FB Guidelines for 2024 Season

Marathon and Sprint information for the 2024 season
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UBT - Timbo
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FB Guidelines for 2024 Season

Post by UBT - Timbo »

Hi all

Yeti asked about this, so here is a quick and dirty set of basic guidelines as to how the 2024 Season will operate.

1) The Season starts as from 1st January each year and ends of 31st December. 2024 is an exception, as Sebastien was going to stop running Formula BOINC in 2024, until I offered to take on this responsibility. As such, the website needed to be re-coded to make it ready for 2024, so the season started officially on 28th February.

2) The projects for the Marathon are those deemed to have sufficient BOINC tasks available for Teams and Members to process. FB points are awarded based on the BOINC credits earned at the end of the year. FB points are awarded based on their League position from 1st (earning 25 FB pts) down to 10th (earning 1 FB point).

The projects chosen for 2024 are listed here:

https://formula-boinc.org/marathons.py? ... nding=team

New Teams and Members can register directly via our website here:

https://formula-boinc.org/howtoregister.py

Only FOUNDERS of Teams can register a Team. But ANY individual can register to take part in the Members League whether they are a team member or they are unaffiliated.

Previously registered Teams and Members will have their registrations carried forward to the following year, UNLESS they wish to have their Team/Members registration cancelled.

3) There are various Sprint Challenges that take place on the same days as the primary F1 race with each Sprint ending at the same hour as the F1 race is scheduled to end (ie there is normally a 2 hour race window which cannot be exceeded, UNLESS there are external circumstances like weather or race incidents).

Sprints are announced without any advance notice, in order to limit bunkering.

Any project can be selected from the published Sprint list for any Sprint event.

The projects chosen for each Sprint will be published here on the forum as well as on the FB website here:

https://formula-boinc.org/sprints.py?ra ... nding=team

4) The project for each Sprint is randomly chosen from a sub-set of the Marathon project list as we have to determine if the project can handle a significant increase in demand for work units, downloads, as well as being able to award BOINC credits in a timely way. Some projects are run on minimal hardware or bandwidth, which may cause a Sprint to cause the project to go offline.

(The following function is not working at present: FB points are again awarded based on the relative performance of each team ON EACH day of each Sprint. So, a Team in 1st place on Day One will earn 25/3 = 8.333 FB points. A Team in second place will earn 18/3 FB points. The FB points awarded on EACH day of the Sprint are then added together to give the final FB points for each Sprint.)

This is to try and smooth out the uploading of work units on each Sprint day, rather than causing issues on the final day when a) it is possible that the project server could be overloaded, with multiple hosts all trying to upload in the last hour or so and b) some tasks may not be credited due to a project quorum of >1 and hence it is fairer to ALL Teams and members if completed tasks are uploaded as soon as they are completed, allowing the quorum to be met DURING the Sprint. This also limits the possibility of hosts cancelling any bunkered tasks at the end of the Sprint, which then have to be put back into the projects download queue.

5) For 2024, the Marathon is split into 3 Team Leagues, based on the performance of teams in the 2023 season. There will be at least one "mid-season" date, when Teams will be promoted or relegated from one Leagues and be moved to another League. This will be based on the efforts made by each team over the period of time before the "mid-season" date is chosen. The hope is that this will allow stronger, better performing teams to face each other, while weaker teams, will be competing with other similar teams.

The entire teams stats are collated from the various project websites, so the entire teams efforts are rewarded from 1st position (earning 25 FB pts) down to 10th (earning 1 FB point).

For Members a separate Championship was created in 2023, and Members need to register so that their individual stats can be collated. Again, a promotion/demotion date will be set and Members will be promoted/demoted based on their 2024 performance up to that date.

6) There is no issue with Members switching teams at any point as the FB stats only collect Teams total BOINC credit stats from the start of the Season, irrespective of which Member earned them.

NB) There might be other rules I've forgotten about, so I reserve the right to add to or amend the above as and when.

regards
Tim
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