Hi, @jayplayco here.
We are running the Hunter Level now for a few days, and a lot of parts have been tweaked in these days and still are tweaked. After two weeks of introduction hunters still, find it difficult to understand the hunter level itself and how they should adapt to it.
To all readers who are new to Steemhunt, Steemhunt is a service built on the platform Steem to enable Hunters to hunt new and cool products and get rewarded on a daily base. If you are new to Steemhunt, you should try first this post. LINK
We will go into details about what the new Hunter Level means and what kind of actions are counted for the score. A detailed post about ABV 2.0 can be found here.
0. Repository
https://github.com/Steemhunt/web1. Hunters Level - Why?
 [Source: Vidar Nordli-Mathisen](https://unsplash.com/photos/IbaTONUx7BI)Steemhunt is building on the Steem environment, and specific behaviors have been adapted which were not helpful to create a good ranking board. Circle voting, using Alt accounts to upvote your post and manipulate the ranking, V4V attempts from larger groups and much more made the ranking board a playground for abusers. Even the Pro-Con review rewards were abused by users working whole day making partly hundreds of comments to increase the chance of an upvote.
At that time the first place on the ranking board from Steemhunt was able to get voting over 120$ for one post when getting the first rank. Few of the manipulation attempts were even quite successful, so the team needed to react to find a way to reduce or block this kind of manipulation.
Unfortunately, until ABV 2.0 having the ranking board and rewards coupled together with, the abusers always found another way to manipulate the ranking board. It was seen from a social behavior point of view fascinating to look into it but still, an issue as it would make the ranking board not attractive and fun.
After de-coupling the ranking board and rewards (upvoting) with ABV 2.0 there was a system needed to be able to reward the hunters still. So the Hunters Level based on the Steemhunt User Score was born.
2. The four columns of User Score
Hunter Levels are based on the User Score, and the User Score is calculated based on different parameters. The User Score is also used as Voting Power on the Steemhunt platform.
1) Account Credibility
In the current moment, two factors are calculated, which is the reputation score from Steem (then number right to your nickname is representing it) and the age of your account in Steemhunt.2) Activity Score
Also here in the moment, the login record is calculated on a daily base. This record adds or deducts every day.3) Curation Score
Curation activities are upvoting hunts from other hunters within Steemhunt (and not from Steemit or busy or somewhere else). This also includes the total curation weight and [voting diversity](https://steemit.com/steemhunt/@steemhunt/steemhunt-s-account-based-voting-ver-2-diversity-score).4) Hunt Score
This point is related to the ranking of a hunted post, also if a hunt has been delisted is calculated and how good your hunt has been ranked.3. How to understand the User Score?
 [Source: Element5 Digital](https://unsplash.com/photos/LTyDj7u_TU4)The current status of the Steemhunt User Score is not made to continued level up to the highest rank and stay there, but is more a real-time activity score of your Steemhunt activities. The critical point is that the data to calculate your User Score is always from the last 30 days, so everything before that doesn`t count. This time limitation has been implemented to;
1) Give newbies a fair chance to get established at Steemhunt
2) Avoid to level up and stay there (as the rewards are coupled with the User Score)
3) Make the User Score more an Activity Score
As a result of this implementation, a User Score can vary from one point to another quite a lot based on the activities in the last 30 days. We will go into details in the next chapter but have to keep the 30 days in mind.
4. Hacking the User Score
 [Source: Dlanor S](https://unsplash.com/photos/2xEQDxB0ss4)Hacking into the User Score is not that difficult if you have understood that the core is maintaining an excellent behavior to keep your level constant and that good results can affect your User Score positively for up to 30 days.
Below is the explanation from @tabris what factors are affecting the User Score.
User Score (=Voting Power) can be
Increased
- When account credibility is increased (higher reputation, older accounts)
- When user login to Steemhunt more frequently
- When user vote on more hunt post
- When user vote with more weight and earlier timing on hunt posts (same curation penalty applied for the first 30 minutes of posting)
- When user hunted, and it’s on ranked high
Decreased
- When a user’s reputation is decreased
- When user login to Steemhunt less frequently
- When user vote on the same group of people many times
- When a user does circle voting with a specific group
- When user hunted, and it’s on ranked low
Let’s find the points for each of the columns in Steemhunt.
1) Account Credibility
 >Increased >- When account credibility is increased (higher reputation, older accounts)Decreased
- When a user’s reputation is decreased
To increase this point, you need to work on your reputation on Steem. Having good Hunts and get upvotes from other Hunters does help and if you managed to get to a Level 1 at Steemhunt, your Reputation at Steem would also increase step by step, when having Hunts upvoted by the Steemhunt bot. Your account does get older day by day, so this is something you don`t need to worry.
If you get flagged at Steem, and your reputation drops this will have a direct impact on your User Score in Steemhunt.
