Make CSS useful again!

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Herzbube
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Make CSS useful again!

Post by Herzbube »

You may have noticed this weird number next to the score of your animal. It is called CSS, which stands for "Cross-Species Scoring", and it is meant as a way to compare animals or trophies of different species.
Let us imagine you and your buddy hunting. You hunt a beautiful whitetail deer with a score of 205. Your buddy on the other hand shoots a Canada goose with a score of 8950 from the sky. These animal scores are based on real life scoring guidelines such as that of Boone & Crockett and are quite complicated to calculate. You both feel very happy and proud of those trophies, but you also wonder:
- Is a animal score of 205 even good for a whitetail deer?
- How does it compare to other whitetails?
- How does my buddy's Canada goose compare to other Canada geese?
- Could he win a tournament for Canada geese with an animal score of 8950?
- And how does my whitetail compare to his Canada goose?
As you can see, we measure whitetail deer and Canada geese with different scales. This makes perfect sense, because the animal score of the whitetail is partially based on the form and size of its antlers. Geese don't have antlers (as far as I know) so they need a different scoring system. And Roosevelt elks do have antlers, but they come in different forms and sizes than the ones of whitetail deer. Therefore we need a separate scoring system for them as well. In fact, we need a different scoring system for every species in the game. This is what the developers must have thought too which is why each species has a unique way of calculating the animal score. It is a very good system but there's one problem: comparing animals becomes difficult, because they are measured with different scales. Some species have animal scores ranging from 15 to 28. Others have animal scores going from 2500 all the way up to 9000. How are we supposed to compare those? And furthermore, we can't even compare animals of the same species without prior knowledge of the range of the animal score. For example if we shoot a turkey with an animal score of 70.750 we have to check the leaderboard and/or the Wiki first to know that this seems to be a very, very high score for a turkey and will probably land us in the Top Five of this season.

Here's where the CSS is supposed to come into play as a normalized variable. It is presented right next to the animal score and according to the Wiki it should help comparing animals of different species. So if a person without knowledge of animal scores for brown bears looked at a brown bear with a CSS of e.g. 99, this person would instantly know:"Aha, the animal score of this brown bear seems to be very high. This CSS 99 brown bear compared to other brown bears is equal to my CSS 99 pheasant compared to other pheasants."
What the CSS is supposed to be doing is putting animal scores of different species on the same scale. A very easy way of doing this is by using percentages. Let me explain:
- If we want to compare the performance of a striker to another striker, we may look at the number of goals they have scored this season. If Messi has scored 50 goals this season and Neymar 25, then Messi has performed better. We can even create a list and give each professional striker in this world a ranking. To make sense of the number of goals per season we need to know what number is considered "good" though. Someone from the USA without any relation to football may not know whether 49 goals per season are good or not (e.g. in basketball some players have 30 scores per game). He first has to look at the leaderboard and after seeing Messi at the top with 50 goals he then can conclude that a professional striker who scores 49 goals per season must be one of the very best.

- If we want to compare two students, we can look at their grades. We can do this for every student in a class and rank them from highest to lowest. Is Mary with an average grade of 5.9 good? Well, after looking at the leaderboard which goes from 5.9 at the top down to 3.3 at the bottom, we can conclude that Mary is the best in class.

--> This is what animal scores do in this game. We can compare animals within the same species, but we have to have prior knowledge of the range of the animal score.

- Now let us compare the performance of professional strikers to the performance of students. We would be very confused because goals per season and average grade are two completely different scales and can not really be compared. But if we compare any given score to the maximum score of its respective field, we can suddenly make statements like this:"Ronaldo has performed 95% as as well as Messi when it comes to goals per season. William performed 95% as well as Mary when it comes to grades. Both seem to have performed equally well in their respective fields."

--> This is what CSS is supposed to be doing. It should be calculating the percentage share of an animal score in the maximum animal score of this species.
This is how it should work in theory. Unfortunately the formula for calculating the CSS includes a species specific multiplier:

CSS = (Score - Min_Score) / (Max_Score - Min_Score) * 100 * Species_Multiplier

The part that comes before the Species_Multiplier basically just calculates the percentage share of your score in the maximum score of this species (e.g. "the animal score of my turkey is 60% of the max. possible animal score for turkeys"). In addition to this they have also added the species specific multiplier marked in red. This means that each species has a different minimum and maximum CSS. Therefore we are not able to tell if a CSS of 40 is high or not without knowing the species. So we have the same problem from animal scores again: we are measuring each species with a differnt scale. As of now, the CSS is a useless variable and does not work as intended. Even worse: it is redundant, because we already have a species specific score (the animal scores based on Boone & Crockett).

