Win your T-Shirt
1 T-Shirt per player for top 10
50 T-Shirts awarded randomly in top 250
So we can guess that there is no more t shirt for the first in a langage (why ? ). But the most important part is that there is 50 t shirt awarded randomly between the 11th and the 250th rank.
So after Fantastic bits, the 250th may have a t shirt when in the mean time the 11th will receive nothing. Personaly i feel that this is very wrong. In a contest, the 11th player should be assured that he will at least have the same reward than the 250th. But i also feel that many codingamer just don’t read the rules so they don’t know. So i create this topic so we can discuss of it
I’ve read it and I think it’s OK.
The 11th player has exactly the same reward than 250th, i.e. the same random chance to win a t-shirt.
In most competitions only the 1st,2nd and 3rd have any recognition. I never saw anything like the 11th winner.
I think these random T-shirts are a “thanks for playing” gift.
But this is IMO, although I don’t really care about next prizes. Not even the PS4, I’m PC master race, and I kind of hate Harry Potter.
There is a huge amount of effort needed to go from 250 to 11, the skill is not even remotely close. In fact most t-shirts will probably end up with people in gold league?! T-shirts for top 50 was a nice motivation to go the extra mile for many, that much was obvious reading the chat during the contests. But now many persons just won’t bother after writing a semi-good AI because they know they won’t have time or energy to make it to top 10.
I understand the reasoning of wanting to give away prizes to a broader range of skill, but please don’t do it at the expense of your hardcore crowd.
First of all: thank you for giving away T-Shirts, CodinGame.
I share the opinion, that winning a T-Shirt sould be a matter of skill, not luck.
In HyperSonic (my first contest here) I placed 54th, I will do my best to improve. And yes, the T-Shirts are a motivation and set a target for finetuning and adjusting parameters.
I’ve seen it the other way round at CodeForces: 50 T-Shirts for the best and 5 random persons in the top 550.
Personally I would say that’s the better distribution - even if it might reduce my own chances.
Well, OK. So far 5 out of 6 responses (and many others as likes) prefer non-random rewards. Devs should take that into account for next challenges.
If you want some free stuff from Codingame, you can also create/join a Codinghub, they will send goodies to them!:
To be honest, the idea comes from me. I actually saw that Hackerrank was doing it on some of their contests. I thought that it could be a nice way to motivate a lot of medium players to play more while top players would still continue to play and try to rank better.
A mistake? Maybe. If this produces too much turmoil, I guess we’ll avoid making it random next time.
The random t-shirts is a good idea, what made it bad was taking the “budget” for them off top 11-50.
I think it would be more reasonable to have top 50 guaranteed + 10 random for 51-250.
For example:
70 % chance to get a T-shirt for 11-20 = 7
50 % chance to get a T-shirt for 21-50 = 15
30 % chance to get a T-shirt for 51-100 = 15
20 % chance to get a T-shirt for 101-150 = 10
3 % chance to get a T-shirt for 151-250 = 3
I too find it a big motivation for getting better and fully agree with reCurse,
Top 10 feels a bit like matter of luck, but top 50 can be reached reasonably well with skill only.
I remember how I told myself to not give up and fight and get a t-shirt, If I knew my chances of getting one would be the same unless I reached top 10 that would certainly have demotivated me (a bit).
Another idea to engage more players would be to give some t-shirts in language categories.
For example, to first K players in languages with more than N users.
A couple of values for K and N could be used, e.g. (2, 30), (4, 80), (6, 200)…
(with no player getting two t-shirts).
I was looking forward to earning the language-specific T-shirt for Perl. I’m sad that it’s not a thing, just when I start doing these contests more seriously.
Wow!! I can’t believe there is so much drama over t-shirts… But for the record, I agree with @MMMAAANNN. An exponentially decaying probability distribution function is the way to go.
It’s true that being the 11th is not the same as being the 250th but in these contests being the 28th is sometimes not much different than being the 56th. And a t-shirt is supposed to be a nice reminder of the fun of participating in the challenge, not a trophy IMHO
We’ve heard your complaints, therefore we’ll most likely come back to the previous way of rewarding T-Shirts, ie top 50 + 1st per prog language (as written in the contest page).
If you want to offer your T-Shirt to someone who ranked better than you, feel free. Just tell here who so there are no duplicates.
). But the most important part is that there is 50 t shirt awarded randomly between the 11th and the 250th rank.
