A way forward for SOTA scoring and mapless associations.

Notices
61

Agreed. Winds are often the most hazardous factor on UK mountains and should never be underestimated, particularly when combined with heavy rain or snow. Mountains in wintery weather can be dangerous anywhere in the world. But the UK’s latitude and persistently high-speed winds and very rapidly-changing wx conditions have led even to experienced continental mountaineers & hillwalkers underestimating them based on altitude alone.

This is yet one more factor in making comparisons [and applying points] based on summit difficulty across SOTA regions meaningless. IMO, under any practical summits-points scheme, activators should use their points to compare their own achievements year to year. If so inclined, they might want to compare themselves with others activating in the same Association(s).

Yet another factor that makes comparisons pointless IMO, is time available and access to SOTA summits. I’m retired and have a lot of free time and live less than 60-minutes’ drive of ~50 SOTA summits, where as many full-time workers with young families might have little spare time and live many hours’ drive from the nearest SOTA summit. I think any comparison of our annual points would be silly.

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@G8CPZ Andy your last paragraph resonated with me, and thanks for it. My challenge with SOTA is not the elevation, or climbing conditions, or weather, or radio. By far the biggest challenge is being able to carve out a day for the hike in my calendar. The continuous series of free weekends I had this summer was an anomaly in our family, but now that we’re back to normal I know my SOTA activity will be much more sparse… hope to get from 95 to 100 points by end of year :crying_cat: Can’t complain though, having a full family needing attention is, from other perspectives, a good thing :smile:

Because of this single challenge, even though I’m determined to get to MG, I am not expecting that to happen before 2035.

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Indeed. That’s the way that it works in reality. Activators are getting a 150% bonus on 2 pointers, and there’s places where there’s two or more of them clustered together for a lucrative winter day out!

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Andrew, do you think people will want to put any effort into a concrete and well-organised proposal for change after reading that? I feel like the SOTA award scheme is made by UK hams, for UK hams, based on UK topography. Period. The rest of us either adapt or leave. Well, fair enough then. We’ll deal with it, no problem :slight_smile:

Yes and no. For instance, the points awarded for a one-day hike here are about double what you would get for a ten days alpine expedition at Denali. I don’t mean to be offensive — I just wanted to spark some discussion. Cheers

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Take that up with Tom, please. Those aren’t my words.

But, what Tom is highlighting in a perhaps overly absolute manner is that another complexity with any proposal that gets made that does need to be considered - does this encourage behaviour that might be considered unsafe or incentivise activators to take risks beyond their capabilities?

My understanding around the seasonal bonus(*) period discussions when that was brought in (before my time on the MT) is that there was a lot of concern that it would get people out on the summits when they perhaps shouldn’t, but as this thread has pointed out - it does tend to incentivise people activating lower summits for Seasonal Bonus so achieves its aim of encouraging activity, and doesn’t appear to have encouraged much reckless behaviour on its own.

Indeed, the favourite activity of most activators during winter periods in SOTA is to discuss the scoring system on the reflector, and/or prominence discussions :wink:

I’ll say again, I (and the rest of the MT) don’t have a monopoly on good ideas. A well proposed solution will be looked at and considered, and feedback given. To date, there haven’t been too many that address the complexities we experience, which means most of what happens is tinkering at the edges (challenges, technology updates, etc).

(*) Not all associations have a winter bonus - some have summer bonus instead.

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66

While I put in in very tongue and cheek language, I will make my suggestion a little more seriously as food for thought.

Evaluation of difficulty requires experience. We have a group of dedicated activators, Mountain Goats, who have put in at the very least a huge amount of time and effort into the project. I would recommend that we give some additional meaning to MGs and allow them to use their experience and allow a “difficulty” bonus of up to 3 points. I would allow nominations and proposed difficulty bonuses to accrue during the year and have a once/year survey to MGs, restrited to MGs who have actually done a proposed summit. I would then award the bonus as "round(mean(MG awarded bonuses))”.

Perhaps we would want to allow the bonuses to be retro-active for the past year, perhaps we would want first activators to get the difficulty bonus, perhaps it is only go forward.

Yes, this is far from perfect, and I don’t expect it to level particularly well between associations, but it would provide a meaningful evaluation of difficulty based off experience and judgement. I think we can all agree that some summits are harder than others.

Personally, I don’t see a strong need for difficulty bonuses, but one thing I do like about this approach is increased community engagement and an additional perk for those who put the work in to become MGs. The downside is an additional layer of complexity and an additional place.

One completely separate approach here is to just include in the database a “difficulty rating” that every activator can contribute to, but that has no bearing on points.

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Like a good christmas pudding, everyone has to give it a stir.

