Benalla

Sure, you can take a percentage of a percentage, but it kind of misses the bigger picture about how scoring math works and what the tradeoffs are. You can't just talk about one objective in isolation. You have to check snider how they play off against each other.

If your goals a

1) Not penalize landouts so much that coming up 2km short knocks you out of the contest - especially if you are unlucky enough to be the only landout for the day. This is the case being discussed where scoring encourages staying in gaggles most of the flight.

2) Award points roughly proportional to speed/winner's speed.

3) Not have long landouts score more than the slowest finishers.

4) Allow for wide variations in finishers speeds and still have proportional scoring as in #2.

You have a problem that is constrained such that you can't maximize all the constraints at once. My personal view is id rather compromise on #4 a bit and somewhat on #3 in order to optimize more around #1 and somewhat on #2. The reason is because doing that helps prevent a bit of bad luck from knocking a pilot totally out of contention (the gaggle incentive problem).

Increasing weighting on #3 and #4 might be good if you are optimizing for score differentiation in the bottom half of the scoresheet, but they also contribute to separating the bottom half from the top half because slow finishers and landouts get even fewer points.

In the US rules we used to have 400 max points for a land out which allowed finishers to get points differentiation down to 40% of the winner's speed. We've upped it to 60% now.

I don't know if 75% is too much, but it's pretty clear that if you want to reduce incentives for taking risks flying away from the gaggle, reducing the penalty if it doesn't work out would help - as was demonstrated to clearly by Sean's situation, which was exacerbated by how IGC devaluation works where a lone landout gets 300-plus points. Miss the last thermal getting home and drop from 3rd to middle of the pack. It's no wonder people elect to stay in the glider tornado even though they mostly claim that they hate it.

One person's perspective FWIW.

9B

"check snider" -- "consider"

(autocorrect)