There are a few bugs and issues that I need to own up to due to a lack of adequate testing on my part. I’ll own up to them here but note that as yet I have yet to fix any of them.
Firstly it turns out the main email address – the one I say you need to send all queries to – hasn’t been monitored at all since the 2022 competition. I thought I had it set up to forward emails to my main address but it turns out I did not. Luckily I only had two emails in there and one of those was from this year. I will monitor this address properly going forward!
Next – on the main page for all players except the one that put their guess in first, the table suggests that everyone’s placing in the competition has dropped one from the previous day, even though there (a) isn’t a previous day because we haven’t started yet and (b) everyone is in joint first and so the implication is that you were in zeroth place yesterday. Super nonsensical. I’m aware of the bug and will have that tidied up as soon as I can!
Also, the scoring flip means I quickly bodged a change to the “number of points left to play for” box and clearly didn’t think the logic through enough because that box currently thinks there is 24 fewer points left than there actually is. I’ll engage brain correctly and try and get that sorted shortly!
There is also a bug where if you try to set your first guess this year to the same thing you happened to have as your final guess as last year, it’ll reject it as a duplicate guess. I note from the error logs that one player tried to set their guess and was rejected as such so I’m controversially going to manually add that guess to the database and get them going, and then I will work on fixing the bug. In the meantime, if you encounter it, please try guessing something else first and then guess again to set it to what you actually want!
Apologies for all of this, and good luck everyone!
So making the game less engaging might be a factor that’s as yet unproven but one thing that is for sure is that the formerly used social media presences on Facebook and X are retired, for now at least. Every year the provider that take the game updates and post them to social media get more difficult to use and/or add costs. It is not worth my while to pay them so I don’t. This year the same thing happened again – X is now not working at all and Facebook would work for the first two weeks only. Tied to my lack of social media presence in general I find myself thinking it is easier to just pull the plug, and so I have for X at least. I am trying out one last free solution for Facebook, and fingers crossed it works!
This might kill the game even more. I have never worked out if engagement is linked to the social media posts and it might be difficult to get a real feel given the other big change this year, but I worry that essentially mandating players to visit the website every day will drive down active participation. It’s one more thing to remember to do, and who needs things? We’ll see.
If the new FB approach doesn’t work then it will be dead too, so I urge players to use an RSS aggregating website or app or tool and point it at https://acc.scriv.me.uk/feedme.xml to get updates however they wish to. That or bookmark the page and visit regularly. I’m thinking of ways to maybe make an opt-in mailing list but my preference is some kind of third party provider that can parse an RSS feed or even the website itself and so far I’ve turned up nothing. It needs to be automated as I don’t want to make work for myself as inevitably the more I have to do, the more likely I am to break the game accidentally.
PINs are planned for tomorrow or the next day. Stand by!
As announced in the last post, the scoring model for this year has flipped back to the one used in 2003 and 2004, namely 24 points on day 1 through to 1 point on Christmas Eve. The reasoning is simple – picking the correct item from a field of 24+ is harder than doing it from a field of 1. The game gets easier, provided you are attentive, as it progresses. It’s always seemed illogical to me that the easier shot gets rewarded more. Imagine basketball but outside the line was 2 and inside was 3. It’d be weird. Or hitting it over the boundary in cricket is 6 with a bounce or 4 without. The harder shot should be rewarded more.
The system flipped after only two years due to significant peer pressure following the 2004 game being wrapped up with several days to spare. Only two or three players (from memory, but I cannot remember who!) lobbied me but they did so hard and ultimately successfully. I’ve hated it ever since, but never had the gumption to change it back. It is part of the reason every time I make a change now I label it is “on trial” so that I can easily change it back with the reasoning that I wasn’t happy with the trial. Indeed, this change itself can be considered a trial and I’ll look at it again if need be.
The negative effect of the game being effectively dead days before the end isn’t insignificant though. In its own way the old system incentivised being an active player all the way to the end because that is when the big points are being paid. Someone could make sure they pay attention early, get 3 or 4 good guesses in and then forget about it and win. The old way you have to be there all the way to the end to win. This almost seems a slam dunk argument for keeping it how it was, but…
All the same points are on offer. You can effectively snooze the first 20 days the old way, then still come in and win. If low scoring days are a problem, then it doesn’t really matter which way round the scale goes, the problem exists somewhere. I have briefly considered but not felt inclined to adopt two alternatives which I’ll mention here:
Making the scoring go 24-23-22-21-20-19-18-17-16-15-14-13-12-12-13-14-15-16-17-18-19-20-21-22-23-24. A hybrid of both systems. Would make the total points on offer add up to 468 and therefore regular winners scores of over 300 would occur, I reckon. Strikes me as gimmicky and so not thought about it for very long.
