opinion on something that bugs me a little bit. With the insane amount of fights being added I feel the points allocated to the forum side of things is drastically low. I understand the predictions is a big part of the site but it should be equal to the forums, not a bajillion times more important. For instance, literally every single person in the MVP league will be at least a 5th degree black belt when the year is over, now that's fine and all but as so many people make all the picks it jumbles everyone up around the same belt level with it being impossible to really ever separate from other members. Wishishere is an example, we are both 2nd degree black belts while he hardly ever participates and rankings and the forum, while I'm on here every day, but as far as the big picture goes, when you only get 3 points per post and 1/5th of a point for every thumb, that is minuscule compared to 50 or 100 points for EVERY pick, don't get me wrong I think wish is a great member but with the amount of time I contribute in the forums in my opinion that should be rewarded much stronger and due to our extreme difference in forum time I believe I should be at least a couple belt levels ahead of him.

Wolf is another great example, this man has done nothing but try to score points since he got here. I mean the guy has over 12,000 posts and contributes in the forums to great degree. Yet he is barely ahead of someone like ACFMMA who barely ever posts and really isn't a true member of our community, maybe I'm off base or thinking too much into it but with more and more starting to pick every event I just dont want to see when the year is over like 300 6th degree black belts when half of them post in the forums every day and others not at all. 

My suggestion to this would be to award more points for forum posts and thumbs first of all, making that retroactive even if possible. Go back to 25 and 50 points for updating rankings. If a member is taking the time to update his 39 rankings every week, that should be worth more than 2% towards my next belt. I have other suggestions but we'll see how this post is reacted to first.

not a bad idea. i was with sherdog for like a 2 years and only posted 350 times. i've been here for like i think 4 months now picking all the time and posting all the time and i'm up 595.

Like I said this is not really a big deal or anything just a thought that I've had. You have to make 33 posts to make up for one perfect pick, that just seems grossly inbalanced to me.

Or maybe they can just award some points for more things on the forums, such as giving out way bigger point bonuses for thumb ups, for instance if you post something that gets 10 ups, that's pretty impressive, however the 10 points you awarded for that (1/5th of a correct fight pick) is not so impressive. Maybe award a couple points for starting a new thread, there's a bunch of things I just think being so active in the forums should put more separation from the members who don't.

* Edited at 03.24.2012, 11:11 AM ET *

Agreed, forum posts should be worth more, like 10 points.

"Yet he is barely ahead of someone like ACFMMA who barely ever posts and really isn't a true member of our community"

Disagree. He is one of the most prolific pickers on this site -- I'd rather look at his picks and pick % than see people talk about whether they should name their Shih Tzu after Jon Jones or GSP.

If posts get more points then we'll have more people just posting random **** for the points? It'll no longer be bout posting when you want, but just posting to get the next belt to an extent

@blackwork ACF was an example that I used because everyone knows who he is. And regardless of how prolific he is, he only participates in half of the site, whereas wolf makes all the picks that ACF does but also has 13 flippin thousand forum posts. But just look at the list of black belts, ACF may be known and he can be an exception but there are plenty of people on there who nobody on this site has even heard of, and once again not saying they shouldn't be able to earn that, just that the people who are in the forum should be rewarded more.

And on another note, I've literally never seen you post in this forum unless it was to disagree with something I said. Do you just follow me around nimbly wimbly from tree to tree

* Edited at 03.24.2012, 11:34 AM ET *

I disagree with the OP. More points for forum posts will make this place more like Sherdog and I don't think that would be good.

* Edited at 03.24.2012, 11:48 AM ET *

@greg I see you are on and would like to hear either what you think about this idea, or hear your reasoning for why you did it the way you did and why you think it's the way to go, you have swayed my mind before.

@mulefloyd that is something that I hadn't considered and is definitely something to be argued against it, not a perfect solution but I still think points should come out of it somehow.

* Edited at 03.24.2012, 11:49 AM ET *

sherdog is bad news i'm glad i stop posting on that site. even the plat fourms are way bad.

I got on sherdog every day of my life until I found Tapology, haven't been back since.

Even though I am an infrequent poster, I tend to agree with theMMAmessiah to a certain extent.  I do think the current system needs to be balanced.  However, I am not here to earn belts or points. I like making picks here and I love reading other people's points of view. 
When I have something to contribute to the discussion, I do.  However, I am not going to restate something that has already been said one hundred times just so I can increase my post count.  That's just a personal thing.  To each his own.

It could cause people to post useless stuff but I kind of like the idea of maybe have an award for getting a post with 10 thumbs or 20 thumbs, or an award for making a post that goes over 500 replies or something along those lines.

You could make a post worth so many points and then thumbs add or decrease the point worth. However, I can see how that system could be abused quickly when people use multiple accounts to thumbs up their posts or thumbs down people just to be d*cks.

I'll talk a little bit about how we came up with the point structure and whether or not it's working the way we expected it to.

We had to come up with the point structure before the site was live, and therefore a lot of guesswork was involved. We took each category (picks, rankings, and forum being the big ones) and tried to estimate how much people would be using these features, and therefore what the right balance in points ought to be.

For example, estimating that there were maybe 5 fight cards per month, with 10 fights each, and on average people will get 2/3rds of them correct and maybe 1/3rd of the corrects will be perfect.  So if you had an "enthusiast" member who picked every single fight, we could expect them to generate X points per month from their fight picks.

And then we tried to estimate that against how actively people might use the forums, and how to balance them against each other.  We knew that some people might have enormous amounts of forum activity and we didn't want that to be a golden ticket to accumulating tons of points.  So, we had to make guesses as best we could as to how these things might balance out.

We also thought about how quickly we wanted someone to be able to attain various belt levels. We tried to set up the point values such that people would, if they were light/moderate/heavy users of the website, attain certain belts at 3/6/12 months, etc.  But again, it was all estimation.

How is it working?

In general, it's more or less working. It seems to be entertaining and fun to rise up the belt levels, and people are very aware of how it works and what will earn points.  That's good.  Thankfully we didn't totally screw it up.

The area we totally underestimated was how many events/fights there would be available to pick.  The initial plans for the site were to list the big fights (e.g.; UFC, Dream, Strikeforce) because that's what we assumed 99% of people would care about.

A lot of you know that I'm in Boston and enjoy the local MMA scene around here, and early I started scheduling in some of the local Boston-area shows to see if all the locals would start using it and having some fun with it.  To my surprise, a lot of people from the general Tapology community started entering picks for these fights, and were complaining that they couldn't find all of them (early on they were set not to be listed in the main FightCenter).

We started adding more and more events and everyone just kept gobbling it all up and picking every single fight. We got the message pretty quickly: the more fights we can add to the site, the better!  But that meant our estimations of how many points people could generate from picking were totally wrong.

Brown, black belts, etc... were supposed to take longer to achieve :)   Oh well.  And there are a few other areas that didn't unfold exactly how we thought they would.  But again, all in all it appears like it's working.

When we think it's appropriate we'll make adjustments to the scoring. But we also don't want to start fidgeting with something that people are already accustomed to and have learned to structure their behavior around.  We're aware the scoring system isn't perfect and do think about how we can evolve it.  But that's a whole other topic for another day...

@ theMMAmessiah get over yourself and relax you'll live longer. Does it really matter who is a black belt etc. let's just enjoy ourselves.

Who thumbs down a guy saying "let's enjoy ourselves".....*** you people are mean.

Holy ****!! Sonnen for Prez's post score has to b a record low.

-466 is impressive!

Sonnen would be proud

@mulefloyd:  Actually, I think Haven was lower at one point, but I'm not sure.  ;)