I appreciate the efforts to having a fair leaderboard. Cynicism from people shouldn’t impress me at the end of 2020, but it still does. On the other hand, I played for a short period of time using narrower reviews, and it actually helped me. Playing 8k words over and over again does help (20 English sentences doesn’t, don’t get me wrong). I used narrower reviews on languages with a lower number of sentences where I still found it valid to keep plugging through that limited sentence pool, because getting a sentence 4 times right doesn’t mean “mastering” a sentence.
Anyway, the short time I tried to keep up with cheaters, I got a tendinitis, had to cut down on typing completely. Then I started a new activity that is taking up all my language learning time.
I believe in making it hard for people to play the very same 20 or so initial sentences over and over again and score 32 points, but we have to think of smaller languages. The thing is, getting a sentence right 4 times doesn’t mean you actually master it. When you are studying French, you have 100k sentences. You can always say “Thank you, next!”. When you study Norwegian (I won’t even get down on Estonian or Georgian here), though, you stop scoring after 4 times getting it right, but it doesn’t mean you have mastered it. So, as a learner of a language with much fewer sentences, you are out of the game. You have only a limited number of sentences you can play in order to score, sentences which you could be still playing and scoring because you are still learning. You get discouraged from keeping learning as well. I only managed to go from B1 to B2 Norwegian after playing the 8k Norwegian sentences over and over again. It might even have been more effective than playing a new Russian-English sentence each day (just for the record, my Norwegian is C1 now and my Russian was still B1 when I stopped using CM regularly).
All this to say the gameplay is still biased towards major languages. Moreover, abusers should be addressed individually for their behavior, that’s more exemplary than trying to create overcomplex rules that abusers will simply keep bypassing.
Mamma mia! The new stats are the eye-openers if you know how to read them. If the game design was ever meant to finish it and get to the last 50,000 collection (at least in Italian) would it make sense to have a stat showing where each player in the game is? Points could be a self serving thingy. A stat showing players getting to the finish : why not?
Because there is no “finish” with language learning. More sentences will come in over time as CM picks up new sentences from its source system, or people start to play shared collections, or create their own. And that doesn’t even count the grammar exercises. The “end” is therefore an ever-moving goalpost. You take it as far as you need it, which will vary from person to person.
Agree to “no finish to the language learning”. Any merit to commitment of finishing the challenge of this game? This is not a licensure place (thank goodness) where many “points” people will undoubtedly flank. I see the proposed new stat of the players place in the game and progress to the finish as a fun challenge not some indecent proposal. I am sure we love our language learning in different ways , that is why we are here. Cheers!
I didn’t say it was; I said that there is no finish to progress to, therefore the player’s “place” is going to jump around like the “time remaining” dialog in Windows File Explorer. Let me demonstrate by example:
“Yay, I’m 75% to the finish!” 2000 new sentences come in from Tatoeba…
“Oh, now I’m only 70% to the end.” The admins purge a few hundred low quality questions…
“Yay, I’m back to 73% to the finish!” The admins add 10 new collections…
“Oh, now I’m only 60% to the finish, how did that happen?”
You can see your distance to go in a single collection like FFT, but that’s only on a single day. The distance to go will change over time regardless of how many you do or don’t play.
Well, if “the new low quality questions could be added by the admins” to perpetuate the game, it will definitely dilute the effort to finish it. Sorry to be the “goal oriented” person. We can chose to vote on the proposed metric, or put the switch on the whole thing and not to be distracted by any of it. Still love italiano to death!
I must say that I’m rather mystified by all of this. Yes, gamification can be a motivator: for me it’s very localized in time, only a part of what gets me going on any particular day. The real, true and valuable motivation comes from learning, from the feeling that I’m progressing, speaking, reading in the language etc.
I use Clozemaster for exposure to the language, for comprehensible input, not for memorizing 1 particular and random vocabulary item per sentence (which happens anyway).