Changing it so the winner is simply the person who gets the most correct guesses, with window value only being a tiebreaker. This appeals a fair bit actually but it is a radical departure from everything that’s gone before and I’d have to be EVEN BRAVER to implement this.
So I come back to what I’ve always felt. It is more logical to reward early guesses as they are harder to get right. The game might fizzle out early, it might not. The closer we get to Christmas the less time people have anyway so that might be for the best? Or I might be trying to justify it with made up reasons. The knock on effect might be less interest in the game as we go on, and there is another related issue here that I’ll discuss tomorrow.
I’ll leave you with this though. As the easy guesses are now weighted less, scores in general will decrease and player’s own PBs may become out of reach, so I’ll have to code in a widget that works out what the overall world record and the personal bests of each player are using this year’s scoring system so there is something more attainable to aim for. That might not be live for the start of play but bear with me! In the meantime, I have run the maths for every year bar 2005 (because I don’t have complete data for that year unfortunately!) to see how it would have gone if scored the other way. I haven’t resolved ties in this so in the few instances where there are ties for first the wrong player may be listed ahead, but you can have a look and see how you would have done, and how close it would have been. Theres a decent distribution or years where it would have been finished early and years where it wouldn’t. It’s linked and/or embedded below for your viewing pleasure!
Tomorrow I’ll be back to talk about the social media issues and how that may further decrease participant enthusiasm. I’m aware I might be accidentally accelerating the death of a game that is slowly dying anyway, and I’ll talk more on this tomorrow and maybe after.
This could be the last year of this game, I fear. The changes are small in nature but could have wide reaching implications for both how the game progresses and how active players are once the game gets going and points are starting to flow.
But first, here is the item list for this year’s calendar:
bauble biscuits candle candy cane chicken chimney christmas jumper gifts gingerbread man house marshmallows reindeer santa santa hat skier sleigh snowman stocking sunglasses tinsel toy car tree turkey wellies xmas pudding yule log
26 items there, you’ll observe, and a few we’ve never seen before!
The big rule change is that I’ve finally flipped the scoring model back to how it used to be, how I have always wanted it to be, and how it logically should be. I’ll do another post discussing this in more detail but for now all you need to know is that if you guess correctly on day 1, you get 24 points. If you guess correctly on day 2, you score 23, and so on. Stay tuned for thoughts, history, and what I fear the implications could be.
The only other change is that the socials have been turned off this year. This is borne 90% out of the widget that did the posting demanding money to keep going (thus necessitating having to find a new one) and 10% out of the general anti-social media vibe I have going on these days. The latter may have contributed to the lack of motivation to find a new solution for the former. Again I will revisit this point in a future post and elaborate on both the realities and the possible implications going forward.
PINs will be sent out in a few days, until then: get strategising, I guess!
Huge congratulations to Douglas Cameron who took the victory in this year’s challenge! He made a rather beneficial guess change with a couple of days to go and it was obvious that he would probably win from there. He has already been in touch to say he is looking forward to trying to defend his title next year, and I am looking forward to welcoming you all back then!
In a tired, middle of the night awakening (I had a horrible cough, but don’t worry – I’ve been tested and it’s not that) my mind wandered into the scoring. I still think it’s a bit of a nonsense that the bigger point reward comes when it’s easier to get the answer right, but I’ve not been brave enough to make the change. I debated with myself whether or not reverting it a bit more slyly to how it used to be (i.e. 24 points on day 1, 23 on 2 etc) would be a bit more palatable to the players and intuitive to follow. The way I came up with would see everyone begin on 300 points and be deducted the number of points equivalent to that day’s date if they failed to get the answer correct. By the end it would all shake out to reward earlier correct guesses more than later ones. In all honesty I think I’m very unlikely to bring this in but I was a fun 3am thought!
I also debated aloud with Mrs S how it was cool that on the final day there were three objects that you could have scored with this year, and maybe to throw an extra level of intrigue (and maybe a cat amongst the pigeons) I should’ve decreed that scoring would be weighted in favour of the less popular guess.
34 people scored on day 24. Of those, 0 had gift so we’ll discard that from our thinking. The split amongst the other two answers was 21 Christmas Trees and 13 Santas – so I could’ve said 13/34 x 24 = 9.1 (we’ll call it 10) points for guessing Christmas Tree and 21/34 x 24 = 14.8 (we’ll call that 15) points for going with Santa. This would’ve actually seen Ed Haslam win as the ten point swing would’ve been good enough, but we’d also have to look back at the igloo/penguin day which I think Ed scored on so nothing is certain.
