Here's a question for you. Currently (before midnight, GMT) if I put a 1 in the 'old table age' on the leaderboard page, to see how the positions have changed since midnight last night, I see, in 10th place:

lagavulin : 369 (20/37/58) 74.44 : 370 (20/37/59) 70.19

It's showing me that lagavulin has lost one medal point (since somebody has knocked one of his 3rd place scores out of the top 3), but that he's gained just over 4 percentage points (since he uploaded a lot of high scoring 4th or 5th place recordings).

Now - the question is - should the arrow point up or down? The arrow is supposed to indicate whether the player's leaderboard score is getting better or worse, but lagavulin's is doing both! :o)

I guess I ought to make the arrow reflect the percentage-based score, since that's what the table is sorted on. What do you think?

Chris.

-- Zwaxy (zwaxy@bigfoot.com), June 17, 1999

Answers

Definitely a no-brainer, Chris. Have the arrows reflect the percentage change. So what are your MARP Tourney picks gonna be, huh?

JoustGod

-- JoustGod (pinballwiz1@msn.com), June 17, 1999.

You're right. I'm tired. I shouldn't be sat around breaking MARP at this time in the morning...

My picks for the competition I'm not sure about. Should I aim to pick the games I'm most likely to beat you guys at, or games I like to play? Hmm. Either way qbert's qubes has to be in there - you never did manage to reclaim that one, did you?

I've just been playing with the leaderboard scoring mechanism a little more. I coded up the idea I mentioned a few days ago, where the player's percentage of the highscore is multiplied by 0.85 to the power (position - 1). Check it out & tell me what you think. It's swapped German Krol and JoustGod in positions 2 and 3 of the table, but I can't work out why that is. JoustGod has more recordings, but German has more 1st places. I'm wondering if JoustGod has enough recordings which score 15% or less than the highscore, which would have counted for zero previously, and now count for something more than zero...

Whatever - I've tidied the script up a little, so it's relatively easy to slot new scoring code into place...

Notice that the search pages now report the number of leaderboard points you've earned, rather than the flat percentage (and they assume that the bonus is 15%).

Also, the search pages can now sort on leaderboard points awarded, as well as score, date, etc.

It's past my bed time...

Chris.

-- Zwaxy (zwaxy@bigfoot.com), June 17, 1999.

Zwaxy,

It's looking pretty good now.

How'd you like my suggestion about having 'user profiles' to customise what search defaults people would like to have, number of recent uploads to show, etc, etc ?

BeeJay.

PS: Something I'm getting used to now is not being in the top 10... ;-) ....but it doesn't automatically show where you are on the leaderboard now when you're not in the top 10.... :-(

-- BeeJay (bjohnstone@cardinal.co.nz), June 17, 1999.

I love the idea of the user profiles. It will happen. I've got some work to do by the end of the month getting some kind of tournament script in place, but after that...

And as for not seeing your name in the leaderboard if you're not in the top 10, well I see my name, and I've not been in the top 10 for a long time. Over the last couple of days the script has been changing a lot, and I've introduced and fixed quite a few bugs, but overall the script is (hopefully) better and more stable now than it was before. Do you still have the problem?

Chris. (just call me 'Captain ClearCase')

-- Zwaxy (zwaxy@bigfoot.com), June 18, 1999.

Zwaxy,

Must have been a temporary glitch while you were messin' with them boards the other night.

It was only a couple of times that it didn't show me, so I assume it was during your reworking of the boards. Either that or I hadn't 'logged' on properly.... which is quite likely as I was doing some testing at work the other day comparing the auto-generated html output from JADE in both the IE and Netscape browsers and now that I think about it I seem to remember typing in marp.retrogames.com to see the differences in the MARP site between the two browsers. DOH!!!!

Don't you just hate the way IE and Netscape present totally different looking pages from the same HTML source - especially if you've made use of absolute positioning which is absolutely not supported yet by Netscape. :-(

BeeJay.

-- beejay (bjohnstone@cardinal.co.nz), June 18, 1999.