Point Creep realistic topping out number
- Thread starter ChrisB
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bullbugle307
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In your scenario a ton of non hunters would be buying points every year to resell to the highest bidder, and then the rich would buy their way to the front of the line. I'll pass.
Pucky Freak
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BigGameDIY
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I don't understand why point system can collapse, I'm pretty sure it is bringing more money than selling tags in most cases. Plus point system keeps people applying every year, without point system they would skip some years or animals. I personally think that hybrid bonus/preference point system like in Arizina is pretty fair, those who are applying longer should have some benefits. We just need to use the system properly.
In my opinion, point creep mostly is a result of stupid "management", especially predators. Protecting predators is not a management, it is anti game animals and anti human act. We can only harvest whatever left after predators.
Media makes big impact on the point creep as well. Inflation and "free" government money are another factors affecting point creep.
In my opinion, point creep mostly is a result of stupid "management", especially predators. Protecting predators is not a management, it is anti game animals and anti human act. We can only harvest whatever left after predators.
Media makes big impact on the point creep as well. Inflation and "free" government money are another factors affecting point creep.
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The point of any draw is to fairly allocated tags when demand, outstrips supply. 'Collapse' occurs when it becomes so painfully obvious that the "fair" part of that first clause has gone out the window, and the resident voters of a given state demand the system be changed. So 'collapse' = system dismantled by angry mob.
Fair: A system where each applicate has the same opportunity/ chance at being drawn for a tag.
- Random is the most fair, though it often is not perceived that way. It's 'unfair' when someone gets stuck by lightening and dies, or gets hit by a drunk driver.
The key take away from "fair" is that the system does not choose winners or losers, random chance does.
Basically here are the 'systems' from most fair to least.
Straight lottery
Bonus Points (extra names in the hat the more you apply)
Preference Points (only people with the top number of points have their names go in the hat)
- Preference Points, in high demand scenarios are unfair, because only the first cohort of applicants have a chance at ever being drawn for a tag.
There are various hybrids of these systems.
Yes, a huge component of point systems is raising money, that's not some hidden agenda it's literally one of the stated goals, go to a DNR annual public meeting.
IMHO it's stupid people who suck at basic math. Yep just going to say it, if you didn't realize that preference points are a terrible way to allocate opportunity where there are 1000 applicants per tag you are a dumbass.
"Point creep" started, literally, (and I actually mean the dictionary definition of literally) the first year Colorado had a preference point drawing for elk tags. You pull up the draw results from year 1 to year 3 and see the top pool increase +1 every year.
It's basic math, it's not communists, or east coast liberals, or PETA, or inflation, or handouts, or instagram...
Some nerd in 1980 said, "um actually that's a terrible idea" and a bunch of idiots were like "nah, it's great" and here we are today.
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Buffs35
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If point creep and the point game was hurting the DOW/P&W/etc. bottom line, then it would stop. But the opposite is true. It has also created a submarket in the hunting industry. I know that I joined this site when I wanted to get additional information and advice for applying and accumulating points in several states. It also lets hunters have a decent chance at anticipating and planning their hunting calendars.
WapitiBob
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Fair is a point of view.
Point systems were never fair, they discriminated against every subsequent applicant.
Point systems are fair because they give those who have been applying the longest, a better chance of drawing.
Point systems were never fair, they discriminated against every subsequent applicant.
Point systems are fair because they give those who have been applying the longest, a better chance of drawing.
I just explained this again to my (very intelligent) friend.
Friend: “I will draw unit 9999 in WY next year, right?”
Me: ”maybe in the random, you were 3 points behind unit 9999 last year, so probably closer to a decade - but, mathematically, probably Never - which I told you already”
F: ”but two years ago you said it drew at (his current point level +1)?, so next year I’ll have enough”
Me: (provides draw odds screenshot showing 1pt/year Point Creep)
F: ”Oh, so I’ll draw in 3 more years then?”
Me: “Only if you know this guy and he lets you use his Van”:
MTGunner
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Yes, you purchased the points. Yes, you own Them! NO, you should NOT be able to sell them! If this were policy then it would mitigate those who have patiently waited for years to draw. I may not draw in my lifetime. I am adult enough to deal with it if I do not draw. But, for another to purchase points to go to the head of the line is BS! My opinion only. MTG
seeth07
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I have pondered how this could actually be done and actually benefit the system. The reason being that if selling was allowed, I could see it as a way to help clear out the current points pool and counter point creep.
Obviously there would have to be things done to ensure that this process isn't abused. The best I came up with was this: You must have previously in the past received a state hunting license for any big game species to be eligible to sell your points. This will ensure not only that you must have a hunter education card (so it limits the group to just hunters - or those with ambition to at least take the course) but also ensures that you have interest in hunting this state (since you bought a tag before). In order to sell the points, you need to do it through the department website where the state handles the sale from one person to another. The seller gets 50% of whatever the current point value costs per year and the state gets the other 50%. This extra 50% is all earmarked specifically for hunting access or habitat as a kicker
I'm sure that the first year or two after this was allowed it would be nuts with some interesting results. However, after that, you would see a significant amount of points removed from the pool and the state will have made some extra cash with it for better hunting in the future.
