This has come up before:
https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=23669duvessa wrote:make the score for winning a species/background/god/combo independent of when the game starts or finishes. Meaning no clan bonus for as-yet-unwon combos, and species/background/god points either being fixed at the beginning of the tourney, or only being finalized at the end. The former is probably better; you could automatically compute them based on non-tourney statistics, similar to Nemelex' Choice, or even use the win counts from the previous tourney. Or you could hand-pick them, e.g. 300 for a mummy, 100 for a human, -50 for a deep dwarf.
You can't really come up with a scoring system that doesn't reward poopsocking though. Even if you only award points for 5 species, backgrounds, gods, cap streaks, don't give bonuses for combo highscores etc., you're still left with the fact that getting a really good realtime or turncount speedrun (or, by extension, score) requires playing a ton of games. Unless you want to cap everyone's points at 2000 and have a 150-way tie for first place. I suppose you could penalize people's score based on number of games played and/or time spent playing, but I doubt the playerbase would care for that.
So I'd suggest the following changes:
- Only award points for each rune once. The first silver rune you find is worth 30 points or whatever, other silver runes are worth nothing.
- No "early bird" bonus for being the first player to kill all the uniques.
- No bonuses for background/combo high scores. Giving points for species high scores is questionable too - and even if you only give points for one species high score per player, they're still incentivized to get high scores on the others simply to deprive their opponents of the points.
- Fixed points for winning each species, as I said in the above quote. No points for winning a background or god.
- Don't award streak points past the first 5-10 games in the streak.
- No clan points for unique deaths, killing ghosts, killing other players with ghosts, number of high scores, or first to kill all uniques.
- Either only award points for a player's first 5 Nemelex' Choice wins, or have a new Nemelex' Choice every 2 days instead of every time the previous one is won. In the latter case, award the points no matter how many times that combo has already been won (otherwise there's a race to win every Nemelex' Choice as soon as it appears).
This leaves fastest turncount win, fastest duration win, and highest score as the only unbounded sources of tournament points, and these are all based on quality rather than quantity. In practice all three of these categories promote investing a ton of time but what can you do.