Merit - Page 2

Merit

Various things about Spring that do not fit in any of the other forums listed below, including forum rules.

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tzaeru
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Re: Merit

Post by tzaeru »

PicassoCT wrote:make it a true meritocracy- lines of code* percentage of spring users using it
..And suddenly everyone started to comment their code!

More seriously though, would there be a potential for big harm done if a system like this was tried?
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Anarchid
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Re: Merit

Post by Anarchid »

Decisions should be made based on arguements, not what rank or merit-points or whatever the poster has.
Now we just need perfect human beings capable of reaching uniform consensus on every question.
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smoth
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Re: Merit

Post by smoth »

hokomoko wrote: tyranny
Oligarchy. You need to choose better words.
tzaeru wrote:
PicassoCT wrote:make it a true meritocracy- lines of code* percentage of spring users using it
..And suddenly everyone started to comment their code!
I probably comment more than most :P does that mean I can be one of the ruling elites?
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Forboding Angel
Evolution RTS Developer
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Re: Merit

Post by Forboding Angel »

PicassoCT wrote:make it a true meritocracy- lines of code* percentage of spring users using it
So only code gets merit? What about the damn near countless projects that I have undertaken in the past 9 - 10 years to benefit this project that haven't had anything to do with code?

If the only thing that matters around here is code, then the vast majority of the people here are messing with the wrong damn project.
raaar
Metal Factions Developer
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Re: Merit

Post by raaar »

PicassoCT wrote:make it a true meritocracy- lines of code* percentage of spring users using it
sarcasm?
hokomoko
Spring Developer
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Re: Merit

Post by hokomoko »

smoth wrote:
hokomoko wrote: tyranny
Oligarchy. You need to choose better words.
Thanks, I've edited my post.
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Tim Blokdijk
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Re: Merit

Post by Tim Blokdijk »

smoth wrote:Pretty much ever karma system I have been in I end up with something like 40/-35 etc. People who are more charismatic and less actually doing things tend to have higher scores because they never challenge any one.
Well, it's not a "open" karma system, it should be a judgement from peers. Would be interesting to see if that changes your "rating" here. And I hope this wouldn’t be used as a "friend" status or popularity vote. That's the intention, not that I have a solid way to keep that out of it.
gajop wrote:I still think the solution you're offering is overly simplistic if you want to replace what we currently have - and that's general knowledge of the Spring ecosystem.
It's should be a quantifiable supplement next to that "general knowledge". i.e. have three people who know their shit bothered to indicate that they think that this person also knows his shit?
gajop wrote:I really don't think devs will really care you have "Merit recommendations" if you don't have meaningful and high quality contributions to the specific topic. You could try changing your system to be more similar to what's done in linkedin, where people would recommend you for special tasks (e.g. "Knows C++", which would be "Engine developer" here).
The problem is at the end of the day veterans won't consider these Merit points but instead make their own judgement.
And this would allow them to express that judgement. Yes, in the current implementation that is expressed in a binary fashion and that's a limitation that needs more thought. I don't know if (LinkedIn) categories would be practical.. who is going to maintain those categories? When to remove old categories for tech? Who is going to judge my CUDA skills? Or my knowledge of the Bitcoin protocol? When is such a category relevant for Spring? Add categories for "social skills"? Or "management"? Then again.. maybe if we reduce it to three categories: 'code', 'content' and 'other'?
Would categories be better then just free form? i.e "I'm Tim Blokdijk and as of 2015-06-05 I think this person made considerable contributions to Kernel Panic's AI, by tweaking the behaviour based on heat-map threat analysis."
That would prevent the problem of having to squeeze people in categories. But free form isn’t quantifiable. I don't know?
gajop wrote:This system is only useful for noobs, who still don't know who's who in the community, and for that, it's too complex/hidden. 0ad does a better job for example: http://wildfiregames.com/forum/index.ph ... ntry307531 , where you can clearly see roles of each person in the forum discussion - pretty important if the person responding to you is a programmer, an artist, or a random community member! However, unlike 0ad, we have multiple games here, so it's likely just not feasible for us -> but in that case, we need a more complex system, rather than an even more simplified one.
Yes, 0ad has a more traditional "game developer" setup, I don't know if that means that they are doing a better job. It's a more top down system (afaict), I don't think that it would fit Spring.
gajop wrote:I also don't agree that you need to have a formal "merit" system to do bounties. Maybe if Spring suddenly grew to ludicrous sizes we would, but even if the developer community were to increase 10x it would still be manageable to keep track of who's doing what. At the very least, mods and admins are here to make sure no outright robbery-like bounties happen.
Yes, outright robbery-like bounties can be be countered. The problems start when it's not outright robbery but "over-promising" and "under-delivering", that happens to the best of us. Or if an admin has to approve an other dev's bounty's that will compete with his own underfunded bounty and they also just happen to dislike each other. Even a delay in approval would put the admin in a very difficult position.
In the end, shit will hit fans and with money involved people will give enough shit for a big mess. Those problems can seriously damage the community.
Having a "merit" system is not a requirement for doing bounties, but I like to play with the concept in the design of a bounty system. If I don't try this "merit" approach now and start with a bounty system based on an admin making the hard choices I'm going to reinforce a system where power is centralized.
enetheru wrote:I'm having difficulty folowing your train of thought.
...
I think your summary is spot on.
enetheru wrote:I notice that you yourself dont know how it would be used, and perhaps are unwilling to commit to official stance on how it should be used. which i think feels like a solution seeking for a problem, rather than the other way around.
Yes, right now I'm not committing to any interpretation or use of this merit thing. Maybe that's a solution seeking a problem.. I think that if "merit" would have to solve an acute problem the pressure from the problem would make us discard it and fall back on a top down approach. Let it mature on the sideline, play around with it, see if it has any 'merit'. :-)
In the meantime I'm reading up on json-ld, deciding what framework to use, bdd for testing?
enetheru wrote:I feel like there are multiple problems you are trying to solve with one 'simple' solution, and feel like its just needs tuning to make it work..
I'm seeing too much in the way of active personal engagement with the system, and people are always lazier than you give them credit for.