Or is reducing the value of the day wrong? I guess it is. So maybe we say the least guessed scores the full 24 and the more popular item gets a reduction equivalent to the gap, so (34-8)/34 * 24 = 18.3 (we’ll say 19). That’s now only a 5 point swing, and DC stays champion. This is the kind of shithousery that F1 would be proud of, and I’m happy to say it was never a serious option!
I wish everyone a very happy and healthy Christmas, a 2022 full of everything you want, and I’ll see you next year for more silly advent calendar fun!
This year I made it so that when you guess, it no longer reloads the same page but a specific page that simply says whether or not your update was successful and then offers a link back to the homepage so that a player can then see their guess in the table (as I assumed they’d want to), but I’m still getting the behaviour where a player is saying yes to reposting their form data and as a result the same guess is being entered multiple times in quick succession. A good design will stop this happening and I thought the bodge job that I’d done would be enough – after all, why would you want to refresh the page that only says your guess change was successful!? Anyway another rethink is required; I’ll have to do something clever like throw out an error if you are trying to change your guess to what it already is…
I haven’t had the time to dedicate to tweaking the website as much as I’d want but I’m well on the way to eliminating the ‘table-headers-at-the-bottom’ lunacy that was a direct result of imitating the design of the F1 digital graphics that I have mentioned previously. Hopefully that process is one I will complete in the next few days and then I’ll be able to move on to a better version of the which-items-have-appeared-on-what-days table that I’ve been planning for a while. I started this last week and found that it’s not as simple as I thought it would be so I’m scratching my head a bit, but with a bit of time I should be able to figure it out!
A player has entered this year with not their real name and this is as good a moment as any to remind players that if they want something similar then they can get in touch and their display name will be amended accordingly. I’m reluctant to give free choice (I know enough people that will choose either something rude or something akin to Boaty McBoatface to rule that option out) but I’m sure between us we can find something agreeable. It’s actually got me thinking about whether the default of full name is actually needed – if, for example, the all time top three were listed as Simon R, Mark C and Antony B I don’t think the competition would lose anything. I’m going to ponder this one and report back, and thoughts are welcome as ever!
A couple of players have pointed out on social media that there are twenty-five items to choose from and they are correct! This means that at least one day has more than one item behind its window, and I don’t think I’m giving too much away when I state this.
I got the Facebook and Twitter links working again and reverted them back to the “post everything” mode that they existed in when they were first created. In the interim the rate limiting of the third party services that I used meant that I had they had been restricted to only updates about window opening and points scoring, and after a couple of days it became clear to me that that had been a good thing so I have deliberately limited it myself now. Please continue to subscribe on Twitter and Facebook to get the important updates placed directly into your feeds (where their algorithms think best)!
Not long left to get your first guesses in on time, and remember a late start carries a penalty so don’t be late! Good luck everyone 🙂
It all kicks off tomorrow, so any players who still haven’t submitted their first guess should get it in quickly!
On that… Another feature of the old 24-23-…-2-1 scoring system was that there was an incentive to play from the start. Flipping it had the unwanted side effect of allowing someone to drop in with only five days to go and win it. This seemed unfair on those who had been in from the start and for me detracted from the feel of the competition a bit. The list based guess format helped a bit but I haven’t been happy with the situation since it began. For one season only players starting late had their points scoring offset by their delay – so a player that started on day 10 and then scored on day 16 would receive only six points rather than sixteen, for example. This ended up being quite confusing (as I remember it on one day three people with three different starts scored) and so was scrapped, possibly in the middle of the same season.
For this year, should it be needed, and again on a trial basis, players starting late are deducted the relevant number of points from their total – so the player who joins after window 10 has been opened will start on -10. I like, and want players to start at the start, and hopefully this change should encourage that!
The rules and website have been updated accordingly. Good luck everyone, and get your guesses in!
Before I get into what has changed about the scoring in the team’s championship, let me confess that there was very very nearly a change in the individual scoring too. I have long been of the opinion that scoring 24 points on the final day when there is only one item left to choose from is just silly. Scoring actually used to be the other way around, the (to me) sensible way around of 24 points on Day 1 all the way down to 1 point on Christmas Eve. It was changed after significant peer pressure because in the few years it ran that way, the title was wrapped up early and the rest of the competition had the “dead rubber” feel you sometimes get in proper sports when this happens.
