So, I’ve done some digging around in the list of players and their scores, trying to reverse-engineer how the scoring system works. I think I’m pretty close to understanding it; a few parts of this are guesses, but they seem like reasonable guesses based on what I can see.
When you first take an image, that image is only visible to you (in the “My Gallery” view). This is the interval during which you can delete the image if you don’t want it to count against your 10 shots for the day. If you go ahead and add an ID to the image, or add a comment to the image, you lose the ability to delete it, and it immediately becomes publicly visible (Correction: Nope. It stays visible only to you until 10 minutes after it was taken, at which point it becomes publicly visible. You can see it in the “Public Gallery” view during that 10 minutes, but no one else can.)
Once the photo is publicly visible, someone else is likely to add a comment or ID to it very quickly, at which point the image will no longer be delete-able.
You score points as follows:
1 point: Taking a photo (any photo).
3 points: Being the first to supply an ID to a photo. Note: I’ve seen cases where it looks like the user gets 3 points for voting first, even if the ID is subsequently overruled by other voters.
2 points: Being the second or third user to supply an ID to a photo.
That appears to be it, as far as scoring goes. I haven’t found any evidence that there’s any extra weight given to “rarities” (birds with few appearances in the system). Nor have I found any evidence that being correct with your IDs makes any difference to your score. Being the first to correctly ID a photo where the first person to vote voted incorrectly does make it so you get credit for the ID in your “Classifications” section, but I don’t believe it gives you 3 points; in that case I think you still only get 2 points. I haven’t actually tested that, though.
It does seem to be the case, though, that your points for being one of the first three voters only get credited to you if the photo eventually manages to get three votes. So if, say, you took a bunch of photos of blackness in the middle of the night and voted all of them as owls of various unlikely varieties, you would only get your 3-points-per if at least two other users came along and voted ID values for those images. If other users did the sensible thing of simply entering “no bird” descriptions, you wouldn’t get any points.
Speaking strictly hypothetically, of course. 🙂
Note that this is contradicted by the tutorial on the site, which says:
If other users have classified the image, you will then see what their guesses were. If a majority of users agree, then the image will move from the Unclassified pool to the Classified pool, and you will receive additional points for making a correct classification. (emphasis added)
So, if you take 10 photos per day of identifiable birds, and immediately apply an ID to them, that’s 40 points per day you are guaranteed to get (10 for the 10 photos, plus 30 more for the 10 first IDs). The people currently atop the leaderboard (wyoming is the current leader, with 3,303 points, for a daily average of 367 points during the 9 days he or she has been playing) appear to be racking up those scores mainly by being extremely zealous at patrolling the “Public Gallery” view’s “Not Yet Classified” page, getting their IDs in very quickly whenever a new image by another user becomes available.
The most surprising thing to me about this scoring system is that it apparently doesn’t matter at all if you’re particularly good or bad at identifying the birds. You just have to be fast, and diligent. But obviously there are less-quantifiable rewards for getting the IDs right (like building and maintaining a reputation for being knowledgeable with the game’s other participants). And there are other ways to have fun with the system besides just trying to grind out the highest score; as with bird-watching itself, there are aesthetic and educational rewards to be had that outweigh the pleasures of winning some crass competition.
At least, that’s what I tell myself as I look at those players with the astronomically higher-than-mine scores.
Good research. I had been wondering about the rarity question. So I take it you didn’t get any super bonus on the “Bald Eagle” identification?
Also, I think the lag-time for when photos appear in the public gallery is 10 minutes, and it is always 10 minutes regardless of whether you have already classified them yourself or not. For instance, when I take a photo, I usually classify it asap. However, there’s usually a ~10 minute window where no one else classifies it and then immediately it is classified by 3-4 others.
And I swear “Wyoming” has some insider’s advantage or something. I have no clue how that guy (gal?) classifies those birds so fast.
Heh. Nope, the Bald Eagle appears to have scored just like any other bird.
I had the same reaction to always seeing wyoming there before me when entering IDs. But I think I figured that out.
I installed the “reload every” Firefox extension, and told it to continuously reload the “Public Gallery” page with the “Not Yet Classified” setting every 30 seconds, then left that browser window sitting off to the side of my screen. Every so often some new images would appear, at which point I’d leap into action, sometimes managing to beat wyoming (and the other two or three users who apparently were doing the same thing) to the punch, other times not, but mostly getting in in the first three identifications.
I’m not sure how much hammering the CONE server can handle from people continuously reloading, but it seems to be doing okay so far (though I did notice some slowing when a big batch of new images appeared all at once, and everyone was probably entering a bunch of new ID updates as fast as they could).