and then there's this: "But as I plan on using this "merit" status thing to split the userbase into two groups (contributors and playerbase)", umm... massive red flag.
I hope merit can help solve different problems as people are lazy and we will lack engagement for to complex systems.
And why is it a red flag? I want to take that concern serious. What's your fear here?
enetheru wrote:The general trend of your posts indicates that this will happen, and I would like to see it happen in the way that you envision internally, but I'm not convinced it will happen that way, and I fear it will be ignored and your time wasted.
I wrote the code.. it works, but I'm not even putting it on https://test.springrts.com/ I first want to make sure I address any concerns expressed. I don't think I would have wasted my time if it's ignored, trying a few things and learning why it doesn't work would be an interesting outcome. If someone would remove it prematurely for "reason" without a public discussion. Yes, then I would have wasted my time.
enetheru wrote:I have ideas for improvement, but after this post I don't think its the right time to respond with those.

Good luck.
Feel free to share your ideas, you can also message me in a pm if needed. And thanks.
smoth wrote:Honestly if the system was enabled, I'd probably set most of the FGJL people as merit I and several people I used to have spat with such as knorke, argh, caydr because they did shit.

I think honestly just having the title of content dev is enough
Fgjl are fine people. But if we were to use merit for voting then there's a risk of giving merit to people that vote a particular way disregarding the "contributor" part, that would kill the merit status. It should indeed be about those that do shit, even if you have disagreements.
hokomoko wrote:I thought about this quite a lot yesterday, but decided to only post today, because yesterday I wasn't even eligible for wanting to get merit, since I registered on June 1st 2014.

Oops, seems like I've already written my first point.
Oh great, perfect timing. What would you suggest? Is 6 months better? Or 3 months, 9 months? I just picked a year, it seemed a reasonable time for someone to demonstrate his or her capabilities and commitment. What do you think of the 25 posts (one post every two weeks)?
I know both are artificial measurements. Maybe just ask the user if they are capable and committed? As in a "Do you consider yourself capable and committed?" checkbox?
hokomoko wrote:The current organization of Spring is based on oligarchy, where some folks I've never chosen decide how things are going with or without consulting me or any other person. Sometimes even without consulting each other.
If a large portion of users will have merit, there's going to be chaos, and merit will degrade into being nothing.
If a small portion of users will have merit, we'll just trade one form of oligarchy with another.
I don't think oligarchy is the right way to characterise Spring as it stands. I also think that those that happen to control some aspect of Spring do not necessary wanted the responsibility but just had to do it as nobody else did it.
hokomoko wrote:The problem I see with merit is that it's arguably giving the illusion of democracy, or equal opportunities. This is a very good thing in society, but not in a project. It doesn't matter how nice I am and how much people want feature X in the engine if adding my code is a bad idea (due to performance, bugs or any other reason). Democracy may allow it in and we can't really have that. Oligarchy is the only system where people stay around long enough to clean the mess after mistakes.
Debian's DD's chose a 'project leader' and this person then can chose members for a 'technical committee'. The TC makes the final decision with technical disputes. I personally think Debian's 'technical committee' is one of the better functioning body's in that project.
hokomoko wrote:It's not that I think the current situation is wonderful and nothing needs to be changed, for instance the process of getting something contributed into the engine is terribly tedious at the moment since there's only one core dev left active, and he probably has better stuff to do than reviewing pull requests all day long. That's a subject for a different discussion though.
Yes, this topic is not about how things are organized currently. If you need commit access to github you will have to take that up with those who administer that.
tzaeru wrote:More seriously though, would there be a potential for big harm done if a system like this was tried?
If it's not actually used for anything it wouldn’t do any harm, if the merit status is used for something then we also have to make sure it's functioning as intended. It's probably possible to abuse/break the current implementation.
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smoth
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Re: Merit

