While you have a point, it stands to reason that everyone assumed 'snowball throwers' meant 'people who joined a team'. I understand not saying 'only the people who throw 2 and up snowballs will be included', cause then people will throw only two. Though really, throwing 2 takes literally 10 seconds. And even so, those who threw 1 did throw a snowball, so should've been included if it were just 'throwers'. Besides which, it makes no sense that these 'non-throwers' would be included in the total tally, but not in the 10% tally. Not giving them prizes at all, fine. But they either count or they don't count. They can't count for total and not for the 10%. If they truly removed about 60% of the total 'participants', they should've done it for the entire event. I want to know what the scores would've been if they didn't count. I'm not saying I expect Dolly to win if this was the case, but it'd remove any doubts. I must say I feel a tad uneasy now, not knowing for sure.

I still feel they should've mentioned it up front. I spent 4.5 mil on the basis of numbers. I knew there was a 'special sauce', but the way it was presented it seemed like it was something that would balance scoring. I didn't care about the items. I cared about the achievement. If I'd known the special sauce meant THIS, I never would've spent so much.

It all boils down to transparency. With all events where there is something like this, I would love to be able to see a leaderboard, if not during at least at the end, so I can see the numbers and think 'okay well, I never would've reached that, fair show' or 'okay next time a little bit more effort!' We learn from the past, but if we don't see what we did wrong, we'll never get better. And on top of that, I feel like when it's something involving basic numbers, a double check from the users' side would only be good. Mistakes can be made and what better way to avoid them than to have thousands check your math?

, I would feel far better about this whole thing if I could see numbers. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. No usernames, just pure numbers. Please.

Finally working this out in my head with all the numbers. From what I worked out, the supposed top 10%, was in effect less than than 5% (others came up with this estimate as well, but I didn't get it until I worked out the numbers for myself).

I did make the cutoff, barely, at 38942, and I figured I was way over what I needed because I assumed there would be approx 475 throwers in the top 10% pool. When I did a rough estimate based on snowballs thrown and what I thought the pool would be I figured between 20-25K would be needed.

Frankly, they said top 10% and I believe it really should be the top 10%, not the top 5%.

No, what actually happened was they removed all the people who threw >2 snowballs, so over 60% of the people. Then they took the 10% from THAT number of people. Keith said himself it was actually 13% since it was all so close together. (All of this is confirmed.)

Basically, they did a last minute rule change which left a lot of people expecting to be in the top 10% out and rather upset.

Yes, I get that. I just had to work it out a little differently.

As far as I see it, it comes down to the fact that we were told 10%, and its totally logical for us to assume that its 10% of the total participants as listed on the snowball fight page.

Not 10% of some random number we have no way of guesstimating.

Oh right like so. Sorry I misread your post.

Agreed. I feel a bit lied to, to be totally honest. And the fact that they were removed from the prize pool, but not from the total scoring makes no sense whatsoever.

Reading how this was calculated is just disappointing. You can't say "the top 10%" if what you actually mean is "the top 10% once we rid ourselves of 60% of the competitors" :| Like, I understand what you were trying to do, taking the "inactive" users out of the pot. But you can't go and do that once you've already clearly stated "the top 10%", because that is no longer the top 10%. It's significantly less.

So 30% were cut out of the distribution? Then the actual avg. amount of snowballs thrown by each user in the top 10% )if only 343 threw the total of 9,853,346 snowballs) would be an avg score of 29,501. If the achievement actually started with those at and above the 87th percentile, the individual scores would be an average of 22,703.

The minimum amount of snowballs thrown needs to be higher than just 2. It will decrease variability amongst scores.

Ultimately, though, the best fix of all is to punish those who utilize auto-refreshers. The unusual high scores are severely skewing your distribution, even with the slackers of <2 snowballs thrown removed. If someone threw over 119,231 snowballs, and the minimum to get into the top 10% was 38k, you cannot use mean/avg. in skewed interval/ratio distribution. You have to use median as your central tendency instead.

Cheating in battle events has been caught in the past; finding out who's using auto-refreshing programs should be a piece of cake.

also, don't auto-refreshers technically go against this lovely rule?

No, like 60% was cut. about 40% was left. I don't remember the exact numbers, someone estimated it on average. (total snowballs/38k=amount of users in 10% if they threw all (Y). Then total players - Y = amount cut IF no one threw anything else.) Something like that.

And about the auto refreshers, actually the reason some people got an insane amount was because they used the first few hours where there was no 5 second wait time to just hold down F5. Sure, some put on several tabs with an AutoRefresher, but the main culprit is the few hours without wait time.

The AR discussion has been had, staff says they can't check and therefore it's okay (still silly if you ask me, but if they say it's okay, don't mind me using one), so to have that discussion here and now is redundant.

