Community Discussion > Flight Operations
ProPilot FAC
EHM-2198 Didimo:
I am afraid I don't quite agree with one of Hector's comments. If we leave all those very old penalties there they will be weighting down like a concrete shoe and we will NEVER see how much progress we make.
If however, every year you kind of get a swipe of penalties then you can compare with previous years and SEE the progress. That is if previous yearly FACs are kept. Let's face it after you get a hefty penalty such as a crash with the current system you might as well give up your ProPilot career :-) it will never let you rise again. For every step back (like a crash) you will have to make like 100 forward.
Anyway, that is my view and many might disagree. I personally stopped finding PP appealing because of that. I just look at the list of penalties (if any) at the end of a flight and that is it.
EHM-2383 Ian:
I have to say that I fully agree with Didimo. It takes such a long time to build up a decent score with lots and lots of successful flights and then this can be knocked out very rapidly with heavy penalties. While penalties are a good way of keeping one sharp and have to be retained, there is also a need for positive incentive to avoid demoralisation. Perhaps some halfway house, as suggested previously, is the answer.
Ian
EHM-1749 Hector:
Please click on the image to enlarge it.
The black line represents my FAC evolution ever since I made my first PP flight on Nov 5, 2005. It can be seen that there have been a lot of "downs" that have been corrected by learning from the previous mistakes. The big one in March 2008 includes my crash while taking off because I forgot to check my plane weight and balance.
The red line represents what the FAC would be if the penalties were "erased off" at the end of every year so we would start next year as clean as a baby.
My question is: what do we want to see? Nice numbers or our real learning curve?
Yes, there were moments when I really hated PP but every time I felt more challenged. And this is the name of the game: Challenge.
We all start in PP under the same conditions. With zero penalties. It is up to us and only to us to work hard to minimize them.
I agree 100% that there are penalties that should be somehow reviewed because there is no reason to be penalized for beacons off while in cruise level and so on.
Also I am a strong believer that the FAC formula should reward not only the numbers of flights online but also the time online. Flying online involves more chances for penalties specially the overspeeding one due to the sudden change in wind conditions sometimes occurr.
More than once I forgot to turn the landing lights on when descending below 10000 or forgot about the speed limit or forgot to set the QNH because I was very busy talking with the ATC and watching other pilots around. It must be remembered that we have no copilot.
For instance in a ramdom check between pilots in PP flying online and those not connected the average penalty points per flight was about 4 for the pilots not online as compared with about 40 for those flying online. Roughly 10 times higher.
Crashes. It seems also to be a big concern about crashes. Crashes are penalized only 70% which mean 700 points.
Now we have a lot of crashes but what have we learned from them? I learned from mine but I would like to learn from other pilots to avoid doing what they did wrong. We have to write a report and state our theory of what happened. It should be nice if Management would publish those reports say, every month.
Only the reports. We don't need names, what we need is the probable cause.
EHM-2097 Andrei:
I am following this thread since some time without saying anything, so I must warn youthat this will be a long, long post. And with spoilers, too :)
1) As far as I can see, one very hot point of the debate is whether penalties (including crashes) should be "cleaned up" in time. Hector's case in the preceding post is very well stated, and an excellent explanation why we should not do it, however I think the solution stands in this very phrase:
--- Quote ---My question is: what do we want to see? Nice numbers or our real learning curve?
--- End quote ---
By following this thread it looks obvious that there is no single answer to this, so my suggestion here is that we may keep two scores per pilot, one that includes all and a rolling one. We can extend this to maintaining two "top tens", for instance a "best scores in the past 3 months" and a "best all-time scores".
Time for another warning ;D : being one of the developers, unless I get bashed for this idea this WILL be implemented this way. So do not hesitate to comment on this one...
2) Whatever we do to compute the pilot overall scores, one thing is for sure, we need to change the per-flight scoring method. There is still debate within the MT about the details, but the big idea is to grant bonuses for everything the pilot does right instead of subtracting penalties for what he does wrong.
To put it otherwise, a pilot gets nothing for an uncompleted flight (whatever the reason), some bonus for completing the flight in one piece and more bonuses for doing it right (like using the landing lights when AND ONLY WHEN needed).
This change will make necessary to restart FAC calculation at zero for everyone, because there will simply be no way of computing together "old" and "new" scores. I know this will be a blow for some of us (including myself :) ) but this is inevitable if we want to reform the score/penalties system.
3) One aspect still under debate is whether the overall pilot score should be like a "total" (as it is now) or an "average" (like getting a 1..100 score per flight, and compute the average for all flights). Feel free to comment on this, because we will probably implement the most popular option of the two.
