What if the leaderboard changed from being unlimited to counting only each player's 50 best games? The max score would be 5000, 50 first place recordings. The rank difference between (only 11 have 50 1st places right now) these players would be determined by their best 200 recordings.

Most of the leaderboard would stay the same, but it would change the competition for the top 10 to 20 slots quite a bit. I think it would be for the better (encouraging the elite to fight on existing games rather than joining the "Beta Rush"). What do you guys think?

Aqua

-- Aquatarkus (aquatarkus@digicron.com), August 18, 1999

Answers

I like the scoring system as it is right now. As soon as I get 1400 mediocore scores I'll go and start improving them. ;)

I guess I could always spend 8 hours on one game and get a mighty score or spend 8 hours on 10 games and have a little more fun learning new games.

-- Dave Kaupp (info@kaupp.cx), August 18, 1999.

A wonderfully innovative idea to stop lame recordings from boosting a player's score :) too bad it's just more work for zwaxy who's already done soo much. We can hope it's not too troublesome to add a new scoring scheme.

-- Chad (churritz@cts.com), August 18, 1999.

I have to agree with Dave on this one. I'd rather submit my mediocre scores first and then build them afterwards (there is going to be a definite division here between the new and old players at MARP)

Secondly, the proposal doesn't solve anything. MARP has, what, 1400 games as of this time? It's fairly easy to find close to 50 games, that people either have few or bad scores on (I've located most of them already :) ) Therefore there's no guarantee that the people in the top 10 deserve to be. The system is great as it is now. If BBH can damn near finish 150 games, he deserves to be #1, and not me for finding 50 clones that nobody wants to play.

-- Q.T.Quazar (qan@home.com), August 18, 1999.

I like the idea, Aqua. Anything to put a halt to the current rush of lame recordings. It may have to be tweaked a bit here and there, but a solid idea nonetheless.

Now I know that I've got roughly as many recordings as some of our newcomers, but that was over the course of a year and a half or so! Not the current "get 500 scores per month" rate that MARP is currently experiencing. Nothing wrong with massive uploads, but come on, have a little pride, huh?

JoustGod

-- JoustGod (pinballwiz1@msn.com), August 18, 1999.

Out out of curiosity, what constitutes a "lame" score?

I may be way off base here, but I thought MARP was about submitting scores, not just particular scores.

A better ruling may be that you can only submit a score of place 3 or higher, all scores lower than that would be deleted.

Or better yet, submissions will only be accepted if they beat the 1st place score. Once someone gets a massive score on a game, its pretty much closed. Once all/most games have massive scores the uploading will dwindle and the leader board will stay pretty much static.

Or even beter. Only ONE submission per game per player. This would make the player only submit his/her all time best score. Pherhaps once a year a player would be allowed to upload again in that game.

Just some thoughts and ideas. :)

-- Dave Kaupp (info@kaupp.cx), August 18, 1999.

I say a player can make the MARP anyway s/he wants it to be - well at least in terms of high scores in arcade games anyway. You can make it your own personal high score archive, or you can work on the scores that are challenged. You can get tons points on the leaderboard by trying all the games, or you can try to get 100 points on every game. Because of this reasoning, I say a player's score in that player's opinion is NEVER a lame score. It may be lame to another person, but in most cases, a personal record is NEVER lame to the player, except maybe against the MARP in general.

Now I'm probably using only one case, myself - but I bet this is true to most or all of you. With this reasoning in mind - I will give the opinion to keep the leaderboard the same way as it is - which I believe rewards all the players for their accomplishments. If you say only accept a score that will place it in the top three(which is what we used to do in a way), I think that discourages players from showing off their best. True, it may not be the best in the MARP, but it's the best to the player itself.

This leaderboard issue is arguably the most controversial issue in the MARP(2nd is the tournament... in my opinion anyway :) ) - it probably will be for quite some time... no matter how you make it, you'll probably still get different opinions... I guess the point is, you can satisfy some of the people all of the time, but you can't satisfy all of the people some of the time. (Is that the right quote?)

Thanks for reading my thoughts :)

-- Gameboy9 (goldengameboy@yahoo.com), August 18, 1999.

Well Dave, first off, a "lame" score can be various definitions to be sure. However...if you observe some of the recordings that have hit MARP lately, I would find it hard to label it anything else. A factor that is considered in this personal opinion include my observation that the players in question are good players who normally can post decent if not top scores on many other games. The fact that they occasionally throw in some scores that obviously were played well below their capabilities is a red flag if I ever saw one. Perhaps they don't really enjoy the game (not unusual, I dislike a whole slew of games emulated by MAME). That disinterest, if that's what it is, definitely shows up in the score and how the game is played. So my question is, why even bother? The answer: It's for the points, my friend! Nothing wrong with that as point-grabbing has been going on at MARP long before most of you discovered this wonderful gathering place for the planet's top players. I'm just calling those particular scores what they are...lame.