But it does, because subeta hasn't been one to boot free-loaders, have they? :s I mean if someone joined either team, subeta wasn't going to kick them out half-way or at the end and say sorry you didn't participate, right? That's not something subeta does. I mean they don't even do that for MM, which is supposed to be a gift exchange. What makes anyone think free-loaders would get kicked out? They were just excluded from the % calculations, because they weren't throwers per se. I agree that it's natural to assume everyone on the team is automatically a thrower, but it just goes to show where staff could take the free-loading "outliers" and not include them as the wording on the news can be looked at in the way I said. :c I don't necessarily agree with the calculations done and I'm not trying to argue against you at all. A devil's advocate if you will.

Agreed. I did get in the top 10%, I still feel it was unfair, so its not just sour grapes.

exactly!

, I believe they were also excluded from getting any prizes. So technically, they were kicked out. The only thing they counted for was the scoring. Which makes no sense... :x

Re-calculated my math then, thank you. If 60% were cut out of the N=4768, then our new is N=1908, sum of Xs=9,853,346 avg=5,166 thrown snowballs.

The top 10% of this new N would have approx. 190 users; 13% is a sample size of 248. A minimum avg. score of approx. 51,663 thrown snowballs would be required; the top 13% would need a minimum of approx. 39,741.

Like I said, I'm assuming the data is severely skewed, which requires median to appropriately determine where the top 10-13% most likely is. Throwing out all ridiculous scores above the median would normalize the distribution, as well as setting the participation bar higher than just 2 snowballs. Participation should require...say, 50 or 75 snowballs thrown. That's more reasonable imo.

I understand wanting clarification on the math, but I'm pretty sure we all know why it was changed. Before the event was halfway over people were complaining about the 'freeloaders' on multiple threads (which are still on the front page of the Feedback forum), saying they needed to be removed for fairness. You can't please everyone, so the staff chose to please those who complained first. I personally think the +2 figure makes sense; someone might join an event and throw a single snowball just to be marked as 'participating', but they probably wouldn't throw two and not continue.

^ Thank you! Thought I went senile or something... ^

Unlocked Snowball Champion! Be in the top 10% of snowball throwers during the Snowball War!

euh what and now suddenly i'm counted with my 7.9k?

[edit] ninja'd by keith.

thanks for listening/updating it also wondering what the new threshold is with the new numbers?

Thanks for checking the calculations :) It would still be nice to know what the adjusted scores for each team were though.

Thank you. I still wanna see the numbers cause I'm curious, but I do feel validated. And also no longer like a total math idiot. I knew 18k would be enough. I bloody knew it. :P

Yay I got my achievement. 4.5mil for an achievement is totally worth it to me.

I guess what I'm thinking about was if people only throw the minimum so that they can get the prizes, then stop. You would still have some 'slacking' members. If you have a minimum, then yes, people will throw to get that minimum and stay at that minimum, but nothing more.

I don't understand how the math works to determine the number you had to get to get either the sled or the necklace, but as more people threw, the number would continue to rise, so there's that.

In theory I like the idea of prize tiers too. But yeah - with an event like this one, if you don't have all day to throw, you would be getting the comments of "oh, I don't have all the time in the world". But I think those come along with each event which is time consuming.

I also liked the averaging system, because in theory, it should be encouraging people to help out their teams. I did, however, see a lot of negative and disparaging comments against the people who threw only a few snowballs. Now, I understand why people are frustrated, but when you're seeing all these negative comments from people who don't see your 200 snowballs as a particularly high number when it may be for you, you'd be less encouraged to participate and help those team members out. You could also say that that would actually encourage members to pick up the pace, but when you look at the final results, I'm not sure if that actually happened.

The only prize you got for winning was bragging rights and 2 random Melody items, and I think that worked out a lot better than a title or achievement. Winning was good but being in the top 10% was the real goal that everyone could achieve regardless of how the members on their team worked.

Participation is participation, and each team had to deal with disadvantages along the way. Team Dolly had the large amount of members join right at the beginning when it looked like they were winning, and Team Tobias had to deal with the influx of members who joined at the end when Tobias had the lead. And yes - when you throw 2 snowballs that is considered participation, and it should be considered participation.

I think it would be problematic to say that you have to throw x amount to be able to participate, because that isn't really in the spirit of the competition. If people truly don't have the time to throw so much, that wouldn't be fair either. It's also basically saying "If you don't throw x and be elite like us you cannot participate" and I think that's also problematic. You could also get people who throw the minimum in order to be allowed to participate, then stop, and you would see the same problems. So there would be a lot of issues that would arise when you set a minimum number that people must reach in order to participate.

And yes - based on the averaging system, Team Dolly did have to encourage all of its members to throw. But Dolly also had more members. Theoretically speaking, Tobias had to get everyone in its smaller team to throw more while Dolly had more members who could've thrown less. And I think that's fair. It's too bad that there's people on both teams that slacked off, but with any competition or team event, you're going to see that happen. And you're going to need to devise inventive ways to deal with it - I saw that Dolly had a competition going for some really cool prizes if you threw a certain amount, and there was free snowballs for Team Dollies, etc. - and for a while it did help.

Both teams had disadvantages that they had to deal with, and both teams had advantages.