Why did they even add this "useless" multiplier though? While having a score like CSS is nice for comparing animals of different species it also comes with problems. Some animals are much easier to hunt than others. Some animals are not only hard to hunt but also quite rare compared to others. So the CSS score attempts to give us a simple number by which we can compare animals but also tries to incorporate the effort we have to put into hunting said animals. This is done with the Species_Multiplier which makes the entire CSS useless.

I propose a very simple solution which will make the CSS a useful number for comparing animal scores:

CSS = (Score - Min_Score) / (Max_Score - Min_Score) * 100

Just take out the Species_Multiplier. Done. If we now see a pheasant with a CSS of 70 we know that the animal score of this pheasant is 70% of the maximum animal score for pheasants. Therefore it is a mediocre pheasant at best. Yes, we can't say anything about how difficult it is to hunt pheasants, but is this really necessary to know at a glance whether it is harder to hunt a CSS 66 black bear or a CSS 66 blacktail deer? I don't think so. At least we know at a glance that the black bear and blacktail deer reached 66% of the maximum animal score for their species. It is much more important to have a useful variable with which we can easily compare animal scores within species and across them.
Last edited by Herzbube on November 9th, 2018, 4:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Fletchette
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Re: Make CSS useful again!

Post by Fletchette »

Yes, as you stated, the problem is they tried to do two incompatible things with CSS. The first is what many people and comp hosts call "normalized" scoring, where each species is scored on a scale like 1-100, and can therefore be compared on an individual bases.

Unfortunately they also wanted to use CSS as the measure in multi-species comps where cumulative CSS was the goal, and as is tracked and compared in the multi-player games stats page (F3). This resulted in the comps turning into goose and duck slaughters, because you can accumulated points so much faster with those animals. Even when they would exclude waterfowl, people would still focus on the species that could be killed faster, rather than focusing on quality (score). This is why they introduced the species multiplier, in an attempt prevent quantity outweighing quality in these comps. Predictably, this didn't work because people will always figure out the most effective strategy to accumulate points.

The result was that CSS is now not effective for either purpose and is rarely if ever used for anything. This is why community comps usually use a derived "normalized" score as mentioned above. In fact I think the UHC comp platform has that function built in if the host chooses to use it.
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HooCairs
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Re: Make CSS useful again!

Post by HooCairs »

Where in the game does CSS matter? Unless EW forgets and does another CSS based mega event you can simply forget it. We used to collect numbers and stuff but that was never of any value.

In March 2015 they said they were going to overhaul the CSS but never followed through.

http://news.thehunter.com/status-update-122
We hear you, appreciate this feedback and are looking to make adjustment to CSS system, so we can offer a properly balanced score system which will reflects the difficulty of harvesting quality animals within each category and rewards accordingly.
If they did not do this with a larger team, why would they do it now when they seen to be running the show on a bare minimum. I don't know their staff count, but we had seen new hires all the time, replacing others or growing the team, but not in a long while now. I cannot imagine they have all stayed with the company. There is no money to be made in fixing the CSS. If EW was my company, it might have someone remove it at most, but certainly not to work on improving it.
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Herzbube
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Re: Make CSS useful again!

Post by Herzbube »

So is the game dead and only the bare minimums are kept running until the profit made gets too small? Because adjusting the CSS would literally take a few seconds. They'd just have to delete one single variable or set it to 1.
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OrLoko
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Re: Make CSS useful again!

Post by OrLoko »

Sounds simple to solve, if they want to keep the CSS they should add the Normalised just beside it, that would be amazing!
Because when you start hunting a new specie you don't have any ideia of score, with the Normalised value that is much better.
  • Player harvested a Wild Boar. Score: 833.659. CSS 46.53 CSSN 62.04, Harvest Value: 100
  • Player harvested a Whitetail Deer. Score: 192.836. CSS 106.00 (88.33), Harvest Value: 100
  • Extra Ideia
  • Player harvested a <fur variation> <animal>...
  • Player harvested a Grey Eurasian Lyxn. Score: 9.799 CSS 116.58 (72.86), Harvest Value: 100
WHAT IS THE POINT OF BEEN "OUTDOOR PROOF" IF THE PROBLEM WAS INSIDE THE WHOLE TIME
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