Post by smoth »

To be fair on the bounty thing though, every year I donate to the server, if we don't need money for that, next year I plan on doing another bounty.
gajop
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Re: Merit

Post by gajop »

I don't think linkedin style categories are feasible at all, even your current would turn to a maintenance hell after a few months.
I dont see it usable for measuring product/bounty deliverability on its own as its something that'll depend on many factors including the developer's inability to do proper project estimates.
I think we should approach bounties with less formality and just use common sense and ad hoc reasoning, as it'll be very hard to create a system or rule set that we can strictly follow and get the desireable results.

Sorry, I know you worked a lot on this, but I don't think I can support this fundemantally, in the current form or any other that was discussed in this thread. I simple think the motivation behind it is a bit too weak/not something Spring needs. I might be wrong of course, but I'll stay out of this thread.
hokomoko
Spring Developer
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Re: Merit

Post by hokomoko »

Tim Blokdijk wrote:Oh great, perfect timing. What would you suggest? Is 6 months better? Or 3 months, 9 months? I just picked a year, it seemed a reasonable time for someone to demonstrate his or her capabilities and commitment. What do you think of the 25 posts (one post every two weeks)?
I know both are artificial measurements. Maybe just ask the user if they are capable and committed? As in a "Do you consider yourself capable and committed?" checkbox?
If I had a suggestion or an answer to your questions I would have written it. It seems you've understood my point here pretty well.
I'd be more likely to believe someone is capable and committed if they don't check that box than if they do :?
I think any measurement will be artificial, that's why I can't recommend any.
Tim Blokdijk wrote:I don't think oligarchy is the right way to characterise Spring as it stands. I also think that those that happen to control some aspect of Spring do not necessary wanted the responsibility but just had to do it as nobody else did it.
As far as I know, no one here was elected and everyone was either appointed by others or by themselves. If someone is the only one left to do a certain job, they were still appointed in the past, maybe to do something else, but the main point is that there is and was no democratic process.
Tim Blokdijk wrote:Debian's DD's chose a 'project leader' and this person then can chose members for a 'technical committee'. The TC makes the final decision with technical disputes. I personally think Debian's 'technical committee' is one of the better functioning body's in that project.
You've given the DD as a bad example in the past, and since they can upload packages etc. I think it's more relevant to compare them to engine developers or even just people with root access to the server. This is significantly different from your merit suggestion.
Tim Blokdijk wrote:Yes, this topic is not about how things are organized currently.
You're creating a class system in the spring community so I'd argue it actually is.
gajop wrote:Everything gajop said
+1
I'm also not very fond of bounties in general but that doesn't matter. If the code is good it will hopefully enter the repo whether it was paid for or not if the code is bad it hopefully won't.
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enetheru
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Re: Merit

Post by enetheru »

I'll apologise for this post, its really early, i just woke up. need coffee.

ok, i'll roughy outline my idea, but it's almost completely different from this merit thing.

And thats to turn spring community interaction into a RPG style game that takes zero(and i mean zero) effort to play.

The various 'problems' as I see them are:
* no adequate information about people in the community
* no filtering mechanism for moderation of feedback and permissions

initially I thought of an achievements type situation with a single counter for your score.. simple to filter based on score..
* how many games have you played/won
* how many forum posts
* negative values for bans/warnings
* commit history
* something to do with game development
* map development
and in addition to that the merit badge for community support, because it will always be a popularity contest, and thats not invaluable.

