Posts by Sellyme

1) Message boards : News : Badges for crunchers. (Message 60140) Posted 10 Oct 2013 by Sellyme Post: I do have a bit of a problem with those designs in that, if sized down, they look really quite bad and not particularly distinguishable. A lot of third-party services implement badges (in signatures and the like), and generally the largest they'll display badges at is 32x32. If the badge isn't distinguishable at that resolution then it's going to just look ugly in everyone's signatures. Looking at those examples I think the easiest way would be to just artificially bump up the contrast and brightness; especially on the outer ring which would probably be the primary way of distinguishing between the badges. Additionally, it might be useful to have the outer ring go through shades at a "faster" rate, so people don't have to distinguish between "murky brownish red" and "slightly darker murky brownish red". The designs aside, it looks like you've got decent milestones/benchmarks set out for the badges.
2) Message boards : News : Badges for crunchers. (Message 59799) Posted 4 Sep 2013 by Sellyme Post: The light-year landmark is a pretty good idea, in my opinion, but it may result in pretty large gaps between badges. Could someone come up with a decent scale for light-year based badges?
3) Message boards : Number crunching : Catalyst is not OK (Message 59700) Posted 27 Aug 2013 by Sellyme Post: I receive this error on my 7770 too.
4) Message boards : News : Badges for crunchers. (Message 59679) Posted 26 Aug 2013 by Sellyme Post: i could care less whether or not a badge system is implemented... just don't change the look of the website. it follows the format of most other BOINC project websites that everyone knows well IMO... I believe that the potential redesign Travis is suggesting is moremostly just a visual upgrade, not actually any layout change. If you have a look at the Wildlife@Home website, everything is in the same place, just prettier. One of my favourite features of the Wildlife@Home site is the navbar, as it allows someone to jump from the forums to their account to the top credit leaderboards in a single click, which is really very helpful. (Also, I accidentally made a quoting error in the last line of my previous post, that line isn't meant to be there, my bad)
5) Message boards : News : Badges for crunchers. (Message 59677) Posted 26 Aug 2013 by Sellyme Post: If you read carefully the two suggested schemes cater for both the "well endowed" cruncher and a casual Cruncher. Yes, but the scheme that you proposed for the casual cruncher is inherently flawed. A three year old 7970 would achieve 2Million plus without changing heartbeat - that's the same as 500 to 1,000 casual crunchers with minimal hardware - that's reality. The 7970 still costs over $400. If you think that that's a mid-range card that most people would have you're kidding yourself. Its a fools paradise to try and compare one Project "rates" with another as a Bellweather norm - if that was the norm, the stampede out of Milkyway would have occurred a long time ago. Which is why I compared percentage of users who had achieved the levels as opposed to what those levels are. The Challenge is to craft a scheme that acknowledges everyones efforts. Ignore that and try to play down high end hardware, is as silly as trying to claim low end hardware is the solution to all ills. That's not a challenge. All you need to do is have badges that are easy to get, and badges that are hard to get. And not 100x difficulty jumps. There is a clear balance to be struck, and its not an easy one as such. Hit way too low and it becomes meaningless, hit it too high and it becomes "elitist". The realities of Modern Hardware make that a difficult balance to strike - but the balance must be achieved - pitch too high and it flops, pitch too low - as many do - and its a pointless exercise. Or you could just, you know, use the range of badges to cover both areas? Start low, end high. It's really not that difficult. (Also, your proposal of the second badge being at 100 million points would, as I said, only be achieved by 0.16% of all users. Your third badge would only be achieved by 0.012%. And you think that that's not elitist?) That's the real world - like it or not.[/quote]
6) Message boards : News : Badges for crunchers. (Message 59667) Posted 25 Aug 2013 by Sellyme Post: 10k is very easy to get on a modern GPU, way back when I was using a HD5850, I was averaging about 160k RAC. Ah, okay then, in that case 100k should be the absolute bare minimum for a first-up badge. 2. Too many badge levels resulting from over-enthusiasm to give a tangible sign to lower level Crunchers. That becomes silly, as they get handed out with the fish & chips and the Hot-Dogs .... a bit pointless, particularly as the Crunchers actual Credit level is hardly a "secret". Every BOINC project that implements badges gets a massive spike in production straight afterwards. For projects where the first badge is harder to achieve, this spike, perhaps counter-intuitively, falls quicker, and by a larger amount. You may think it's pointless, but badges that are actually achievable for users who can't afford to go out and buy top-of-the-range dedicated hardware are a huge factor. one for current average credit There's a reason that no project (as far as I know) has a badge system based on RAC. It doesn't reward dedication, you can lose your badges through no fault of your own, they disappear when the project ends or is having server issues, and the figure is just in flux so much that there's no real easy way to tell if you're going to get a badge or not. AllUpTotal: 1m, 100m, 500m, 1Bn, 5Bn, 10Bn, 50Bn, 100Bn [As Credit inflation and Crunch Power increases that's easy to amend later ... later adding 500Bn, 1Tn would keep it going for a Decade or more ...) Going from 1 million to 100 million is ridiculous, and will result in 99.95% of crunchers just stopping at 1 million and swapping to a project where the badges are actually in logical steps. Only 0.16% of users with credit would get the second badge with that system, which is ludicrous. If you don't have a dedicated GPU, 1 million would be nearly impossible, let alone 100.
7) Message boards : News : Badges for crunchers. (Message 59661) Posted 25 Aug 2013 by Sellyme Post: Don't have anywhere near the artistic skills to make the differently-coloured images, but I feel that this could be a good base: I'd recommend 10k/50k/100k/250k/500k/1M/2.5M/5M/10M/25M/50M/100M etcetera as badge levels. No 25k, because having the second-level badge at 25k when it's quite easily achieved is a bit silly, and theoretically speaking the sequence should start at 25k, but in my experience it's good to set the first target in a rewards system like this to be lower than what would actually be in sequence, as it gets people into the project a lot easier, as they feel like they can get something to show for their work quickly. Admittedly I haven't actually returned any work units on a remotely modern computer for this project (I think all of my work here was done on an Intel Celeron D), so I'm not sure exactly how easy 10k is. Booted it up on my i7-3517U to get a bit of a reference, and will adjust my proposed levels accordingly when I see what kind of output it gets.