All anyone has to do is implement a shadow calculation tool that computes their ruleset, and then they can play by the rules they think is best. No-one appears to be arguing over which summits should be included, so the main database of activations remains valid. If activators want to compete with someone(s) then likewise compute their new score.

Personally, I’m working my way towards activating all 122 of the real GM/ES summits, and currently have a score of eleventy twelveen.

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For my idea described above here, to illustrate the points adjustments one would have to write some code that simulates a cohort of activators, each adjusting summits from the DB by certain values using non-uniform random sampling from a distribution centered near some value, and additionally simulates the accrual of adjustments over time. That’s doable. One could plot it then as a time series to see how the values of summits are growing or dropping. The center values would not be real. To make them closer to real one would have to look for actual feedback from activators, or comments about the summits, e.g. look into reflector DB with activation reports, see what people say (“dammit that should have been 50 not 10 points”), or into articles associated with summits. Still doable… but is there appetite for this.

For the second part of my idea (summits which have 0 activations and are presumably difficult), this is even simpler, I just did a rough simulation, hope the AI didn’t make any mistakes in coding because I was too lazy to write the calculation code myself this evening. Here are top 10-point summits which have never been activated, but have a certain number of 10-point summits close to them (within 10 km radius) which have been activated more than 5 times. The number of such summits in proximity is listed too.

Probably very good candidates to significantly increase point value, but of course would have to be manually reviewed. Only currently active summits included.

Piz Bever,13
Piz Bleis Marscha,13
Piz Prüna,11
Kurobebetsusan,10
Piz da las Blais,10
Nakayama,8
Piz Cambrena,8
Piz Duan,8
Chastelhorn,7
Hoch Dukan/​Piz Ducan,7
La Tsavre/​Mont Ferret,7
Piz Paradis,7
Piz Serengia,7
Piz Uffiern,7
Rocca San Giovanni,7
Roche des Prés,7
Senninyama,7
Corn da Camp,6
(...400+ more...)

Some ad-hoc eyeballing shows that they are indeed damn difficult. The full list of potential “difficult summits with easy neighbors” where the number of neighbors activated > 5 times is at least 2, has over 400 candidates.

One could dive more into this and refine the algorithm, and the code, and start the discussion about by how much to increase value, what to do with the already-activated neighbors which will now be cooperatively undervalued, or how to simulate adjustments by activators (first part of my idea), then one would have to devise a process of manual reviews of adjustments which is an exercise in running a distributed moderation business, all doable, but one needs to see the appetite for this while there seems to be none.

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@EI8JEB @KM6AM

Any idea that relies on a number of votes, or the number of activations in an area is only going to have any impact on well populated associations with relatively easy peaks.

ZL3 has 4023 SOTA summits, of which 3206 have some form of public legal access (the rest are on private land, permission required).

There are ~2700 activations recorded. 533 peaks have been activated at least once. But over half (1420) of all activations are from just 47 peaks - the only 47 peaks to have 10 or more activations recorded.

So the only summits that would qualify for an up-vote in difficulty bonus are the easiest, most accessible 47 that don’t deserve a difficulty bonus. And (it would take some GIS playing to prove) but these are also probably the only areas with enough ‘nearby activations’ to try and identify difficult peaks based on activation frequency.

The main reason that many of the remaining ~2600 public-access peaks do not have any activations is that they are either:

  • Many days walk to reach their base
  • Technical alpine summit requiring ropes, anchors, multiple climbers present
  • The wrong side of major rivers, lakes that would require boat, helicopter, packraft or similar to cross

Neither of the above suggestions would have any impact on addressing and rewarding the difficulties around these summits - some of the hardest in the SOTA scheme in terms of time, equipment and preparation required. Both proposals would both reward activators on technically difficult peaks in well visited, easily accessible areas, whilst ignoring the challenges of the vast wildernesses that many associations contain.

==

And this is the problem with all the suggestions I’ve seen so far. They target a specific problem relevant to a specific association, rewarding operators in that region, whilst ignoring the vast range of diversity of challenges that affect SOTA operators worldwide.

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70

In a system perceived already as unfair, isn’t a proposal that makes the point value of some summits more fair worth considering? Global mapping systems work that way. The fact that we don’t have enough ground truth data somewhere does not mean we should not improve the quality of the map elsewhere.

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The system is currently consistently unfair. What I warn against is alterations such as the above that benefit some associations to the detriment of others. That, to me, makes it more unfair, not less.

Likewise, there are things we could do to improve fairness in an objective manner. With good GIS data we could give bonusses based on distance_from_road, elevation_gain_from_road, presence/absence of tracks, climate, elevation_relative_to_permanent_snowline, gradient, etc.

But again, that would benefit 1st-world countries with good free access to quality government geographic data (e.g. ZL) and further restrict opportunities for the ‘mapless associations’ the thread title aims to help. So I do not propose them.