All of these should be automatic in the sense that no interaction with the achievement system is necessary, so will require integration with lobby server/github/whatever

Achievements motivate people.

but then why not make it a skill tree involving all the layers of spring, and all actions creating experience.. when you could have character classes etc.. but thats going too far maybe...

anyway to address the list i created earlier

* will people even care - who doesnt want achievements? and its a zero effort system, doesnt really matter if they care or not.
* exclusion from important discussions/descisions - thats upto the filtering mechanisms put in place by score
* long term usage - I haven't addressed this.
* knowledge domain agnostic - targeted achievements make peoples experience pretty obvious
* ambivalence(of both valences, not apathy) towards hard/soft power in descriptions - thats upto the filtering mechanisms
* doesn't solve disagreements with all merited parties. - experience points are very unlikely to be the same, so there could be a few metrics to solve arguments or just more reason to argue.
Tim Blokdijk wrote:I hope merit can help solve different problems as people are lazy and we will lack engagement for to complex systems.
And why is it a red flag? I want to take that concern serious. What's your fear here?
its the idea that there needs to be a split, or that i would be a gamer or a creator, when reality is more grey. people feeling disenfranchised by putting them in a box they dont necessarily feel they belong. making hard splits is never a good idea. people take offence when you categorise them.
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AF
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Re: Merit

Post by AF »

In that case I'm clearly winning at spring, and was in the #1 spot for almost 10 years before Smoth took the lead

Also lets not forget AI devs, wiki people, Mantis bug herders, autohost owners, lobby devs, etc etc
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Forboding Angel
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Re: Merit

Post by Forboding Angel »

The largest issue I see on these forums is that only people who code are given any credit for anything, despite the fact that coding is actually only a little tiny part of making a game for spring, not to mention making maps, wiki tidiness, and all the stuff that AF mentioned, forum moderating, etc etc.
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PicassoCT
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Re: Merit

Post by PicassoCT »

But you cant allow people to vote on everything, even if they are totally clueless.
The Devs are no wishing well.
If the devs want to give up a feature cause it is to difficult to maintain, and a majority of people vote against that (even though not using that feature), some people simply should not have to vote on that. Lets take a concrete situation and ask ourselves would have happend if we had merit.

Zervers MT Build. It was difficult to maintain. It was a in Group Discussion only for Engine Devs.
Should the rest of the spring world have a veto on such matters.
Would the devs not override simply the merit system.

Protocoll & Performance Discussions
Problematic was that some people had the impression that the discussion simply died before the problem got resolved. So they set out to resolve it on there own, with diffrent speeds, resulting in a clash afterwards.
So Merit system also needs a way to keep isusses hot- and not saying something to that issue should result in your merit beeing transfered to a person of your pre-made- choice who has said something getting your merit.
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enetheru
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Re: Merit

Post by enetheru »

PicassoCT wrote:But you cant allow people to vote on everything, even if they are totally clueless.
you can if their vote is weighted by score.. this doesn't leave them feeling disenfranchised. it also lets them know what they need to do to get more influence.
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enetheru
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Re: Merit

Post by enetheru »

PicassoCT wrote:The Devs are no wishing well.
This is fundamental to the nature of open source. The only influence anyone has over anyone else is that which is given.
something I think a lot of people forget.
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enetheru
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Re: Merit

Post by enetheru »

Sorry you must not have understood my previous post.. we agree on this matter.
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PicassoCT
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Re: Merit

Post by PicassoCT »

Merit should be limited to areas where at least two sets of interests overlap - and should only concern the interested partys. And the not realizing party should only have veto rights with a majority needed to veto.

Image

Finally- we need a central discussion place everyone agrees upon. And also accepts that not checking into this place can mean agreement by witholding opinion or voting. You could also add transferable voting, meaning in case of withholding, a previous agreed party gains my merit on the subject.

Devs - overcomplicating things since 1892.
But if it was easy, we would have get it managed by now. Also difficult to catch free spirits into a process. And to keep a process about the subject and not about the bureacratic measure itself. Here be dragons.
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raaar
Metal Factions Developer
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Re: Merit

Post by raaar »

AF wrote:
Also lets not forget AI devs, wiki people, Mantis bug herders, autohost owners, lobby devs, etc etc
There are lots of useful roles, but some can be grouped. Users can also fit into many categories over time.

We apparently already have labels for users that tell which category they belong to. How is it defined though? I can't seem to find where to change it. Someone else labeled me (omgrage! ... it fits though, should be "Metal Factions developer").
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AF
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Re: Merit

Post by AF »

I preferred omgrage, but I believe those are set via groups and some other phpbb feature
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