Changes to Crescents

Open letter for discussion:

I just noticed some changes made on the Awards wiki page that directly affects how Crescents are awarded for DB competitions. Everyone, you can check out the changes here: https://wiki.darkjedibrotherhood.com/view/Awards If you’ll note the “Upgrades at” column, you’ll see the numbers have been changed from a standard 10 participants, based on the level of Crescents involved.

Now, I have some serious concerns as to these changes.

I’d like to ask the MAA Staff, and whoever approved such changes, why they felt it was necessary to make it more difficult to earn/award already impossibly hard to get Crescents?

Even at a quick glance of past DB-wide, DC-run competitions, the average participation numbers are waaaaaaay below the amounts set in these changes. Maybe one DB-wide competition in fifty gets over ten participants, and that’s generally when there is little effort involved, meaning they’ll be lower tier to begin with.

Diamond and Ruby Crescents are already two of the least awarded medals in the DB. In 12 years (since Crescents became a thing) there have only been 370ish Diamond Crescents awarded. For comparison, there are almost three times as many Gold Novae awarded) I’d like to know the rationalization behind making these even harder to obtain. For a club that, I’m sorry, is struggling with increasing member activity and participation, why are we lowering the rewards rather than raising them?

Hey Shad, thanks for the thoughts. These changes will be discussed in my report but here’s a rundown. First, the tiers were updated, after which the discussion came up of scaling the participation upgrade line to reflect different participation pools (many BTs don’t even have 10 members). This discussion started with the MAA Staff then spread to the Dark Summit, which is the group that approved the current numbers.

The Tier 2-1 upgrade number was the most discussed and came down to a statistical analysis of participation. The goal was to place the upgrade number around the Q3 mark so that around one fourth of competitions would upgrade based on participation. For competitions that start at Tier 2, the Q3 mark falls at 20 participants. That said, the variance is HUGE because Tier 2 includes DJB-wide stuff plus some clan stuff. A Voice competition pulls less participants than an ACC ladder, inherently. So we dropped the number to 15. You’re “1/50 DB-wide comp pulling over 10 participants” thought is not, I think, statistically accurate. I will say that our stats excluded competitions that pulled 0 participants.

This is to reflect the fact that while some DJB-wide competitions have trouble hitting this number, clouse feuds (which now start at Tier 2) have an easier time, but we wanted to maintain Tier 1 as a fairly exclusive crescent level. It’s meant to be difficult to earn. In some ways, a Diamond crescent is suppose to be rarer than a Gold Nova.

So I like the numbers as they are, but the numbers are also easy to adjust over time as we see what changes.

Additionally, since I think the primary concern here is DC level DJB-wide competitions (like Voice monthlies) that do not always pull 15 participants, I will chat with Mav about potentially creating an exception for regular DC-run competitions automatically starting at 1st due to being DC-run.

Hope this helps explain the reasoning behind the changes.

Honestly, Diamond Crescents are much too rare these days. Traditionally, they were awarded for DC-run DB-wide competitions, and I’m not sure why that changed. Crescents, no matter the “type” should not really be rarer than Novae. Crescents are meant for ongoing activity, and should be rewarded more often.

That being said, what was the impetus for changing this? There have been a lot less high-tier Crescents being awarded as of late, and in most cases the participation levels are well below even the mean. I’m having a hard time reconciling reality versus the need for such changes. We don’t want to award people good crescents? Rather than changing the Crescents, we should probably be looking at ways to boost activity of the competitions themselves. We are at a time where we don’t even award Tier 1 Crescents, therefore the solution is to make it harder to get them? That seems fairly counter-intuitive.

The Tier-5 thing is fine and makes sense in general, but the high-end makes no sense at all. It is bother harder to upgrade from Tier 2 and currently there is no way to award Tier 1 outright. If there was something concrete where these medals were being over-rewarded suddenly then it makes sense, but they clearly are not, so the change is just strange

Personally I take vast exception to this notion. Crescents are not supposed to be rarer than Nova, not at any rate, at any level, nor at any given time. That is not their purpose.

The fact that Diamond Crescents have become such are due to a massive amount of inflation Novas received during the Dark Crusades, and the failings of Club leaders to be providing enough Cr-D level competitions over the years. (Yes, all 12 years).

The Dark Crusade mention is fair and does inflate novae. I have adjusted Tier 1 crescents to be “DC-run DJB wide” so stuff coming from on high starts at the top. Regular DJB-wide stuff run by members starts Tier 2, with the threshold holding at 15 for the time being. Thanks for the discussion and continued updating, all. This stuff is flexible for this very reason.