Cutoffs are all well and good, except for (at least) one particular phenomenon... Several of MARP's competitors here have picked out games that are 'their territory', so to speak. I think the most obvious example of this would be Steve Krogman and his mad Galaga skillz. :) This game (and most of its clones, Steve didn't quite do this for all of them and I will force him to do so in the near future) is locked down, essentially. I daresay that nobody's going to be beating his 20+ million anytime soon. Or ever. It's great that he's totally aced that game, but where does that leave the rest of us? I think my tourney score of 2.6 mil is earning me about 4 points on the leaderboard. Even with a 10% cutoff, my recording and a whole slew of others gets eliminated. I'm not saying this because I really care about the four points, I'm just saying that when a newbie shows up, maybe he's good at Galaga, and sees that a 5, 6, or maybe 7 million score is necessary to even ~show up~ on the board, let alone get significant points, who's going to bother? The return is not worth the effort required.(posted 9207 days ago)Another example might be Ben Jos. Now there's a man who's good at Donkey Kong. :) Most of the players below him are somewhere under half his score, and that will bring a lot of respectable scores (200Kish, I'd imagine) under the 10 point mark. 200K is not a mark I'd expect to get in that game without a lot of practice... A ~lot~ of it. So once again, a cutoff would basically refuse any scores that aren't superstar-quality, and MARP is ~not~ a collection of superstars, gentlemen. There are a few in the bunch, but that's maybe 2% of the population or less.
I can do exactly the same with one game I've harped on a bit lately, a virtually unknown shooter called Brain. It's not a great game, and its scoring leaves something to be desired. But if I chose to spend 8 hours of my life or more in front of the game, I could slap up a 10+ million score, absolutely dwarfing anything else out there. The next score is 250K, I think, and basically I'd invalidate ~everybody's~ recording except for anyone who wanted to try again and had a few hours to kill.
Now I'm not saying I have a solution for these lockdowns, because there doesn't seem to be one. It only makes sense that the top score in a game is going to be very, very difficult to beat if it's a world record. But why take a player who is good and essentially tell him, 'You can't play Pac-Man like Billy Mitchell... No points for you!'
I say leave the mass-uploaders alone. So what if their scores don't earn them any points, or single digits? What's it to ~you~? That's their effort, that's what they want to be known as. Keep your eyes on your own screen, as it were, or you'll be left behind. :)
Brian