Any scoring system is a balance between fairness (in terms of rewarding effort) and fairness (in terms of giving SOTA access to the widest range of DXCC). Which is why, for me, simpler is better.

Keep it Stupid Simple

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The only truly equitable system I can think of that benefits all associations would follow the first parapraph or so of the original post (before it got silly!), and require a GPS tracklog to be submitted for every activation running from roadend to summit. Then apply some distance, time, gradient, elevation metrics to that (with additional rules around how to do this for multi-summit trips)

But speaking as someone who has to submit tracklogs daily to clients from my team of workers, maintaining such a system and dealing with all the data errors would be an absolute nightmare. And I already spend hours every week where someone forgot to stop track recording at the end of the day, or their battery went flat, or they accidentally submitted the entire contents of their GPS to the system.

If such a system were introduced, I pity anyone who volunteers to run it!

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73

Absolutely hear what you are saying here. A few thoughts,

One option here would be to give a first activator a vote regardless of experience. Another would be to allow the MGs to vote based on a narrative if no MGs have activated the particular summit. I don’t think you would have a challenge getting bonus difficulty points awarded for the situations you describe!

The main advantage I would see of this scheme as opposed to a “technological” approach is that the set of factors that make a summit easy or challenging is enormous and very difficult to capture with pre-defined metric. If we want to account for difficulty, then it seems the best metric is “how difficult was it to do, compared to other summits” and in order to do the comparison some experience is required. This is definitely not a perfect scheme, and thinking through these kinds of issues could make it quite a bit better.

Taking a step back from the specific proposal above, maybe it’s better to just ask the question:

What would be best/fairest way be to get difficulty feedback from activators and use this to develop a difficulty bonus?

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The one thing I definitely do agree with you on is that any such proposal should take the form of a ‘bonus’ rather than a tinkering with the baseline number of points per summit. That way there is consistency through the years over the number of summit points every activator to a specific summit has received, even if the bonus points get tinkered with (as they have in the past with shifting winter bonus elevations & dates).

==

Anyway - I’m off for a 2-3 day wander round the Silverpeaks to string together a series of 2-pointers and earn a completely disproportionate number of 3 point winter bonuses, before winter bonus season ends.

That’s the fun of unfair systems: sometimes its fun to play the game, sometimes its fun to game the rules.

Be interesting to see where this discussion has gone by the time I get back!

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I think the best way to improve scoring would be to add more point bands. Why not have bands for 3, 5, 7, and 9 point summits? It would be straightforward to implement, and no less fair than the current system.

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Not all MG’s are created equal. That too depends on where they live, and where they climb their hills.

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As far as summits are concerned, geography is unfair. It doesn’t evenly distribute summits of varying heights across the globe. There are vast areas that are flat enough to have no summits, and areas with summits so high as to make mere survival a challenge. Even with a set of summits of almost the same height, some will be relatively easy to ascend, while others are close to impossible. I think it is inevitable that the scoring system will seem unfair, if only because you can’t argue with the geography (or the geology, or the weather).

I think the SOTA scoring system has proved to be pretty good, all things considered. Sure there are a few glitches, especially when you compare nearby summits in neighbouring associations, but quite often that comes down to one or other of the associations having been created early on, when the rules were less well understood by all. Sometimes it comes down to trying to make the scheme available to more areas. (See, for example, the few P100 associations.)

I agree that’s a non-starter. What proportion of activators would have that facility, even these days, anyway? Sure, some of the more serious ones would, but it’d be an additional (and non-trivial) hurdle for new activators to get over.

That is horribly subjective, and takes no account of there possibly being different routes of very different difficulties. I scrambled up one of the routes to the top of Helvellyn on a wet summer day. It was a bit slippery, and we nearly had to retreat because one of our group struggled with the exposed nature of parts of the route. Others came by a much trickier route and had to wait their turn on an exposed ridge to get through a needle’s eye. Yet others had wandered up long gentle paths pushing kiddy strollers. How would you classify that summit’s difficulty?

Collecting information about the difficulty of various routes is definitely helpful for activators coming along later (and there’s always space in the summit pages for more notes about each summit), but I can see no point in trying to make a “difficulty bonus” work. Even the geography is against it.

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…and just add in that any variable subjective points bonus is going to be an absolute nightmare to deal with in the database.
Do changes ripple back to earlier activations?
What happens when a bonus gets decreased?
How do you avoid folk “gaming” the bonus?

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April 1st post from Richard?

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No it was a satirical take on people telling the MT they had everything wrong that Richard posted in 2008 or so.

I have learnt something important… When posting a joke or something not to be taken seriously make sure to tag a smiley on the end. Lest threads like this develop :wink:

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