BadBertie
Agree with Punchy there. While I have found this tzc entertaining and amusing, as a race/competition it was over from day one. To try and balance teams, handicaps or whatever, you are trying to artificially make the teams identical in performance. And where's the fun in that.
The entertainment in this tzc for me has been the freedom/possibility for Mountain and Central to up their game and it may still be a very close finish tomorrow.
Where you have teams of a complete mix of ppd, limited by expense effectively, you need to devise a contest of skill rather than brute force. The only example I could think of is daft but goes like: random number generates a total 24hr points production for each of the teams to achieve but not exceed. Teams or team captains nominate the "players" for each day's target production score. Closest to the total wins a point, over shooting deducts points. To allow for continuous play for a couple of weeks, the 14 daily random numbers are all announced on day 1 to allow teamwork and planning. It would be a pain to administer but largely removes the advantage of the big guns.

Any contest where it is advantageous to limit production is counterproductive to one the primary goals of contests.

troy8d

BadBertie
Agree with Punchy there. While I have found this tzc entertaining and amusing, as a race/competition it was over from day one. To try and balance teams, handicaps or whatever, you are trying to artificially make the teams identical in performance. And where's the fun in that.
The entertainment in this tzc for me has been the freedom/possibility for Mountain and Central to up their game and it may still be a very close finish tomorrow.
Where you have teams of a complete mix of ppd, limited by expense effectively, you need to devise a contest of skill rather than brute force. The only example I could think of is daft but goes like: random number generates a total 24hr points production for each of the teams to achieve but not exceed. Teams or team captains nominate the "players" for each day's target production score. Closest to the total wins a point, over shooting deducts points. To allow for continuous play for a couple of weeks, the 14 daily random numbers are all announced on day 1 to allow teamwork and planning. It would be a pain to administer but largely removes the advantage of the big guns.

Any contest where it is advantageous to limit production is counterproductive to one the primary goals of contests.

Maybe we need to  Re-Post the "primary goals of contests"
For the most part I thought it was In Team competition.
Whether we Fold as a single user within our team or in a competition then end is still Folding.  

Punchy
I think texinga was on to something, that it's not total population but population of folders in a given geography.  However, I'd go a step further and say it's not just the population of folders but also the distribution of production of those folders.  For example, if a "time zone" contained only brilong at 16 million PPD alone, it doesn't really matter how many other folders are in that time zone.
 
There are really only 2 possibilities here: either an unbalanced competition based on some attribute of each person (whether it's time zone, latitude, longitude, birthday, last digit of phone number or postal code, etc), or a "balanced" competition that again groups people by some attribute but then attempts to balance things somehow.
 
The current TZC is a hybrid of the 2: there weren't enough non-North-American folders to balance out EST, so it was a given that EST would stand alone and win.  The "extras" were allocated between Pacific and Mountain to at least balance those out.  However, this competition has been the most dramatic demonstration ever of how "balancing" fails.  Balancing only works if people are accurate with their production estimates.  Hence the registration rule:

• All information must be reported as accurately as possible during registration.

When the information isn't accurate, balancing won't work.  In previous competitions we have put caps on production for "overachievers", but even that won't really work, because then the winning team is the one where the most members come closest to the cap (thus rewarding the team with the most sandbaggers).
 
I think we should abandon the notion of balanced competitions for good, and come up with some other way of assigning people that gives us a reasonably even distribution and "let the chips fall where they may" as texinga said, or come up with some other way of picking a winner.