I don't agree with limiting anyone here on how many scores they can upload. But I just felt compelled to note that there are increasing amounts of lame scores cluttering up the MARP landscape. Submit 'em if you want to MARPers, but just don't get offended if you spend 2 minutes learning a game, submit that practice session and then someone calls it lame. That's really the point I'm getting at here.

JoustGod

-- JoustGod (pinballwiz1@msn.com), August 18, 1999.

A few things to put my idea in perspective:

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

-- Aquatarkus (aquatarkus@digicron.com), August 18, 1999.

JG,

I see what you mean about some of the scores. I cant say anything for the rest of the players, but the low scores I've submitted where markers for a game I liked or could improve or with more practice at a later time. With over 1400 games, it will take me a few months just to try them all much less master them. :)

So yes some of my scores are lame, I prefer to call them markers.

-- Dave Kaupp (info@kaupp.cx), August 18, 1999.

I know this will make things more confusing, but I think I have a modification that might be an improvement to Aqua's.

Pick the N best games, maybe 50 maybe 100 maybe 500. Then after the best games, leaderpoint points would ONLY count for recordings that are in the top 3. So If you placed in the Top three in ALL of your recordings they all will count, no matter how many recordings you input. But If you put up many [of the controversal] lame scores, only the best N scores would count.

This will prevent someone from thinking that putting marker scores up for 1400 games will benefit their leaderboard score, since what should benefit the leaderboard score is if 1400 of those scores are in the top 3. I like the idea of using MARP as a database to mark your own best score at the moment, since who can remember what their high scores are for so many games. I'm not against quantity, i'm just against quantity without quality for a leaderboard score.

-- Chad (churritz@cts.com), August 19, 1999.

Somebody putting up 1400 (or whatever amount) of low scores may get them in the leaderboard today, but if that person never went back to improve there scores, the would eventually migrate down the leaderboard as higher scores for that game are posted.

Person A scores 10,000 gets 100 points, person B scores 20,000, person A now has 50 points. Person C scores 100,000. Person A now has 10 points. If person A never improves that score, he is bumped down 90 points.

The current point system works fine the way it is, over time every thing should even out as more and more players submit scores for each game.

PS: Sorry I was being facitious about my previous submission rules. I don't think it needs to be overly complicated.

-- Dave Kaupp (info@kaupp.cx), August 19, 1999.

Ok, my views on these leaderboard disputes.

I've always been an advocate of quality over quantity. Yeah, I've broken down and uploaded some crappy scores for temporary leaderboard points, but the rest of the time I'm making a conscious effort to learn the game and submit what I feel is a "good" score for me. Very rarely do I UL something that won't have 1st place at the time. I guess this is mainly because of the old 10-3-1 scoring system... I like the new percentage scoring too but I still like the old one as well... gotta break the 2000 mark ;)

I guess it's just kinda weird to see some "newcomers" come close to matching (or even surpassing?) the number of submissions that either JoustGod or I have... seeing how we've been over here for well over a year. And yes, I AM against lame submissions... but who am I to say if a recording is lame or not? I just think that sometimes the player is MUCH better off giving the game a few more plays before rushing to upload a recording for some more leaderboard points. For example, take Q.T. Quazar's Body Slam recording (Q.T., I'm not singling you out to pick on you! I already know you have enough to put up with considering Discipline's headhunting). He scored 120 points, and SportsDude has the high at 31,230. The 120 scores *0* points as it isn't even 1% of 31k. So isn't this really a waste of time? Just spend a few more games getting the mechanics down so the recording actually claims some leaderboard points.

Oh yeah, and I'm against scores on games that are considered "broken". Sure I gave in and did Battle Lane recordings, but who hasn't? It doesn't take any skill at all to start up the game, and it takes an eensy teeny tiny bit to get 540 or 550 or whatever on the two Cabal sets. If those romsets are fixed and work as well as cabalbl, how many of the people are going to re-record?

And people should always be allowed to better their own scores, putting restrictions on how often people can upload scores is a bit silly. My Psychic 5 recordings went from 140k to 6 million as I learned all the nuances of the game... and then Alan Kwan shows me up by getting 8.4 million, heh :P

-BBH

-- BBH (lordbbh@aol.com), August 20, 1999.