4) I have seen, in this thread, very sensible comments about scoring long flights vs. short ones, and we will try to take into account the following principles:
- A 4-hour flight is not twice as difficult to perform as a 2-hour flight, because the most important parts (and those that require pilot workload) are take-off and landing, which occur one time in both cases;
- However this tends to be less true (in the favour of longer flights) when flying online, because in this case there is a continuous workload throughtout the flight (let's ignore the (in)famous "IVAO badge hunters" who do their online long hauls with "Do not disturb" remarks in their FP while going shopping).
Balancing the bonuses for online nd offline flights will definitely be a difficult and delicate thing, because online flights should be encouraged while the EHM policy remains NOT TO FORCE anyone to fly online.
5) Some penalties obviously need revisiting and for now, one method we think of is adding timers. For instance, turning off the lights by mistake will no longer be penalized IF the pilot realizes his mistake and corrects it within seconds.
The same should solve the overspeed problems. I know this is debatable too; Kivanc stated above, and I think he is right, that in real life passengers would not be very forgiving for their pilot going into overspeed.
However, this is one of the things that are more difficult in (MS)FS than real life, because the wind can change from 50kt tailwind to 50kt headwind in a split of a second. This hardly can happen in real life, while it is a common phenomenon for anyone flying online (and happens, in a lesser extent, also when flying offline wth real weather).
In this condition, we simply cannot require pilots to avoid overspeed (or even stall if the wind changes in the opposite direction), because there is no (known) method to do it. The best we can require (and apply penalties to those who don't) in this case is getting out of overspeed / stall within a short, given time.
6) As FL4 was mentioned at some point and Eric-Jean asked about it, here is a rough story of it:
I started the project 2 years ago but I must admit it did not always run at a fast pace. Also, it took me some time because I had lots of technical stuff to learn, both FS-related (like handling FSUIPC) and related to the broader .Net universe.
At this time the FL4 client can be used (and it is used, by me, as stated in some flights comments) to record non-PP flights. Along with massive technical improvements, which are not visible to pilots, let me point out a few new features (that are already developed, so I take no risk in naming them :) ):
- Possibility to save a flight in progress and resume it at a later time;
- Possibility to break a long flight as two connected flights, or land at the alternate and THEN resume to the main destination;
- Possibility to completely perform a flight (including PP) wthout a running Internet connection
- A more comprehensive flight selection mechanism.
So, at this point there is still to develop the whole PP bonus/penalty/scoring system and the user interface also needs a "facelift". This is why this thread about PP scoring happens at the best possible time, because in a few weeks we will have decided what to develop.
I hope I did not get anyone bored with such a long post 8)
Andrei
EHM-0654 Murray:
--- Quote from: EHM-2097 Andrei on September 17, 2009, 07:35:24 am ---1) ...By following this thread it looks obvious that there is no single answer to this, so my suggestion here is that we may keep two scores per pilot, one that includes all and a rolling one. We can extend this to maintaining two "top tens", for instance a "best scores in the past 3 months" and a "best all-time scores".
2) ...but the big idea is to grant bonuses for everything the pilot does right instead of subtracting penalties for what he does wrong.
3) One aspect still under debate is whether the overall pilot score should be like a "total" (as it is now) or an "average" (like getting a 1..100 score per flight, and compute the average for all flights). Feel free to comment on this, because we will probably implement the most popular option of the two.
4) I have seen, in this thread, very sensible comments about scoring long flights vs. short ones, and we will try to take into account the following principles...
--- End quote ---
Just want to take a few moments to backup/expand upon/refute some of the things Andrei has said.
Point 1. leading into point 2.; the suggestion of ignoring some penalties was made as a stop-gap measure to be applied to the current FAC calculation *ONLY* (to give those of us with hugely negative FACs a chance). FLv4/PPv3 and it's new skills-focused scoring will totally negate the need to ever remove penalties from the pilot record. As a pilot's skills improve, their FAC will *IMMEDIATELY* reflect the improvement, not in a few years time (current FAC). Personally, I don't see any mileage being gained in operating two calculations on the new scoring, but a feature that will be easy to provide under the new mechanism would be allowing pilots to download a file of all their flights/scores and you can "play" with them in Excel/OOO Calc as you see fit.
Point 3.; I think I've made it clear that I'm firmly in the "0-100" camp: statistics on what will essentially be a percentage are ever so easy ;). However, we value the membership's opinion on this matter as nothing is yet written: if you all prefer a "big number" approach, as currently undertaken, *LET US KNOW*
Point 4.; I, as much as any of you, are fully aware of the skills difference between online and offline flying, especially in the departure and arrival phases of flight - TBH, I've not noticed a great deal of difference in cruise though, and that's where the majority of most flights are made. I personally feel that a flat "online flight" bonus better reflects this than an online time-based bonus does, with an additional "overall flight time" bonus, and then with the new pilot skills points added in you should be rightly rewarded, whether online or offline.
Points 5. and 6. I cannot really add any more to; I've either made my point(s) clearly elsewhere in this thread, or it's stuff I can't really comment on (as I'm not developing the FLv4 client ;D)
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