 
I totally agree with the accuracy problem
we had people that posted too low and some posted way to high (Which left teammates scrambling to make up deficits)
and you have the few that might post PPD numbers intentionally low
 
I posted 50-70k PPD myself - would have been happy to do that and still game
but when teammates can't deliver - hardware fails - ooops someone posted too high a PPD ...now we have to make the shortfall...i sacrificed my having my stress relief activity...
Im going back to that after midnight tonight (because we should be over 100M and any Wu would be way after we are over the line)
 
Im not stopping ..just going back to a regular take it easy and game mode
 
 
why not quit the Lets fill in how much we can deliver and - go by your PPD avg during your best month(s) 
(do not include bad months - because people may not fold some months)
 

I am very busy these days, but I'll leave my $.02.  I have always felt the TZC is an inherently unbalanced contest.  For those of you who don't know, it originated with Zerran2001 and for the first 2 years Central won, the next two years Eastern won and it looks like that hasn't changed this year.  Unfortunately, ETZ has the highest population density and when I raised the participation of the contest it increased the sample size of folders we were drawing from and magnified that difference.  Yet, it always seemed that people were fond of the TZC and it held a certain charm among members of this team so that despite is inherent design flaws and as such I felt it worthwhile to continue. 
 
It was fully my intention to do two things to make this contest more balanced/interesting, but I simply did not have the time with a crazy busy schedule this semester. 

• I would like to see the results of the competition when it is weighted by population (excluding the additional points of the international participants) - I ran some rough estimates of this a year or two ago and found it makes the race much more interesting. Think of it along the lines of a points per capita competition in each time zone and the team that would win would be the one that was able to turn out a larger portion of its folders (assuming a uniform distribution of folders across population).
• We also were going to have mega teams competition - I think this year ETZ + International vs CTZ, MTZ, and PTZ would have made a very close race.

 
I certainly regret that I am not able to devote more time to folding at the moment (I haven't even been able to get my own folding setup up and running).  I am also a bit disappointed with my contribution to this year's TZC.  Contests take an tremendous amount of planning, time and effort to run and given my schedule I haven't been able to devote the necessary time to make it what I would like to be (we weren't even able to make our original November deadline).

A big thank you to those who participated in this years contest, those who donated prizes, and those who helped to make it happen.  Drougnor holdin down the stats as always, Saijnor helpin to keep things organized here on the forums, Dutchforce helpin on the forums and contest design, and notfordman doing a little bit of everything.
 
Happy folding to all,
And to all a goodnight!

Viper97
Tis fine there troy... one cannot be everywhere.
 
One however can be the loneliest number.

Two can be as bad as one, it's the loneliest number since the number one.

Just my 2 cents, but we are talking time zone challenge. That covers a large geographical area.  If only 40 people sign up. That wouldn't even be enough to potentially fill 1 person per state. Its always going to be unbalanced in this regard whether you consider population densities or not.  We would need to recruit in the upwards of 500+ people to narrow down the potential gaps in time zones. With numbers like 10 people per team, 1 person can offset the entire competition alone. With 100+ people per team, that number begins to diminish.
 
I don't feel it is productive to penalize, or not count every folding point due to unbalance issues as it is counter productive to the ultimate goal of folding.  Yea it sucks to lose (I am part of the mountain team), but as I have mentioned before, a contest on this large of a scale with a very limited contestant pool, we will run into these issues.
 
Even if your team doesn't win, you are still a winner. Its about who you are helping when you fold. Its not about yourself. Its a donation. As with anything, you can donate a few cans of canned food to a food drive, or an extremely wealthy person can donate $1,000,000 to the same organization leaving everyone else feeling like their donation is useless.  On the other end of the fence, even 1 can of food can make a difference in ones life, even if it is only for a day.  The same concept translates into folding. 
 
I completely understand that competition gives people more drive and motivation to fold the most they can. So its more fun to feel like you have a chance. But then again, a completely balanced competition isn't necessarily fun either.

Speaking of folks being able to forecast good numbers for contests.  There are factors at play within DC-land work that also complicate a good estimation.  One of them, as Bcavnaugh shared is that people don't just do one thing (Fold or Crunch).  They often do both and can be involved in multiple contests at once.  So they are floating along, possibly sticking pretty well to their forecast and then "bang" your Team needs more help and the cry goes out for "turning up the juice".  So, the likely thing is that you pull some machines into play that you had not expected to use in hopes that you can help the team. 
 
