What.CD Ratio System Overhauled

Back in last October, the popular music torrent tracker What.CD announced that plans were underway to make some major changes to their ratio system. This was pretty big news for the site’s half a million user base as the announced changes apparently made it easier to maintain a healthy global ratio on this usually ‘difficult to seed’ tracker. However even after a couple of months later, the changes had not been implemented and naturally some users began to feel that the purposed updates were never going to materialize. If you were one of those skeptics – you’ve been proven wrong. What.CD has overhauled their ratio system and the changes are now fully integrated to the BitTorrent tracker.

Quoted below is a post from What explaining why the changes were made:

We announced a couple months ago that we were going to overhaul the ratio watch system. Well, we've gone and done it now. At the top of the page, beside your stats and ratio, you will now see a "required" value - this is the ratio you are required to maintain in order to keep your account on the site.
The entire system is explained at rules.php?p=ratio. It is not necessary to understand how the entire system works or the math behind it - what you need to know is the following:
What you need to know

This system does not alter your ratio. It alters the ratio we require you to maintain for you to keep your account on the site. You must keep your ratio above your required ratio at all times. Therefore, you want a high ratio and a low required ratio. Both your ratio and required ratio will change depending on your behavior on the site.

Uploading makes your ratio go up (good). Downloading makes it go down, which is generally fine so long as your ratio isn't very close to the required ratio. The system was built to reward people who download things (and keep them seeded).
Seeding makes your required ratio go down (good). Downloading makes it go up. Not seeding something you've downloaded makes it go up dramatically (bad), as the percentage of your snatches which you are still seeding is directly factored into your required ratio.

Therefore, seeding and uploading are good for keeping your ratio above your required ratio. Not seeding things you've downloaded is very bad for keeping your ratio above your required ratio. Downloading is also bad for it, and if your ratio and required ratio are getting dangerously close together, you should stop downloading and concentrate on seeding your snatches instead.

Ratio requirements will only be negatively affected by this new system - it's made things easier for everyone.
You can think of it as a dual system. We've taken our old ratio watch system, and lowered the ratio requirements depending on how many torrents you're seeding. If you don't want to seed your torrents forever, don't - just follow the rules of the old system. If you choose not to seed any torrents, your ratio requirements will be exactly the same as they were before the change. If you do want to seed torrents, or if you're having trouble with your ratio, then you can start caring about how many un-queued torrents you have seeding in your client.

Easy, right?

So, if you are a What.CD member and still didn’t read about the recent changes, head over to their rules section and look under ‘Ratio’. Changes are more or less the same as those previously announced and IMHO should make life a lot easier for the members who were struggling to keep up with the site’s ratio requirements.

How to get into What.CD

If you still aren’t a member of What.CD, this article would have been of little or no use to you. Although we cannot give away What invites like some other sites due to rules, it’s not an impossible tracker to get into. One of the safest and most reliable means to obtain a free invite is via their IRC interview. If you didn’t know already, What.CD engages in IRC recruitment and there’s even an official ‘interview prep’ site online. On the downside, there a lot you need to know in order to pass the interview. For a step by step guide on how to get to the interview channel, how to prepare for it, etc please read our article “Free What.CD invite via IRC interview – How to get in”.

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• New Ratio System At What.CD Music Tracker

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