Here's an update to the Power Ratings as of 3/12/99... Again, scale is 0-10 with an average player set to 1.

#1 BBH 7.52 ; #2 JoustGod 7.26 ; #3 Angry 6.67 ; #4 German Krol 6.54 ; #5 JSW 6.53 ; #6 Steve Krogman 5.17 ; #7 lagavulin 4.10 ; #8 Donut 3.94 ; #9 Krool 3.94 ; #10 Phil Lamat 3.56 ; #11 BeeJay 3.48 ; #12 JGustavo 3.46 ; #13 Dith 3.42 ; #14 GOD Inc. 3.37 ; #15 Renzo Vignola 3.35 ; #16 N.Rodgers 3.33 ; #17 NotMan 3.26 ; #18 Zwaxy 3.13 ; #19 bIcchI3r3 2.77 ; #20 SportsDude 2.72 ;

Total Players: 126; Average Player: 1.00; MAME Total Games: 1186; - clones: 444; - deletions: 2; + additions: 56; Leaderboard Games: 796; No High Score Yet: 129

As you've probably guessed, I've written a program to crunch all this stuff. To give you an idea of what is happening, it basically works off of 5 lists: Scores, Games, Clones, Additions and Deletions. It will take a valid MAME game list (in this case 0.35b5), removes the clones and originals that play like clones, and adds back the clones we would want to count. The final list consists of 796 leaderboard games and is compared to the scores list that includes verified or unverified scores. Note: this isn't the exact # of games since final decisions have not been made. A change to the Power Ratings from last week is that I now factor in total games played. This was necessary because people were ranking higher simply by playing lots of games. (Sorry JoustGod, you could have moved to #1.) Another example is Ron Corcoran and Rick Fothergill, Ron has 42 games played averaging 31% of the top score, Rick only 5 games but hitting 88%--both wind up with a Power Rating of 1.51. Also, due to the fact that there seems to be a core group of players emerging, to balance the difference between high and low raw scores, it is now a little tougher to get a 9+ power rating.

-- PatL (laffaye@ibm.net), March 12, 1999