A few things to put my idea in perspective:(posted 9614 days ago)I believe the ideal scoreboard would have an entry from every player for every game, giving an accurate score curve. Real world time constraints, and the dedicated efforts of the MAME team to emulate every minor chip revision known to the internet, make this impossible. I probably haven't sent in 50 recordings myself, and even if I sent in one for every MAME game I ever played I still probably wouldn't hit 500.
The only "lame" scores (aside from the joke games) are where the player didn't really try - extreme evidence of this (on most machines) is failing to beat the demo screen, not making the default high score table, not seeing the first intermission, not clearing the second wave, etc.. Even as good as a first or second try from someone like Angry or BBH probably is, it's not what should be here. "High score" means HIGH SCORE - your best attempt. If you can bury the game - 10 times or more the #2 - DO IT. Don't wait for someone else to show up.
That's why I don't think a "Top X" for each game is the way to go. It discourages medium players from trying, and encourages excellent players to move to a different game as soon as they get first place. But "Top X", and the current system, are the only two I've ever seen anyone propose for MARP. I was trying to reply to Chris Parsley's thread about setting a minimum score, but I realized I'd left the topic so I made a new one. Unlike most of the time I suggest things, I don't know what the immediate effect will be. I came up with the 50/200 figures after a quick look at the leaders - first idea was 50/100 but two people have 100+ first place scores. I don't expect my ranking to change much if it's implemented (#45 I think), or to ever hit 50 first place recordings and join the battle for #1.
I wasn't trying to eliminate quantity of games as a factor, just tone down the extreme advantage shooting for 1400+ recordings has during the weekly beta era. 50 looked like enough, but I did little more than draw numbers out of a hat to illustrate the concept - I spent two or three minutes on the numbers and most of it was waiting for different pages to come up. The right numbers are probably larger.
To Gameboy9: Yes, someone could go searching for games with bad scores to qualify, but the other qualified players would probably attack his 1st place scores to kick the jerk out of the race. Part of the point was to increase the value of fighting other elite players :) A deserving player not qualifying is more of a worry to me - Krogman only has 39.
To JoustGod: No upload limit intended. The scoreboard floats, and someone's best games today could be very different from tommorrow. The proposal is only for leaderboard credit.
Aqua