Sorry if this has been asked before, but I don't quite grasp what the new site's point system will serve for under the PRIZE header. Can anyone clarify exactly the implications?

The Community page says :

Points = Prizes
Get Points to participate in raffles and special promotions.

Participating in the Community and interacting with it is rewarded with Points, following our top secret scale (don’t bother asking, it’ll be kept secret). The Points are used to reach different levels of monthly raffles, which will let you get special promotions available only to Community Players, of all of our games, from the smallest to the largest. The more Points you have, the more levels of raffle you can reach, and the larger the games that will be available to you.

• Level 01 Raffle: for Players with more than 25 Points.
• Level 02 Raffle: for Players with more than 200 Points.
• Level 03 Raffle: for Players with more than 500 Points.
• Level 04 Raffle: for Players with more than 1000 Points.

Prizes and raffle winners will be made public on the last Friday of each month in the News section and the Forums (you can read the rules here on the Help page).

http://new.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_comunidad_ventajas.asp

The way I see it, everybody registered at the end of a month participates in some kind of sweepstakes. Prizes you can qualify for are related to the points you have. What prizes, I don`t know. Maybe if you have 1000, you can get lucky and net an Android game.

That's my impression too, at first glance, but I was wondering if the score totals mentioned for "prize categories" were set back to zero periodically, e.g. I was wondering how a stiff could manage to get 2000 points per month, for example...

I love your choice of games, by the way!

I am fairly sure that the points will be cumulative. Otherwise, I don't think anyone could get 1,000 points in a month without...

But I won't give away the secrets of how points are earned.

No, we won't, Joram, won't we.

Thanks Indigo! You seem to be missing Galactica, however.

The trickier question is how to earn those posts, posting in several fora seems to help as does making friends.

GrtZ,

S.

And it is checked, if you allready own a game or just random drops?

Santiago said:

Yeah it seems to have resulted in a good many 'Tell me about game X' type of threads in many a forum. 'I've an eye on y'all intalopopahs!'

Yeah. I don't care for the current point system.

Based on what I've been able to tell about it, it rewards posting in forums you don't care about, making friends with complete strangers, asking rules questions, stupid or otherwise, making off-topic threads, etc. Whie people who only make friends with people they know, answer the rules questions, make only relevant posts, and only post in a forum if they really need to, are punished.

So I've determined to ignore my point count altogether.

Note that I'm not saying that all off-topic threads are bad, nor am I saying that it is bad to post in a forum for opinions on a game. I'm just saying that the new point system encourages that, which will probably result in a few people "working the system" to gain points.

A little off topic but is there any reason why expansions aren't part of the game collection? I mean, if we get points for having the games, it would be nice to have all the games count. I have all of the Arkham Horror Expansions and most of the Descent ones... Anyone know if they plan to remedy this?

From what I can tell...

10 pts. for registering

5 points the first time you respond in a new forum

5 points for the first new topic you create in a new forum

1 point per friend

Games don't appear to be a 1 for 1 point. I think maybe for every X you have, you get Y points. I am thinking this may be 5 and 1 respectively.

Most of my friends are legit, or people asking to be my friend. Once I realized there were two guys that are asking everyone to be there friend, I cut them from my list.

Joram said:

Here, here. Quoted for Truth.

It's a good way to push the product range, though. Quite imaginative really.

Kage

Joram said:

Agree 100%

You can still earn points with out completely spamming the system (I hope my own points are a testament to this).

The questions Ive asked about games are legit. Ive actually had trouble or questions about these games and I figured what better place to ask. (This also led to me choosing Mag Blast as one of my games, for my B-day shopping spree my g/f took me on.)

The list of people Ive asked to be my friend follows this criteria:

1. I searched for players in South Carolina (since this is where I live) for potential meet ups.

2. I add people who respond to my threads and help me.

3. I know them from other sites (BGG etc)

4. I also searched players in Indiana as that is where my extended family is located and that is for potential meet ups as well.

And this alone resulted in my gaining a ton of friends and points. Hopefully they'll institute a PM system so I can start communicating with them etc.

Thats honestly what Ive done, so as I said it proves you can do it without a spam fest.