ImBillT
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Life expectancy is just the average age of death. Roughly half of the population that life expectancy applies to will live longer, and roughly half will not reach it. In a preference point system, for low availability, high demand tags, it’s not the average person that matters. It only takes a handful of people with above average longevity to account for all the available tags.
You could calculate where the percentage of people that reach a certain age intersects demand. Let’s check out an imaginary hunt with 1000 people applying for 5 tags. That’s .5% draw odds. That’s 200 years to cycle through all the applicants. Let’s assume that everyone entered at age 10, that there is no way to burn points except to draw(no lesser hunt is available), and let’s assume that no one gives up applying prior to death. (Theoretically a system should actually reach a maturity level at which all max point holders entered at the minimum age, just because we aren’t there yet doesn’t mean the model is flawed) Well, we know that no one is going to reach 200pts. What is the actual number? 50yrs into the program, max point holders now have 50pts, and 250 applicants have drawn tags. Are there 750 people remaining in the max point pool? No. Why? Death. But they’re only 60yrs old and life expectancy is 75. How have they died? Umm…life expectancy is an average. Just as some have died before age 75, others will live beyond age 75. Let’s pretend that by age 60, 30% have died. That’s 700 remaining alive, and 250 of the original 1000 have drawn tags, but 30% of them are dead as well, and they are part of the total 300 dead, therefore, while 300 died, they didn’t all come out of the 750 that haven’t drawn yet. 700 are alive, and 175 of them have drawn tags, so there are 575 applicants remaining in the max point pool(that’s 115years remaining to cycle through) Are they all going to be dead at 75? No. We covered that. Now, if we had real numbers on how many people would live how long, we could pound out where the FIRST max point pool would settle, but remember, that takes into account the fact that we were pulling 5 people out of the pool every year with tags. Let’s just pretend we got through all the living members of the max point pool by age 90. Is that where it would stop(80pts)? No. Why? Because we have a back log of 1000 people with 79pts. It just took us 80yrs to get through the first cycle of max point holders. None of these 1000 applicants have drawn. How many have died? Well, roughly the same number as in the pool one point above them, but this time 80 people were taken out of the pool with tags. Again, if we had numbers, we could continue to pound away. But we don’t actually need to. It all comes back to 5/1000=.005=.5%. If we ignore health status and frustration, and assume that only death and drawing can remove a person from the max point pool, then the max point pool will be equal to whatever age only .5% of applicants live to exceed, minus the age at which they were allowed entry. Do .5% of people reach age 95 and beyond? If so, the max point pool will reach 85, and there really won’t be a draw. When you finally reach age 95, only 5 of the original 1000 will still be living, and they get those 5 tags. Life drew for you. Guess what. Same for next year. What about a hunt with .1% as many tags as applicants? That’s 1000yrs to cycle through everyone. But what age will only .1% of applicants remain alive? 100? Guess it’s a 90pt tag. What about a hunt with 20% as many tags as applicants? Well, since most people live past 15yrs old, that’s topping out as a 5pt tag. When tag allocation percentage drops below the percentage of applicants that live beyond life expectancy AND is also low enough to last through that many draw cycles(65 assuming 10yr old entries), preference points could exceed life expectancy minus the age at which entry is allowed. Roughly 50% of applicants will exceed life expectancy, BUT at 50% tag allocation you cycle through applicants every two years. 1.5% tag allocation is where you can hit 65 draw cycles. Because about half would have died by age 75, it shouldn’t actually reach 65pts. When you start getting around sub 1%(100 draw cycles to clear the pool if everyone lived), I would guess that you might start clearing few enough people through the draw and having enough people remaining healthy enough to hunt beyond age 75 that you could see preference points go past 75.
Bonus point systems still skew the time required to draw rather than an even distribution, they just don’t screw things up as bad as preference points. Squared and cubed bonus points get reasonably similar to preference points as the system matures. A guy with 50pts could have his name in the hat 125,000 times in a drawing with only 1000 applicants. If there are 20 guys with 50pts, their individual odds still suck, BUT their names in the hat 2,500,000 times vs a guy with 0-5 pts have a statistical effect quite similar to preference points.
To the real world. For most species in most states there is enough opportunity that it doesn’t take long before you can choose to burn your points without drawing the most difficult tag available if you so choose, and the total number of tags available compared to applicants is 5-20%. The result is that unit 201 isn’t going to top out as high as the above mental experiment predicted(again because it didn’t follow the rules of the experiment). Many things could lead to burning your points. Frustration, change of priorities, degrading health etc. the list is probably longer than I can imagine. But let’s look at sheep. You’re not going to party app for sheep. You’re not generally able to intentionally burn your points on an easier to draw hunt. The carrot is a big one as well. You might decide you’re not up for all the effort and foul weather required to hunt at whatever age you’re at to put bull elk or mule deer number 40 on your wall, but you just might push yourself past your limits for sheep number one. People are applying for sheep tags beyond a sane age, and I’m not convinced they’re going on the hunt they dreamed of.
