Maybe, but I can’t imagine anyone expending their life banging out the same sentences day in and day out for no learning return either and just to see themselves on a leaderboard… yet that is what appears to be happening. Though I do want to emphasise “appears” because as I said, I do strongly suspect some script involvement on the part of at least some of the people at the higher end of the leaderboards. (I edited part of my earlier post because I didn’t want to give the impression that I suspect that everyone with a high score is doing that. If someone has been playing regularly for a few years of course it’s possible to get a pretty high score level. But for some others, IMHO 'bot involvement is a strong possibility.) How, I’m not entirely sure because I’m not a JavaScript whizz, but there have been some scores that have been racked up too fast for any other plausible explanation. I type faster than pretty much anyone I know and on a really, really good day I may be able to hit 70K over the course of 17 hours on and off. Typically it’s significantly lower than that, unless I’m going on a Clozemaster bender. (The site is sometimes a bit more addictive than is good for me.) But to see someone blast out a quarter of a million by hand in 3 hours or so, I think it was? I ain’t buying it.
Edit:
Aaaand pardon me while I thunk my head into the desk for not seeing the obvious. I can see how they can do it. I couldn’t write the code myself without a lot of brushing up, but for a skilled script writer it would not be unduly onerous. Obviously it’s not something that needs a public airing, however.
One might say : the feature in the cloze collectibles that allows rake points at a blinding speed rate and quantities is a question of a reputation of a player him or herself and that of a site developer that allows that feature to be there used that way. Collectibles are private, so the ways of obtaining those points. Since new stats are proposed in #2 ,one could watch, for example, a stat of the players typing in the same word some gazillion times. I would say : one good remedy for this is to make all leaderboards toggleable i.e. day, month, year, all-times, all-blinding-stars or whatever. This might take some oxygen off of that perpetuation and will put “players only for the points” in the same eco chamber. I would also add: life is a theatre… and is too short. Cheers!!
Eeeeh, maaaaybe. Wearing my database admin hat I can see that being (charitably) processor intensive and (realistically) server-killing. Counting sentences is one thing since each one is (I expect) a separate record. If you start looking at individual words within those sentences, that’s a whole new level of aggregation. I like the idea of more stats, provided that it doesn’t slow the site down.
(Not just for this specific example, but in general with any changes to the stats. I think it’s something that hasn’t really been considered in this thread.)
I think it makes more sense to invest in better spacing for those repetitions instead of complaining about points and leaderboards.
For example the low count of repetitions do only make sense if words are repeated in different sentences. The 4 Levels (25%,50%,75%,100%) make sense for Collections where words occur very oftten or are repeated due to conjugations of the same word. But in collections like 50.000 most common or more where some words do only occur once you have to cheat the system: Set the days for repetition to a lower number of days and use the ever increasing Interval.
Another option is creating your own Collections for those words, but this is already a lot of work and i don’t know how many people are willing to invest so much in their learning. We should not forget, many of those posting in this forum are enthusiasts and probably won’t be the typical Clozemaster Students.
I’m writing this, because the discussions about leaderboards are driving me crazy. I would love to see better collections, translations, no clozes for names, better algorithms, an android app with the same features as the webseite and so on.
The discussions about leaderboards are driving me crazy too. Simple: the leaderboard are forced on me. I do not want to see my name with the number attached to them or think what other people do to get to the # 1 spot. Making that switch on and off should not slow the system much, but will for sure remove some aggravation.
Ahhh … not “watch” in real time… is that what you thought I meant? That doesn’t seem practical or interesting, agreed.
No - just a leaderboard for those who are playing -one type of game- and another for the rest. Not that I understand anything about the practicalities of such things.
On the face of it, though, it seems like a conceptually elegant solution for the thing which is upsetting people, without globally and radically changing the landscape, which will undoubtedly upset more.
For myself - I do not care (sup @Koeppchen)… I’m here because no other app could, say, take me from knowing zero Finnish to actually remembering which case to use. Show me a leaderboard that can do that and I’ll support it … until that day, the all-time boards mark how far I’ve come… and I like that… and I’d be mildly bummed out to lose it because a handful of people are… jerky. I’m just saying - if it bothers some folks, then make the jerks dance in their own tent That’s all.
Not entirely; I think there are relatively few people who would expect real time stats since we know that can’t even be done with the existing scores given the variance between the dashboard, leader boards and profile counts. (That’s no criticism, I emphasise; the point of the site is language learning / reinforcement, and stats of any kind are just a “bell and whistle” to “funify” that a little. If the latter is sacrificed so that the former performs better, I’m all for that.) But even if it was a periodic count, you’d be talking about the system needing to go through every collection in every language to identify every unique word being played (and this number will change day to day), then aggregate the number by word by player… that there is a whooole bunch of calculation to be done by the server each day. I’m sure I’m not the only one who doesn’t want us to end up with a panoply of interesting and diverse stats… but with lags in response time because of the grunt work the server has to do in serving them up.
Fair point.
Allow me to segue and shamelessly plug the third option in Mike’s list in this thread; “Shared collections with missing words by theme / topic”. I think that this would address some of the issues that you mentioned in the earlier part of the post. (I note that you, like I, have voted for that one. But I shall not pass by an opportunity to tout for even more votes. )
Yes, if I see the words “wanna” or “gonna” in one more translation I’m sure that my teeth will rotate by 90 degrees.
Do I hear an AMEN!!!? Especially exceedingly rare names that hardly anyone has ever heard of before. One stat that I’d love to see (yes, I am kidding here, I don’t really want to see it, please don’t add it to the list) is the number of times I’ve needed to go to multiple choice just to work out what the name is.
As for the other… point taken; again, I have exactly zero comprehension of how such things behave in reality. I was imagining a simple metric whereby those who play fewer sentences for comparatively more points are identified, and made to sit at the special table.
