One common question we get at Micropower is where point values should be set on various rules.

This FAQ addresses how point scaling works and why you might want to change the point values on certain rules.

It's important to understand that point values have two roles before adjusting them:

1) To establish the importance of a particular rule with respect to other rules in your system.  Naturally, an important rule for most stations is Artist Separation.  Therefore, we might expect Artist Separation to have a fairly high point value like 100 points.  By comparison, a relatively unimportant rule like Yesterday Artist Separation may have a much lower point value such as 20.

2) To allow the scheduling engine to "scale" the severity of a violation.  Nearly all rules in Powergold offer scaling.  This means that if you have a rule which says an artist can only play every 2 hours and it has 100 points, that an artist playing back to back would render the full 100 point violation.  Scaling allows us to asses a lower number of points as the separation increases, so playing the same artist 1 hour and 59 minutes later is "close" to violation free, and would only be assessed 1 point of violation.

Because violation points have two roles, it is important to consider carefully any adjustments before making them.  Powergold works hard to come up with the best song for a given clock position, but to do that you need to carefully identify the importance of a rule.

Here's a little more detail on point scaling:  Earlier we discussed an artist separation rule of 2 hours and 100 points.  As mentioned, the only way to actually be assessed 100 points would be to have the same artist play back to back.  Artists playing further than 2 hours apart would, of course, be assessed no violation at all.  Artists playing just one hour apart are 50 percent from your target (2 hours) so they would be assessed 50 percent of the total violation points for that rule, in this case 50 points.

A word of caution:  when creating rules with very low point values, it may be possible to have that rule become ineffective.  For instance, if you have a rule like 1 Week Separation at a low value of 5 points, this rule may often be discarded if digging further into the stack to avoid violations causes much more important rules like Offset from Self to be violated by the same or greater point values.

One final note:  if you are just starting to adjust point values it may be helpful to simply create a few basic tiers and make all rules fall into one of them, say 100 points, 50 points, and 20 points.  This will simplify rule management and provide a clear difference between important rules and less important ones.  Powergold allows a maximum point value of 1001 to be assigned to a given rule which allows for a lot of room between important rules and less important ones.