With this editorial, the added information below the scores page and the staff tournament scores we can come a lot closer to figuring out the scoring formula.
Quote:
Just do your best and submit EVERY game you can regardless of the outcome. Every bit of effort counts!
Quote:
(And don't worry, [people who submit losses for teams they want to lose] are really only hurting themselves.)
And
Quote:
The Altador Cup Committee bases scores on win/loss/tie record, point scores, individual performance, and a weighted average based on team membership. Translation: A team with more players has no advantage over a team with less players!
And on the staff tourney:
Quote:
we still play our tournament the same way you play yours. It just happens that we're the only player for our respective teams.
Obviously, the first two quotes mean that losses and ties still award some positive points. What that means is that the personal score of any single player gets added up first with no regard to the amound of games played to get it (which can only result in a positive number), and then added to the team pool, which then gets devided by the number of players to make the team score.
There may be no difference between playing 5 losses and getting one 9-0 win, depending on how it gets scored, but you can still 'sabotage' a team just by signing up and doing nothing, or possibly playing only a single game with minimal score if TNT had enough foresight to put in a tresshold for being counted.
Now that leaves to be guessed at how single games are scored. Looking at the staff tournament, you can easily see that points scored in a game do count because there's matches where both players won all 10 games that still resulted in a winner. In that light, I'd say counting wins/losses/draws seperately from the score
at all is unnecessary, as the score already reflects the outcome.
So I'd expect something like:
"Score = 1 + (#ofGoalsYouScored * ValuePerGoal) - (#ofGoalsScoredAgainstYou * ValuePerGoalAgainst)"
With an absolute minimum of 1. The most uncertain thing in that formula would be the "ValuePerGoalAgainst" variable, which might be anything between zero (the way the game works that'd still be effective) and the same value of a goal you scored yourself, depending on how much they want to reward efford over score.
If they do count whether you win/lose/draw they'll likely add unchanging point values for a win and to a lesser degree tie, but if that's the case then they probably aren't keeping track of goals scored against you as well.
So how does that affect us? Well for one thing, I wonder how long till someone figured out they'll score faster by opening 50 game windows and cycling between them hitting "Start Game" and "Send Results" letting them play and lose unattendedly than by playing and winning. But then, I expect TNT will be keeping an eye out for people who send more scores than one every three minutes.