Thing is, it has never sat well with me. I’m of the opinion that the harder to achieve achievement (that is guessing correctly on a 1 in 24 chance rather than a 1 in 1) should be rewarded more. I will do a further post about all this another time, but don’t be surprised if I flip it back to how I feel it should be one of these years. Your thoughts, players, are welcome as always!
So onto the team’s championship, where this year (2020) Leo are looking to defend their title and make it six wins in eight years. Credit to the Leonians for dominating so much, they have some heavyweights on their team and have clearly earned their results. It’s a sad side effect of the changes I have made then that they’d have actually finished fourth last year under the new scoring system. My beef with the old system is that we had uneven teams. Leo’s success is accreditable to that – they have had the most players at least half the time in their dominant spell, or one short of most the other times. 2013 was the last time they were significantly short – they won that year despite being three players lighter than their closest rival.
The dilemma of sorting this seems easily fixable by saying only the top x players for each side score, but I didn’t like that so much as that’s not really a team’s championship towards which every player contributes. Instead I’ve come up with a slightly contrived system and it works as follows. For each team, their best player contributes their whole score, their second best player contributes half their score, their third best contributes a third of their score, and so on. The teams with the best players still get the big points that they’ve earned, but for teams with lots of additional players these additional players contribute less and less – but crucially they still contribute. Fractions are always rounded up so every player who scores always contributes at least one point.
There are flaws with this, I’m aware, but I like how it creates a competition that still rewards teams with big scorers, I like how everyone is still in play for their team no matter how low their score (unless, you know, it’s zero), and I like how as teams get larger their capacity to run away with it is limited.
I will, given time, go through the team’s championship for every year and see how it would have changed under this system but for now here is what last year would have looked like:
Leo’s 2 point victory over Taurus becomes a 1 point victory for Aries. Aries had only four players compared to Leo’s seven and Taurus’s six, but with three of those in the top eight this feels like Aries have been rewarded properly for having strong players rather than many players. Over half of Leo players finished in the bottom half but the combined points haul of these “extra” players were what won it for them. Alas, what the new system cannot do is give a leg up to teams with only one or two players – Capricorn, Sagittarius and Scorpio had only single players last year and they remain down the bottom – but then if you only bring one player to a team championship I can deal with the resultant struggle. I think the new system strikes a decent, if imperfect balance. It’s worth pointing out that had Hakan, our champion last year, been representing a team all on his own that team would have finished in the top half!
As usual with such a fundamental change, we can consider this one “on trial” for this year. I’ll see how it pans out and try a different tweak next year, or even just revert it, if that seems best. But for this year, the new system is in. Good luck everyone, especially Gemini!
Around now I have normally sent all the players their details for this year and am starting to see guesses trickle in but this year real life has prevented me from doing this so far. I will definitely have them out by the end of the day tomorrow though so if you played last year expect to hear from me by then! If you didn’t play last year and want to, get in touch now!
As a small preview, here are the items the calendar threw out this year, in alphabetical order. Those so inclined can start planning their strategies now!
5 days to go angel bauble bell cracker donkey elf gift gingerbread man holly penguin pudding reindeer robin santa sleigh snowflake snowman star stocking teddy tree wreath
I’ll be in touch very soon. Looking forward to this year!
I was pondering the calendar for this year as I drove along at work the other day and the implications “the current situation” might have on my ability to even shop. Before I even get to the obvious solutions (mail order, usual online grocery shop, etc) I let my mind wander into the idea I’m about to present and before I decide just to go with another regular calendar I wanted to float it and hear some feedback.
The calendar choice is getting ever more stressful, as I anticipate that the template that any major (or even less major) Advent Calendar manufacturer uses is unchanged year-to-year and in any event I’d have to pay to find out. The result is I try to find obscure, often foreign, suppliers, and then save the calendar for a year or two so that if a design is changed, it’ll work in my favour. I do actually have a calendar from a previous year but it came from a retail chain and having wandered through said chain again, I see the exact same design (on the front at least) is on sale again. Anxiety heightened…
My mind wandering fixed not only the unnecessary shopping problem but would absolutely stop anyone from being able to buy the calendar – because I would be making it myself. My proposal is that for 2020 I manufacture the Advent Calendar myself, and in a bid to totally set it apart from the calendars previously seen I would hide 24 Christmas Films behind the doors. I would arrange them in the order I would watch them in a hypothetical world where I had to watch these 24 films in the lead up to Christmas and I could only watch one per day.
I can think of pros and cons myself but I am keen to hear from potential players about what they think – the question “would this put you off playing this year” being one I’m especially keen to hear about. Leave comments here or on Facebookor Twitter, please!
