Incentive Overhaul Part 2: Crescents

It seems like everyone got the Activity Tiers easily enough, so let’s move on to the next part of the incentive structures reform, the placement awards. Before moving on, if you haven’t already, I suggest reading through Part 1. You should also take a look at the latest Regent report, which covers some major updates to the Credit Award Policy (the policy formerly known as Possessions Salary Policy), some of which are related to these changes and some of which aren’t. But the tldr there is everybody is getting more money for doing things.

Part 1: Activity Tiers and XP
Part 2: Crescents
Part 3: If Anybody Cares, This Was Our Due Diligence

This is Part 2. And I’ll start with the bottom line up front: there are now two ways to get more XP/Credits for beating people. If you beat more people, you get a more valuable medal. If you place in a higher Activity Tier, then you also get a more valuable medal. But “participation crescents” you get for being one of the only people who entered are not worth so much.

How Crescents Worked

The simple thing about our competition awards was that they always had the same value. Here's the full set of 10:

Medal	XP	Credits
Gold Nova	600	2700
Silver Nova	450	1800
Bronze Nova	300	1200
Diamond Crescent	120	1200
Ruby Crescent	90	800
Amethyst Crescent	75	500
Sapphire Crescent	50	300
Emerald Crescent	25	200
Topaz Crescent	15	100
Quartz Crescent	10	50

The complicated thing was figuring out which of those you got. By default, the top three finishers got a medal based on the target audience for the competition:

• Clubwide: Ruby, Amethyst, Sapphire
• Clan: Amethyst, Sapphire, Emerald
• House: Sapphire, Emerald, Topaz
• Battleteam: Emerald, Topaz, Quartz

If it was clubwide and a Council member ran it, that changed to Diamond, Ruby, Amethyst.

The second thing you looked at is how many people actually entered. If at least 10 people entered (5 for BT comps), then the competition awarded crescents one level higher than the default. For anything except a BT-level competition, if you got at least 10 entries, the 4th place finisher also got a crescent, and so may the 5th, 6th, and even 7th place finishers depending on what level crescents you started with and how many people entered. If it's a novae-granting comp, then the top ten all got medals.

There are a few quirks to this system:

• The first place finisher got the same rewards regardless of if they beat 9 other people or were the only entry. If they beat at least 9 other people, it was the same as if they beat 100.
• If all 55 members of Odan-Urr entered a COU clan competition, second place would get a Ruby crescent. If you were the only one who entered a club-wide comp, you got that same Ruby crescent. Unless a Council member ran it, in which case you'd get a better crescent.
• 3rd and 4th place in novae-granting competitions got the same amount of credits as each other.
• Competitions that members put little effort into tended to award better placement credit than competitions that members had to work really hard on, because they got more participants and thus gave more and better crescents.

Change One: Which Crescent You Get

We're doing away with the Xth-level Crescents system and replacing it with Activity Tiers. And that means that every competition is going to award the same set of crescents. By default, that means an Emerald for first place, a Topaz for second place, and a Quartz for third place.

Every competition will award more and better crescents if it gets more entries.

Novae-granting competitions work just like before.

Entries	1st Place	2nd Place	3rd Place	4th Place	5th Place	6th Place	7th Place
1-9	Emerald	Topaz	Quartz
10-14	Sapphire	Emerald	Topaz	Quartz
15-19	Amethyst	Sapphire	Emerald	Topaz	Quartz
20-24	Ruby	Amethyst	Sapphire	Emerald	Topaz	Quartz
25+	Diamond	Ruby	Amethyst	Sapphire	Emerald	Topaz	Quartz

Beating a lot of people will always get you a better reward than beating a few people. For competitions that get a lot of participation, like Kanal's weekly trivia or clubwide puzzles, things will work out more or less like they did before, with the full array of crescents going out.

For competitions that don't get many entries, this changes the math a bit. Before, if you were trying to get the most XP and credits you could, you wanted to hunt for clubwide competitions that didn't get a lot of entries. It's not that hard to find fiction comps that are going to close with only a few entries, meaning that all or most participants will get a crescent, and because it's a club-wide comp, they were the high value crescents. And first place out of one entry got you the exact same credit as first place out of nine, and almost as much as first place out of a hundred.

Going forward, this is still an effective way to snag crescents, but they'll be low-level crescents. If you want the big rewards, you're going to have to go where the competition is. Ruby and Diamond crescents are going to be pretty hard to get, because you're going to have to beat a lot of people.

Change Two: How Much Your Crescent Is Worth

Outside of big events like vendettas and seasons, this means you're mostly going to see the high level crescents for the competitions that get 20+ entries, which is mostly trivia and puzzles. Competitions that take a lot more effort just to enter are probably topping out at an Emerald or maybe a Sapphire crescent. So how do we make placement in our core activities more valuable?

The answer is that crescents aren't going to have a fixed value anymore. Their value is based on the participation value of the competition:

Crescent	Current XP	New XP
Diamond	120	350% of participation
Ruby	90	300% of participation
Amethyst	75	250% of participation
Sapphire	50	200% of participation
Emerald	25	150% of participation
Topaz	15	100% of participation
Quartz	10	50% of participation

So if participation in a cluster race (Tier 2, if you remember last time) is worth 45 XP, then a Topaz crescent is worth 100% of that, or 45 XP. A Sapphire crescent is worth 200% of that, or 90 XP. That’s in addition to your participation XP. To save you the math, this is what all those values work out to for crescent plus the participation XP:

Placement	Tier 1	Tier 2	Tier 3	Tier 4	Tier 5
Diamond	247	202	157	112	67
Ruby	220	180	140	100	60
Amethyst	192	157	122	87	52
Sapphire	165	135	105	75	45
Emerald	137	112	87	62	37
Topaz	110	90	70	50	30
Quartz	82	67	52	37	22
Participation Only	55	45	35	25	15

If you want more placement XP, you either have to beat more people or place in a higher tier comp. If you want the most XP, do both.