When Bigadv was in its heyday, 8101s could suddenly start landing upon you without mercy and pound you for weeks while other people were basking in better performing WUs.  There too would go your forecast that may have included/anticipated other more tasty Bigadv WUs.  The same thing happens with GPU Folding.  You can be floating along, happy as a clam with your favorite GPU WU and then the WU-fairy decides to deposit a load of the worst WUs on you for days (or weeks).  Call it "luck of the draw" with PG Servers, but those things too used to complicate my best estimates. 
 
So, all this to say that forecasting (for me) was more "art" than "science" when I was Folding and I rarely (if ever) came up with a forecast that was accurate. 
 
I also agree with anyone that just loved the TZC for it's simplicity and lack of complicated rules, formulas and debate of same.  I was very fortunate to have been around for many of Troy's excellent contests and they will always be remembered fondly. 

Bummer my 4P OS is down hard....Re-Installing OS.
At least we are somewhat at the end of the TZC.

Yay! Time for a few games, after the other teams finish :-D

Also, it looks like Mountain crossed the finish line around 2am EST, Dec. 18th
 

troy8d

BadBertie
Agree with Punchy there. While I have found this tzc entertaining and amusing, as a race/competition it was over from day one. To try and balance teams, handicaps or whatever, you are trying to artificially make the teams identical in performance. And where's the fun in that.
The entertainment in this tzc for me has been the freedom/possibility for Mountain and Central to up their game and it may still be a very close finish tomorrow.
Where you have teams of a complete mix of ppd, limited by expense effectively, you need to devise a contest of skill rather than brute force. The only example I could think of is daft but goes like: random number generates a total 24hr points production for each of the teams to achieve but not exceed. Teams or team captains nominate the "players" for each day's target production score. Closest to the total wins a point, over shooting deducts points. To allow for continuous play for a couple of weeks, the 14 daily random numbers are all announced on day 1 to allow teamwork and planning. It would be a pain to administer but largely removes the advantage of the big guns.

Any contest where it is advantageous to limit production is counterproductive to one the primary goals of contests.

Well, we've seen a few comments the tzc was a little unfair due to some extra production. Let's face it, there's likely to be a compromise between peak production and a balanced competition.
The way I see the scenario above playing out is everyone will need to be pushing 100% so "captains"/tacticians know who is ready to be thrown into the mix in a few days and what ppd they can expect. There will be tactical pauses to try an ensure the "players" projects drop their points on the day and not over-shoot, but then they rev up again for the next target.
Anyway, it was just an idea. Something different.

bcavnaugh
Well at least I have moved from 20th to 18th Team Rank and back down to 195 for Project Rank.
Sorry wrinvert but then it looks like you are on a Folding Break ATM.

I'm still plugging away, just had to throttle back to just my 4p again after we hit 100mill. I was within 10% of my projected ppd.

drougnor
If you're having trouble getting the Team Standings chart to load, check here - This is my badly cobbled together backup copy
 
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ajp2y_vsc3njdEtoS0RDS0tFZmg2Z1JTcWFJb1JSUUE&usp=sharing%27#gid=24
 
I'm basically fiddling around learning how Troy put together the site just as a way of increasing the knowledge base on this. I'll try to get the publishing side sorted sometime today so I can just provide a simple page link like Troy did instead of linking to individual spreadsheet tabs.
 
Remember, this is only the backup site.
 
d

so, just curious, why do the ppd numbers here not match up with EOCF?

LearjetMinako

drougnor
Also, it looks like Mountain crossed the finish line around 2am EST, Dec. 18th
 

 *sadface*.  Maybe next year, CST will claim its rightful place.  But this time, it was fun to fold once again for a while.
 
Like to give a big Thank You to DutchForce.  This dude donates some awesome prizes.  In fact, the GTX660Ti FTW+ that he donated back in the 2013 March Maddness is what I've been folding on.

You don't mean the Central of Attention do you.

drougnor
 
Also, I want to say Congrats to Central for crossing the 100 Million point line at 10am EST, Dec 18th!
 
PST is under 2 days now! 

Well done Central. Certainly had us worried. Thanks for making it fun !!