On Dec 18, 5:33*am, John Cochrane
wrote:
The only change is, a slow finisher is guaranteed the best of HIS
distance points or his speed points, whereas he used to be guaranteed
the best BESTDIST distance points, or his speed points. That's it.

Is it maybe time to retire the separate concepts of speed points and
distance points? IN particular, wouldn't it be better if outlanders
got credit for speed too?

As far as i can see, the only reason not to is the practical one that
in the old days there was no evidence of exactly when an outlanding
was made, making it impossible to reliably calculate speed to that
point.

In these days of GPS traces that is no longer true.

It's 01:40 here and I only gave this a few minute's thought, but I
can't immedately see major unfairness in the following proposal:

raw points = S * (D - L/2)

Whe

D = the scoring distance as defined by the task rules
L = the distance from the landing point to the finish line (0 for
finishers)
S = speed achieved over the scoring distance

The raw points could be simply kept as is and totaled up over the
contest (this would devalue bad days in a natural way), or the maximum
could be scaled to 1000 or some lesser value according to existing day
devaluation rules.

This seems to me to have the following nice characteristics:

- if you fly the same distance as someone else then it's better to do
it faster, regardless of whether you both complete the task or both
land out at the same place.

- if you achieve the same speed as someone else then it's better to
maintain that speed over a longer distance.

- speeds tend to have a fairly small spread on a given day (except for
those who spend a long time on a low save), so the preferred method to
more points is more distance.

- the penalty for landing out just short of the airfield is very
small, reducing the incentive to try to stretch and just scrape over
the fence.

- once you stop making forward progress it's better to land out
promptly than to waste a lot of time scratching at low level. This may
be true even in the case of an eventual save. (I'd have to run the
figures)

- if faced with a long, slow, skinny, final glide it may in fact be
better to fly quickly to a good outlanding area that you can reach
easily. (once again I'd have to run the figures)

- distance flown away from home counts for half, distance towards home
counts for 1.5x. If you're going to land after 100 miles it's better
to do it out and return than straight out.


What do you think? Totally stupid? Perverse and unsafe incentives I
didn't notice? Too complex?

I'm certainly prepared to debate whether that "2" is the right value.
For sure the number needs to be bigger than 1, otherwise a straight
out task is worth zero.

I also wondered about a slight variation:

raw points = (D^2 - (L^2)/2) / T

Where T is the flight time.

This is less different than it first appears. S = D/T, so the first
version can also be given as:

raw points = (D/T) * (D - L/2) = (D^2 - DL/2) / T

This is the same in the event of a straight out flight but the
alternative version penalises landouts near home relatively much less
after a long flight than after a short one.