What mainly intimidates me about it is all the additional clauses for different scoring options. I feel like it should be simplified, but that's not my place to say anything because I haven't been involved in it while all the new scoring options were added.
Breaking my silence on this point to explain how
that happened, lmao.
So there were two different edits to the points system here.
The first edit involved bonus points for
amount of chapters reviewed. Or more specifically, you'd get double points if you reviewed over ten chapters in a single post (10+ counted for double) and five extra points if you review chunks of ten chapters after twenty (so hitting your thirtieth chapter gets you five bonus points). This happened because the original system had you earning one point per post, and it was thus hella simple ... and not a system that particularly encouraged people to read longer works. The
downside to this system is that rather than encouraging strategy (you can totally win a month by reviewing a bunch of shorter fics and all), it just encouraged people to gun for longer works and ignore shorter ones. Case in point: the reviewer in second place at the moment only had to review two fics, one of which was worth over thirty points. To put it bluntly, this goes against the spirit of the game, never mind the spirit of what the game is trying to
do for the forum, so it's the rule that I think could actually really be tweaked. Or dropped altogether, for that matter. I mean, not only is it game-breaky, but it's also the one most likely to be hella confusing to newcomers
anyway because there's just no neat way to explain it without making a mess of it.
The second edit is a little more reasonable, both in game balance and description. Sometime towards the end of summer, a bunch of us realized we needed to do more to promote lesser-known works. Hence, Del created the Deli and tapped me to ask if I could hand out bonus points for fics featured in said Deli. That was easy enough, but the downside to this is that the Deli is a
quarterly affair, rather than a
monthly affair, and it would be rather silly to either: A) offer bonus points for the same fic for three solid months or B) offer bonus points for a short period of time and then nothing in between. So in order to fill that time gap, I added a lesser bonus for fics
not featured by the Deli. Why a lesser bonus? To offer a little more importance to fics featured by the Deli.
And there you have it. Like I said, the double points/five extra bonus points part could probably be nixed because it's convoluted and also hella broken, but I'm gonna insist that we at least keep the bonus points for the Deli/featured fics. Largely because the leaderboard is all about bribing people to read fics they normally wouldn't, so at least
that's in the spirit of things.