While this may the case with you Luftwaffe Flak it appears that many people have simply entered almost every fourm / subfourm in order to get their 5 / 5 (total 10) points by Starting a topic and making a post there. The questions are generic across the board(s) and tend along the lines of asking question that one could answer eithier with a really difficult use of complex search engines like google or by just actually reading about the game, here , on the FFG site. Also there is sometimes the duplication of a thread inquiring the exact same question which implies the intention isn't to genuienly inquire about x or y but to statr a topic for the 5 points. Personally I'd rather just allow people like me to give points to the trolls and spammer so they stay out of the forums I frequent instead of dipping in to ask yet another inane question like Is this game cool, why should I buy it? Which appears on the surface to be a shallow insinserce vieled attempt at 'point aquisition'.

hollis posted this in the 'Advice' thread and I think it is ver accurate and topical:

" Points

Basically, the points system as it appears is about as close as possible to a textbook example of how NOT to have a positive impact on behavior. It's destined to backfire if the goal is to encourage positive community development. This is much more effectively implemented through community regulation -- e.g., allowing people to rate the quality of posted messages on, say, a scale of 1-5, or perhaps as simply as being able to check a box if a post was good or bad. Here is why it doesn't work.

Either points will have an impact on forum behavior, or they won't. If they don't, one has to wonder why they were implemented in the first place. And if they do, it's even more problematic.

On the one hand, you have people who are regular posters that now receive an external reward for continuing their behavior. Probably about the worst thing that could possibly be done. If anything is going to happen, it's going to be a decrease in the quality of posts, with no -- or a marginal -- increase in the quantity of their posts. There's a huge literature on extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation. The take-home point: if you give a reward for doing something that people are doing already, you actually decrease the quality of their behavior.

On the other hand, you have people who have ideas but might be too timid, or just don't care, to post. Hooray for them. Maybe some of them will start posting now. It's a shame you're also giving more motivation to troll as well. Thorndike's law of effect: behaviors survive or die by their consequences. In theory, all behaviors (positive or negative) have the same consequence here: points. So all that's been accomplished is an increase in the number of posts, and not their quality. In practice, however, it's much harder to come up with a constructive or interesting post than it is to come up with a trolling post or a flame. So the real net effect here is an overall decrease in forum quality.

Trolling is only compounded by this little line from the exclusive contests: "according to your Point total, you can enter in pages with scoops that only a privileged few will see before the rest.". I don't think I've ever seen a better reason in my life to forum troll. If someone thinks this can be avoided with clever design, I assure you that any large enough community will have many more individuals, far more clever than the designer. Anything that can be exploited will be exploited, and then propagated through the entire community.

On the bright side, we'll probably only see an increase in trolling towards the end of the month when prizes are awarded. Fixed interval reward schedules have a bigger impact on behavior the closer to the reward it gets. Think: cramming before an exam, or doing all your work the night before a presentation first thing in the morning. The forums will probably have PMS once a month, but be otherwise unaffected. Well, except for the decrease in activity by regular posters who are no longer internally motivated to contribute to the forums. Variable ratio or interval reward schedules are much better for increasing desired behavior overall. Think: slot machines or random-interval work evaluations."

ColtsFan76 said:

Looks like a recipie for spamming and trolling, rewards for making irrelevant topics, I'll think I'll join Joram and others and saying I will just ignore the point system

Luftwaffe Flak said:

Indeed, I don't regard it as impossible to get a lot of points without spaming. My main problem is that the point system encourages spaming and rewards it, not that those of us who don't spam are going to be without points; we'll just have a lot fewer. And if we start worrying about the fact that we've got a lot fewer, then we'll be tempted to make irrelevant stuff ourselves. Hence, my determination to ignore my points all together. They will come as they come, and I won't go out of my way to make them come faster.

Luftwaffe Flak said:

By posting in every possible forum you could might lead others to think otherwise.

It's pretty easy to come up with some pretext for a seemingly "legit" post in an effort to gain points.

The whole system is like some sort of social engineering gone wrong.

Nor does it tend to lead to productive posts either. I know my point total is stuck at the current total, even though I've replied to some topics in various boards.

Whoever thought of this point total system didn't think it all the way through since it leads to more spamming of boards and/or threads with the same topic but just another way of saying it.

Cab

Caboose said:

There is no point reward for starting threads.

There is a point reward for starting threads. At least for the first one in each board. Maybe not the ones after that, but I watched my point count go up quite a bit after starting a thread.

Joram said:

Quite possibly not for your first post. However, if you make subsequent posts starting topics, you should get more points. I did. I'm only posting in about 18 forums, which means about 90 points. Add in 11 friends, and you still have 40 points unaccounted for. They came from starting threads.