It's time for a follow up!
Interesting! It still lacks contintuity at the blue-yellow border (since e.g. (24,170) is actually a 1000), but this is at least continuous around each expert solution! If you assume the expert solutions are relatively dense in the finite part of the blue-yellow boundary, the discontinuity also isn’t so bad.
The new scoring system has been in place for almost 2 months now, and whenever I inserted a new (cost, cycles) point for a level, I noticed subtle changes in the leaderboards that suggested that players got more varied (and higher) scores. So I think it's a huge win over the previous system, especially when there are many optimal points.
In the interest of that, I've decided to retire from the exclusive expert position and score solutions against the best solutions of everyone. Since I prefer to keep scoring at the client side (in addition to the server's), once in a while I'll just collect from the server those optimal solutions that contribute new points to the pareto frontier and add them to the next version of the game. This implies that scores above 120x won't survive - they will become the "new 120x" and everything will be normalized relative to them. Moreover, any temporary discontinuity will get smoothed.
This change has just been implemented, and the present version already includes a few solutions from players. In order to not spoil the game for me, the solutions are collected and stored as part of the source code in an encrypted form (I am aware of the cost/cycles values, though - didn't bother to encrypt them.)
Indeed, and it's even harder to figure out which levels have root improvements since those solutions aren't represented in the histograms at all as far as I can tell.
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A root histogram of this form would of course be useful (for levels where some strict improvement is possible) but it might make "chasing those imaginary points" a bit too easy.
I share your view here, and a root histogram is not going to normally show up.
I've changed my mind here, after observing that not many players create rooted solutions:
- Histograms in Level Select now show statistics for root even if the player hasn't rooted the level.
- For those levels whose metrics with root are better than without in some aspect (cycles, score, conditions etc.):
- - A comment is shown in Level Complete of a non-rooting solution, suggesting that this is the case.
- - The histograms for root are available in Level Stats even if the player hasn't rooted the level.
I like the new histogram! As far as score-improvement goes, though, it's only really useful for users if anyone breaks past the expert_score for a level. This could happen in future levels, but after the newest update I wouldn't be too surprised if this was entirely impossible for the current ones!
At the time, that's what I thought too. But later, while I was preparing a hint level for one of the levels, I discovered that there were 100 points left on the table (real points!)
By the way, that sqrt(cost*cycles) histogram was replaced with a more user-friendly histogram of scores as part of moving to the new scoring system.
I think my only hope is playing dirty... If C12 is to blame for your 2i advantage, then it's going away, and replaced by 2 new levels. Also included is one of my favorite achievements. Hopefully you won't find any loophole this time!
Aha! I suspected foul play when I saw C12 went missing. [...]
In the end, I made that Snowflake level a hint level of another, more elaborate level (and smoothed the difficulty curve towards that new level). Hint levels don't get scores
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