We still get points for the terminally ill though don't we? Just not as many.....thats the way forwards i think.
Yeah. 1/10th of what you would get normally.
There may well be some wisdom in picking up the almost guaranteed few points from the like of Wendy Richards and Bobby Robson, but in the end you've got no chance of hitting the big points you'd get with a younger, not ill person.
The factor of a tenth seems a bit high, although some consideration did go into it. It was between that and a score based on how many other people had picked the same person. The problem with the latter is mostly to do with the size of the fame pool we had to pick from, it would have been very easy to go through wikipedia and find obscure terminally ill people. Which is pretty boring when it comes to waiting to see who dies.
This could have been solved by stricter "fame" criteria than just having a wikipedia page, but then what do you pick instead? Stuff like an IMDB page and google search results end up being heavily skewed in favour of certain types of people.
Saying all that, if it works out ok and we play again for 2010 then it might be good to do a combo of the terminal illness rule and some sort of score weighting depending on how often they appear in lists. Have to wait and see I suppose.
It's a weird statistical balance of trying to keep the fun in making it worthwhile with lucky guesses and "feelings" about people, as well as rewarding a bit of research on who you thinks on their way out.