Latin and other languages where names change depending on their role in a sentence should be exceptions to this. “Tom” appears way too often in its various forms in Latin for my liking, but it’s important to learn the difference in usage between Didymus / Didymum / Didymo / Didyme / Didymi and Thomas / Thomam / Thomae, etc.
Once you get a sentence to 100% Mastered and score the maximum number of points (16 for multiple choice, 32 for text input), each time you answer that sentence correctly after that to keep it at 100% Mastered, you score fewer points until you hit a minimum number of points.
That would be fine with me. I always thought it was odd that I could get 32 points each time I got the same mastered cloze correct again. It has always felt like a disincentive for playing new sentences, which is often more valuable.
More leaderboards - we plan to add leaderboards for number of sentences played, number of sentences mastered, number of new sentences played, number of multiple choice, number of text input, etc. We’d also like to add a way to choose a default leaderboard you’d like to see when you open the leaderboard from your dashboard. The idea here is we’ll be able to compete across more metrics, and having more stats is more fun anyway.
I do not agree that having more stats is more fun. It’s all about the stats that matter most to me; I don’t want to have to page through the rest, and I don’t want calculating them to interfere with performance. Level and length of activity streak matter to me. And, as I mentioned in a separate post, unique words played and mastered would also be useful to me. I feel a little guilty for caring about where I end up on the leaderboards, but it does motivate me somewhat, so they have a purpose.
No more All-Time leaderboards. … The Weekly and Monthly leaderboards offer a fairer and more accurate ranking. We could also consider replacing the All-Time leaderboard with a 6-Month or Yearly leaderboard.
A Yearly leaderboard wouldn’t remove the basic problem that people can cheat themselves and the system by:
preferentially selecting (manually or via configuration) sentences that are below their level (either because they fall into an easy category or because they’ve already been mastered)
preferentially using easier methods (such as multiple choice) when they could use text input
using automation of one form or another
Since people will always be able to do any of these, the true “fix’” is individual and attitudinal: people need to find the right motivating tool to make progress. Whether All-Time leaderboards are removed or not doesn’t make much difference to me. Whether there are ten, twenty or a hundred English-speaking Russian learners in the world who have heard about Clozemaster, had the opportunity to play it, and acquired more points than I have is as much a matter of chance as anything else.
I am fairly new here, so I haven’t thought about the All-Time leaderboard enough to consider that someone might cheat their way up it. Keeping that in mind, there could be a “simple” solution that might be acceptable for most people. My thought is to leave the All-Time leaderboard as is and simply add a checkbox/toggle that filters the existing All-Time rankings from the start date of Clozemaster to rankings from the start of the new statistics calculations. So you wouldn’t filter if you believe the All-Time rankings should stand as they are despite their flaws. On the flip side, you could filter if you just want to see the rankings as of the date the new method of calculating statistics started.
My final thought on cheaters : they always be there. They are in duo playing easy first features for the million times and here typing in the same word to get to a new level in 10 minutes when it normally takes days. Say, if the punishment for such behavior consisted of making them type the same word for the million times, they are already doing it to themselves. Everyone is free to do what they want with their lives. Happy progress to those who aim to finish this game all the way to the bottom!
Ciao barcarolle, I have yet to meet a cheater who is truly content with him/herself. Once on a group Christmas holiday to Italy, i listened in amusement as a boaster of umpteen “golden owls” couldn’t quite manage “Here is my passport” Nuff said.
Two changes - 1) controls at the top, and 2) the rankings are shown for only one time period at a time. The controls allow you to view the rankings across various time periods and metrics as mentioned above. Curious to hear what you think!
There are added metrics and a current year leaderboard option (though we may change this one to or add a rolling “past year” option, each passing day would put new years at a disadvantage). We’ll keep the All-Time leaderboard as an option, though this change makes it slightly more hidden.
We may end up changing the points such that getting a sentence to 100% Mastered remains as-is, but keeping a sentence at 100% Mastered (so answering an already 100% Mastered sentence correctly) scores the minimum number of points - the idea being to further reduce the impact of repeatedly playing the same set of sentences while still allowing customizable review intervals, and to keep the focus on getting a sentence to 100% Mastered and then playing more new sentences. Getting this implemented on the both the web and for the mobile app will take a bit more time.
Good idea! We’ll have to give this some more consideration, but it could be a good option.
Longer term we may add an option to select your default leaderboard settings such that if you didn’t want to compete on points you could select some other metric (we’d have to figure out how to handle the rankings shown on your profile, the round results, etc.). We’ll also aim to expand the number of users shown. Leaderboards per collection may be an option, but may also be too much. It is possible to have the same sentence in multiple collections, but we’re going to leave that for now as it can be useful in some cases.
First impression… it’s a lot… The multifarious ways of splitting it makes it feel like the crown sits not too much upon one neck… the 19th century anarchist in me approves
Laughed at the -15 secs max per question- stricture… without this, the time I take on text inputs alone would make me the undisputed board boss all year round… oh well
There are some strange things in some leaderboards, in the time leaderboard there are some people with over 1000 hours and having only 7k played sentences and 300 mastered, and 100k points. It seems like some people have been in a sentence stuck for hours, with the browser opened with that phrase while doing other things.
or 5k hours for 200k points and 2k sentences xD
There are also ppl that have mastered far more sentences than they have in their profiles, that’s kind of strange too.
… until that day, the all-time boards mark how far I’ve come… and I like that… and I’d be mildly bummed out to lose it because a handful of people are… jerky. I’m just saying - if it bothers some folks, then make the jerks dance in their own tent 
That’s all.
But I shall not pass by an opportunity to tout for even more votes. 
)
It’s very much appreciated.
