New Scoring System

One of the most exciting parts of playing on FleetWit is the moment after you finish the last question in a race and your final score is revealed. But when you score 897 points, what does that number really mean? With the latest version of FleetWit, we’ve updated the way we calculate scores to make them more fair and transparent. What follows is an explanation of a few of the changes we’ve made to the way we determine the scores in our trivia races.

A Few Preliminaries

Before getting into the math, we’ve made a couple of minor tweaks to our gameplay that affect the new scoring system:

1. 3 Strikes and You’re Out (and 5 for Hangman). In previous versions of FleetWit, you were able to make an incorrect guess on a given question up to 10 times. In the new version we’ve reduced that to 3 incorrect guesses for a multiple choice question and 5 incorrect guesses for a hangman question. These were pretty common sense changes. Our multiple choice questions have 4 options, so if you guess wrong 3 times, process of elimination should give you the correct answer. For hangman questions, limiting incorrect guesses to 5 lets you move past a question you don’t know without the tedium of guessing nearly half the alphabet.
2. Time Waits for No One. We’ve reduced the time limit on multiple choice questions from 20 seconds to 15 seconds, and on hangman questions from 40 seconds to 20 seconds. This is still plenty of time to read and solve the question, but it keeps the game moving along more quickly.

And Now the Math

Your FleetWit score is still based on a combination of accuracy and speed. However, instead of starting with an arbitrary amount of points, we look at the accuracy and speed of your answers as a percentage, which we then weight differently to determine your final score.

Accuracy

Your accuracy score is based on the number of mistakes you make in a round. A mistake is a wrong answer — either an incorrect answer choice in a multiple choice question or a wrong letter in a hangman question. To get your accuracy score we subtract the number of mistakes you make from the total number of mistakes possible in a race and divide it by the total number of possible mistakes:

Let’s take the example of a 5 question race with 4 multiple choice questions and 1 hangman question. In this race there are 17 possible mistakes [(3 mistakes x 4 multiple choice) + (5 mistakes x 1 hangman)]. Let’s say you make one wrong guess on each of the multiple choice questions and you click two incorrect letters on the hangman question. That comes out to 6 mistakes, and so your accuracy score would be calculated as follows:

Accuracy Score = ( 17–6 ) / 17 = .64 or 64%

Speed

Your speed score is calculated in a similar manner to your accuracy score. We take the total amount of time available in a race, subtract the amount of time you took, and then divide it by total available time:

Continuing with the example above, the total available time for the race would be 80 seconds [(15 seconds x 4 multiple choice questions) + (20 seconds x 1 hangman question)]. Let’s say you take 3 seconds to answer the first two multiple choice questions, 5 seconds to answer the second two multiple choice questions, and 4 seconds to answer the hangman question (including the 1 second penalty for each wrong guess). That gives you a total time of 20 seconds, so your speed score would be determined as follows:

Speed Score = ( 80–20 ) / 80 = .75 or 75%

Putting it all Together

After we calculate your accuracy score and your speed score we multiply each number by a coefficient in order to weight them differently. The breakdown we use is 60% accuracy and 40% speed, meaning we multiply your accuracy score by .6 and your speed score by .4. We add these two numbers together and then multiply by 1000 to determine your final point total:

Sticking with our example, your final score on the race would be:

Final score = [ ( .6 x .64 ) + ( .4 x .75) ] x 1,000 = 688 points

In Conclusion

Our hope is that this new system will make the scores a truer reflection of a player’s performance as compared to the old setup. And by weighting accuracy more than speed, we aim to reward genuine knowledge over a lucky guess. One fun aspect of the new system is that in the future we will be able to create races with a different balance between accuracy and speed. We will never vary from the 60/40 breakdown outlined above without making it very clear in the race title and description, but this flexibility will allow us the opportunity to come up with races that present new kinds of fun challenges for our users. If you have questions about any of the above, feel free to reach out on customer support or email us at hello@fleetwit.com, and, as always, happy racing!