Currently, most competitions either have <10 entries or they're going to be Tier 4 or Tier 5 activity going forward, so overall these changes mean that we'll probably award more participation XP and less placement XP than we do now. Based on our projections, this isn't going to be a huge shift in XP earnings for most members. The exceptions are the relatively small number of people who are getting a huge chunk of their XP from placement in what will become Tier 4 and Tier 5 competitions, which is about a dozen people club-wide. But I would expect to see a few dozen other people get slight boosts to their XP income.

Speaking of income, credit values will follow a similar progression:

Crescent	Tier 1	Tier 2	Tier 3	Tier 4	Tier 5
Diamond	1925	1575	1225	875*	525*
Ruby	1650	1350	1050	750*	450*
Amethyst	1375	1125	875	625	375*
Sapphire	1100	900	700	500	300
Emerald	825	675	525	375	225
Topaz	550	450	350	250	150
Quartz	275	225	175	125	75

Unlike participation, there are a few cases (marked with an asterisk) where you'll get fewer credits than before. Unlike XP, Novae are also going to be worth more than they are currently.

What About Containers?

Container competitions continue to award no participation credit, so we didn’t have to talk about them in Part 1. However, some do award crescents for placement. How does that work?

You will not select a tier for containers manually. Instead, they have their very own tier in the site code. When the container competition closes, the site averages the tiers of all of the approved child competitions, and that is the effective tier for the parent competition.

So for example, if you have a container that awards placement for two cluster races (T2) and two Dragonball trivia competitions on Discord (T4), the average of 2, 2, 4, and 4 is 3. That parent competition would award T3 crescents. The average is rounded down to the nearest whole number, so if e.g. the average is 3.25, it'll award T3 crescents.

Note for nerds: this is a simplification of how it works on the site code. James wants to make it clear this is not exactly how it works. The description on the wiki is more specific on what is actually happening, which is important, but for most people, I think the description above is more intuitive and accurate enough.

As before, not all containers will award placement. Some are just, well, containers.

So What Does That Mean?

Here’s some things you should expect to see going forward.

Significantly more Emerald, Topaz, Quartz crescents and fewer Diamond, Ruby, and Sapphire ones. But, with the sole exception of Quartz crescents for T5 comps, those lower level medals award more XP than they used to. Emerald/Topaz/Quartz for a fic competition used to award 25/15/10 XP and 200/100/50 credits, but now they award 52/35/17 XP and 525/350/175 credits.

However, placement for competitions that don’t get a bunch of entries is generally going to be worth less XP than it used to be. You’re not getting a 90 XP Ruby crescent for being the only person to submit a token entry to a fiction or art comp anymore. This is partially offset by participation being worth more.

We will continue to see lots of high tier crescents awarded for competitions that have a lot of entrants, like puzzles or Discord trivia, but they aren’t going to be worth nearly as much for T4 and T5 activities as they used to. You can still get good XP for a winning 2 minute entry on a puzzle, but it’s 52 XP instead of 120 XP.

Non-competitive activities, which is pretty much just RP, are worth a lot more than they used to be so the XP gap between them and crescent farming isn't as wide. But winning competitions still provides more XP and a lot more credits in comparison.

Placement in container competitions for mixed events will be a pretty big deal. Last month’s Vizsla Bounty Board still has a few stragglers waiting to be graded as of this writing, so let’s look at February for an example. You have:

• A bunch of competitions that would now be T5 that saw a lot of entries. Placement in these is worth less than before because of the low tier.
• A bunch of competitions that would be T3 but only got 1-3 entries. Placement in these is worth less now because they weren’t competitive; everyone who entered got a medal.
• The two cluster races would be even more lucrative now for the people who placed, because they were valuable T2 comps and there was a lot of competition, with 18 submissions to one and 30 to the other.
• The average tier value works out to 3.25, rounded down to 3. And 49 people participated in the parent competition. So today it would award the full set of crescents, starting with Diamond, and they’d be valued at T3. The people who entered the fiction and art comps wouldn’t get as much XP for placing in those comps because of the low turnout, but they make up for it by taking the top spots in the container.

The main thing, and I’ll talk more about this in the next report, is that XP awards will shift a bit away from placement and towards participation. This moves things a little closer to the pre-XP days when doing things was what got you awards and promotions, and winning things was what got you credits. For the last few years, crescents, not participation or leadership, have been the golden ticket to getting promoted faster. And I think that's one thing if winning means you spent a lot of time engaging with the community or sinking hours into high quality art and writing, but that's not what most of our crescents go out for.

Another return to pre-XP practice is that doing clan and house/BT competitions isn't handicapping people anymore. Those competitions will award the exact same participation XP as a club-wide one. You're more likely to get a crescent in unit comps because fewer people can enter them, but your crescents from club-wide comps will potentially be worth more if more people submit to them.

Lastly, Council offices and other leaders will have a little more of an active role in steering community activity. For years, the Fist, Herald, and Voice have been able to offer bonus clusters for certain competitions, but since clusters aren't worth much (and used to be worth even less), that wasn't much of an incentive. Now, those leaders will be able to run selected comps at the T1 level. Things like Gorefest, Lorefest, and Shrouding New Ground will award more credits and XP for both participation and placement. That will presumably attract more submissions, which will make placement even more valuable.

As before, I'll open a thread in #general for any questions on Discord, though I might be a little slower to respond this time.