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.

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.

got 2 more drops before we go over the 100M
then I can finally get some gaming in
 

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.  

I only fold my laundry during competitions.  Right now though... given what I've seen, Pacific hasn't really folded their laundry well... we got Krinkled on Kristmas!

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)
 

One also has to remember that not all of us know what our PPD will be.  So we average it.  An 8101 might deliver 320K but a faster 8105 a 360K PPD.  Me I just assume a failure is going to happen, so I pop a breaker, the folks at home go... oh well, he'll be home in a day.  So I lose points.  Then I tested out the 980's I've got and for fun added them into the mix.  I could rake in 550K PPD if I only scored the good WU's but them Core 18's drop my PPD to 180K PPD, so I factor that in. 
 
It's not so much sand bagging but rather understanding that nothing ever goes well during a contest.
 
Just saying.

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!

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

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.