Parish level. Never national. Here is the argument.
Named after Chapter 32, and kept firmly inside a parish of about four hundred people, because a national table with forty thousand names on it tells thirty-nine thousand nine hundred of them that they are losing at buying jam.
The Cotswolds, this season.
Ten rows out of four hundred and twelve, positioned around you rather than around the top. The board never opens on somebody else’s victory.
The Cotswolds · 412 membersSeason to date · resets 1 October
- 01 A member near Chipping Norton Eleven check-ins, two patches, the whole archive 1,840
- 02 A member in Chadlington Nine check-ins, a cask filled, a box unbroken 1,610
- 03 A member near Burford Fourteen check-ins, no purchases at all 1,480
- 04 A member in Ascott-under-Wychwood Six check-ins, a patch, two people roped in 1,290
- 05 Youyou Seven check-ins, a patch, a cask and a box 1,140
- 06 A member in Enstone Four check-ins, the archive, a hedgerow adopted 1,020
- 07 A member in Kingham Twelve check-ins, nothing else 960
- 08 A member in Stow Two check-ins, one very large order 780
- 09 A member near Shipton Three check-ins, a box, half the archive 620
- 10 A member in Milton-under-Wychwood One check-in, in February, which counts double 410
Parish boards only. There is no national table, on purpose, and the argument for that is directly underneath this one.
Why a national leaderboard is a bad idea, in five steps.
This is the single most argued-over design decision in the whole membership scheme, so here is the reasoning rather than an assertion.
-
A national table is a machine for producing losers
With forty thousand members and one table, thirty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety people open it and discover they are nowhere. That is not a competition. It is a ranking of how much money people have spent, published to the people who spent less.
The top one per cent enjoy it enormously. Everybody else looks once and never looks again, which is exactly what every scheme that has tried this has found.
A leaderboard that ninety-nine per cent of people close immediately is a feature with a negative return.
-
Scale destroys the only thing a board is for
A leaderboard works because you recognise the names on it. Four hundred people in a parish means the person above you might be somebody you have queued behind, and the person below you might be your neighbour.
At national scale the names are strangers and the numbers are unreachable. There is no story in being four thousandth.
-
Spending-based ranking is just an income table
If the score is money, the board ranks disposable income and dresses it up as achievement. That is unpleasant at any scale and worse at national scale, where the top is occupied by people who bought a cask.
So the score here is weighted heavily towards turning up. Fourteen check-ins and no purchases sits third on that board, above a member who has filled a cask.
-
A parish is a real thing and a nation is not
A parish here is about four hundred people who share a bit of geography. That is roughly the size at which a village hall notice board works, and the whole system is modelled on a village hall notice board rather than on a game.
The twelve parishes never compare against each other either. There is no league of parishes, because that just reinvents the national table with more steps.
-
And it must be possible to leave
One switch removes you from every board, including your own view of it. There is no partial opt-out, no anonymous placement and no ghost entry.
About one member in nine turns it off, which is a considerably higher proportion than any of us expected and a good argument for having built the switch first.
How the score is actually built.
| Doing this | Points | Why it is weighted that way |
|---|---|---|
| Checking in on site | 60 | The highest single line. Turning up is the behaviour worth buying |
| Checking in during February | 120 | Because the car park has four cars in it and somebody should come |
| An order of any size | 30 | Flat. Not proportional to spend, deliberately |
| Every £50 spent | 10 | Present, but capped at 300 points a season |
| Taking a patch to delivery | 200 | A season of attention, not a transaction |
| Reading a chapter | 10 | Free to earn, which is the point of including it |
| Roping somebody in | 150 | Once they have kept the order past the returns window |
| A parish challenge completed | 100 each | Awarded to every participant, not to the fastest |
What resets, and what does not.
The board resets on the first of October, at the end of the farming year, which is also when the patch grid reopens. Everybody starts at zero.
That is frequent enough that nobody becomes permanently unbeatable and infrequent enough that a season means something. Weekly resets produce a treadmill; annual resets produce a table that has been settled since March.
What does not reset is your best season, which stays on your profile, and the three-year badge, which is on the calendar rather than on the board.
The board, questioned.
You can see how many members each has and what challenges they are running. You cannot see their scores, because a parish-against-parish comparison is a national table with extra steps.
Because the board is rendered around you. Opening a leaderboard on somebody else’s victory is a design decision, and it is the wrong one.
No. Spend is capped at three hundred points a season out of a realistic maximum of about two and a half thousand.
Change your parish in Faffing. Your score moves with you, which has caused exactly one argument.
The challenges the board scores.
Six of them, time-boxed, and all six are community goals rather than individual ones.
Elsewhere on the estate.
/estate/the-money/
/estate/recording/
/estate/sitemap/