This Data is not based on the last 30 days but always on the current date when the Account Credibility is calculated.
2) Activity Score
 >Increased >- When user login to Steemhunt more frequentlyDecreased
- When user login to Steemhunt less frequently
This explanation is quite simple. Your activity Score will increase when you log in and decrease when not on a daily base. The Activity Score is also calculated based on the last 30 days so that the max Activity Score would be logging in every single day for 30 days. :)
3) Curation Score
 >Increased >- When user vote on more hunt post >- When user vote with more weight and earlier timing on hunt posts (same curation penalty applied for the first 30 minutes of posting)Decreased
- When user vote on the same group of people many times
- When a user does circle voting with a specific group
As we have seen being daily active at Steemhunt and increasing the reputation on Steem is substantial. But the Curation Score is something which is impacting your User Score based on your last 30 days activity.
As explained above you need to vote with a sufficient vote weight early enough to gain Curation Scores. Also voting on multiple hunts does increase your Curation Score. But more important is that you have to be careful not to vote on people but actual hunts and products. Behavior from Steem like “I am trailing that person so upvoting…” will harm your curation score. Even if you are only curating products, it can still happen that you are voting on the same group of people, as hunters usually develop a taste for a specific type of products and hunters as curators also. But if you keep your upvotes broad enough for all cool and new products your curation score will settle to a stable status. So keep an eye on cool hunts on Steemhunt for curation.
4) Hunt Score
 >Increased >- When user hunted, and it's on ranked highDecreased
- When user hunted, and it’s on ranked low
Especially some of the new hunters tend to start hunting, anything without knowing what they are doing and getting de-listed their hunts very fast. :)
If you are one of them, I would recommend reading the posting guideline here and my last post about how to understand the posting guideline here. The reason is, the ranking of your hunt and also delisted hunts (not accepted hunts) affect your hunt score. An excellent ranked hunt will increase your Hunt Score, but a not good performed hunt will decrease your Hunt score. Currently, you are allowed to hunt as many hunts as you wish, but still, only one accepted hunt get upvoted if your Hunter Level is above 1. The best case would be to have a daily hunt verified and ranked high on the “today’s” board. For that, you will have to be clear about what the posting guideline requests when posting a hunt and that the specific hunt will get the attention from other hunters.
The easy mentioned but very difficult to achieve task here is,
“Find cool and new hunts, hunt them down before another hunter does and be sure that your hunt is matching to the posting guideline!”
5. So what is a good user score?
 [Source: Volkan Olmez](https://unsplash.com/photos/BVGMRRFQcf8)If you can keep a user score between 2-4 (Hunter Level 2~3), you are already a very active member of Steemhunt. From my experience in the last 14 days, everything going over a User Score of 4 tends to be very fragile for dropping in a few days as usually there had been some boosting reasons (high ranked hunts, great curation) in the last 30 days. As soon as these boosting reasons are out of the 30 days windows, the score drops to a “normal” activity level.
2. Conclusion
A lot of hunters are claiming that their User Score is dropping or increasing in big steps. But that happens because all four columns of the User Score are multiplied with each other. If you have only one column under 1.0, it is going to make a big change in your total score, and if you have a difference of 0.1 in one column, it can affect your User Score up to 10-20%.So the goal should be to maintain a Hunter Level above 1 and try to keep it between 2-3 and also to boost it with excellent activities temporarily to a higher level up to 4 or even 5. Verified Hunts on Level 4 or 5 does get a higher reward, so the motivation to boost the Level is given.
Thanks for reading!
Other articles about Steemhunt.
- Steemhunt- Start here
- What is Steemhunt and why should I care?
- Biggest Airdrop ever - HUNT token and how to participate
- [Steemhunt] ABV (Account based voting) in development
- Update for Upvoting Review Comments & Other Developments
- Most asked questions from Steemhunt Newbies.
- How to get your hunt verified on Steemhunt
- [Evolution of Steemhunt`s voting system](https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@jayplayco/steemhunt-evolution-of-steemhunt-s-voting-system)
- Understanding Steemhunt and How to Craft a Good Hunt -@fknmayhem
- Picking Apart The Steemhunt Posting Guidelines - How We Review Hunts @fknmayhem
- Steemhunt is NOT a Writing Curation Project- @fknmayhem
- The difficult way to make your own path with ABV
- Being a Trailblazing SMT on Steem Pre-SMTs - @fknmayhem
- Crowdfunded Products are Validated “Cool” Products For Steemhunt - @fknmayhem
- [Steemhunt] Open Source and Community
- Steemhunt- ABV 2.0
- Understanding the new posting guideline
Join our chat channels if you need more information as the community, team, and the moderators are answering very fast on any question:
Discord: https://discord.gg/mWXpgks (this is where the magic happens)
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/AzcqGxCV1FZ8lJHVgHOgGQ