I don’t follow a lot of OIL species, but I can’t think of one that is actually on straight preference points. If they went there it would be a disaster. NM has 5 NR sheep tags and 1793 applicants in 2021. That’s 455yrs of applicants.
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I read you whole post, and here’s the crux you keep limiting it to just age and drawing, when I say it will top out at like 40-45 I’m not cutting out all the variables, I’m saying all variables included, dropping out, people getting pissed and changing the system, buying gov tags, whatever…
I don’t see a preference point system going past 40-45.
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Not quite. It's the estimated average length of life for a hypothetical cohort assumed to be exposed, from birth through death, to the mortality rates observed each year. That might seem like splitting hairs but there is a difference than "half live longer have don't" as people die at year 1 and there is a human maximum age? 113 for men?. Anyway the correct way to demonstrate the phenomenon is to reduce the applicant pool by the crude mortality rate, ideally you would do this per year so that you would take out more folks in years where because of environmental reasons there were more deaths, but let's just use the current rate and say 8.95 per 1000.
I'm going to us CA sheep for this example model... they have preference points and not a ton of units so I'm not OCRing a bunch of stupid .pdfs or whatever... 27 tags a year for (total) 3463 applicants. That's R +NR and there is a 10% cap but lets say that doesn't exist. So basically what I'm modeling is, hypothetical new sheep population with 27 tags, that never grows or shrinks, with 3463 applicants in the first group, using a preference point system that is never hybridized. Further there is a single unit, not multiple with different success rates/popularity factors/ewe v. ram, everyone is applying for a tag not a point (so everyone gets a tag their first possible opportunity).
The hard part is attrition not due to death, so people who give up, find a new hobby, maybe have financial hardships and miss applying for a period of years that kicks them out, or maybe they draw a sheep tag in another state, or buy a gov tag, or get a ewe tag, or miss 1 years application... whatever. Let's run it at 1% and at 10% attrition.
So max pool is 23/64/85 depending on variables.
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Here is CO's top point group from 2003 to 2021... I bet they are all drawn by 30 points, unless a couple of them are sticking to 1 specific unit with the hardest draw odds or something.
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In my mind it's just ridiculous that you would ever have a scenario where there is a unit with 5 tags 400 applicants, all of whom had parents that started buying them points at birth, all who continued to buy points there entire lives, all of whom never picked an easier unit, all of whom lived past 80 and in good enough health to hunt, all of whom who never missed an app, all of whom...
So my WAG in a 1 in 100 tag scenario 40 years of drawing = crude mortality +3% attrition for all causes.
What's interesting is if you take a WAG at a bonus point scenario and say for 3000 applicants, the first year 3 draw a tag (1 in 1000 odds) then each subsequent year .7 additional tags are drawn... so by year 40 you have 30 tags drawn so 1% odds, you still draw out everyone out by year 45.
So my WAG in a 1 in 100 tag scenario 40 years of drawing = crude mortality +3% attrition for all causes.
What's interesting is if you take a WAG at a bonus point scenario and say for 3000 applicants, the first year 3 draw a tag (1 in 1000 odds) then each subsequent year .7 additional tags are drawn... so by year 40 you have 30 tags drawn so 1% odds, you still draw out everyone out by year 45.
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ImBillT
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Mathematically I’m not sure you can account for all variables. You could account for age if you simply new what percentage of the population reached a certain age, which you could model that accurately. So that’s what I attempted to model. Im sure I screwed something up too but that’s the best I could do under the circumstances. In real life, yeah, there are other things that take people out of preference point systems. For a lot of species you’re right that the max point pool will never reach the number of years in the system that my method predicted. For sheep I think the tag numbers are low enough and demand high enough, that not enough people drop out. Governor’s tags? How many people per year does that really take out of the pool? 1? From a system that clears 5-6 per year anyway. Governor’s tags aren’t limited to max point holders either. What percentage of governor’s tag holder were ever at max points? Has it ever even happened? The total percentage of max point holders cleared by governor’s tags is nearly meaningless. Pissed off at the system? How many of those are at max points? 5pts under max? Yeah a lot of those people give up. At max, my bet is that the majority hang on well past their original willingness hoping that the guy beside them gives up or dies. Like I said, for other species “giving up” doesn’t constitute not hunting. The option of an alternative hunt is always there. For things like sheep, moose, goat and bison, there is not an alternative outlet. I don’t follow those species, but I don’t think any are pure preference. If they were, it would top out at a ridiculous level of it we’re allowed to stay in place until it topped out.
For NR sheep in NM it would take 455 years to clear the applicants from year 2021. 45yrs would only clear 225 applicants via tag. The other 1568 would have to be quite frustrated. Considering, if they were in on the bottom floor of a preference point system, they would rapidly have the highest draw odds for sheep in the west it would take a lot to frustrate them. My guess would be that some other states are worse.
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