Starting a new thread because it's a direct response but could spark a new battle:

Easy Part: I'll back any cutoff around 30% or less. I'll at least think hard about supporting a higher one.

I don't really like the idea, but I'd accept 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1.

Hard Part: If it goes back to 10-3-1 I'm gone. Stig "Sir Charles" Remnes may say that every other post but this is the very first time you've ever heard it from Aquatarkus. The following will show I'm completely serious and hopefully convince.

It should have been clear earlier in MARP history, but was either accidentally overlooked or intentionally sidestepped, that the 70% difference in points between first and second places encourages cheating. It was a vague, undefined thought of mine at the time I joined the debate that got MARP the percentage scoring system. At this point it's in full Dolby Surround Sound.

The major argument for having a big point jump between first and second is that it encourages competition. With real rules it might work, but it's irrelevant because that's not the situation we're in. We're using a program with no built in safeguards to compete with hundreds of people we don't know and will probably never meet. Even if we completely trust in the MARP regulars following the rules (which is totally unfounded), most MARP players send in a few scores and vanish without a word. The scoring system under MARP conditions has to be linear to minimize the effect of cheating on the results.

I haven't posted an "I DON'T CHEAT!!!" message on the forum because it won't help. It's 1999, Clinton has been in office for 7 years, so if you don't understand why asking for denials is pointless you have a great future in political journalism.

To Chris Parsley: I'm sorry I didn't say anything explicitly about the cheating concerns I had with 10-3-1 or your expanded variation during the original debate. A MAME:CE (with a corresponding MAME32:CE) that poses a significant barrier to cheating could change MARP conditions enough to make your idea workable.

To Phil Lamat: Your posts on the argument surrounding Track 'N Field tell me you don't have unlimited faith in your fellow gamers. If you think some of your scores have been and will be passed by cheaters, doesn't it make sense to cut the amount of credit they get for it?

Aqua

BTW, for those of you who don't follow the NBA future hall of famer "Sir" Charles Barkley has announced his impending retirement after each season this decade.

-- Aquatarkus (aquatarkus@digicron.com), October 27, 1999

Answers

It is just suprising that everyone is coming full circle. I wasn't holding on to the 10-3-1 system die hard, but it was better than the percentage, which is what I am now hearing from a lot of people here. I said it would promote many lame scores, and look, it has. Now, yes, the seventy percent drop may be much, but how about something ala the old superstars series. (10-7-5-3-1)? (It goes down five, with a respectable 30% improvement for first, and 20% for each position below.)

-- Chris Parsley (cparsley1@hotmail.com), October 27, 1999.

The only way a 10-7-5-3-1 system (or something similar) would really work is if the scripts automatically rejected anything that would end up in 6th place or lower, and would automatically delete the old 5th place recording in case a new recording on that game got 5th place or higher. Otherwise, submissions of recordings by people going through the alphabet (who, I think, are very unlikely to check before submitting where their score would end up), will still be stored and processed.

Of course, we can still have mass-uploaders, because to beat someone's 10 first places, you "just" have to submit 34 fourth places, but at least the number of recordings on MARP at any given time would be 5 times the number of games, not virtually unlimited like it is now. (And growing every day, especially right after new releases of MAME.)

I don't know what happened to our previous discussion, but I'd still prefer the percentage system, but modified to where everything that would get 5, 10, however many, points or less would be rejected when submitted, and deleted when another submission has reduced it to below that threshold. The only exception in rejecting/deleting a recording would be for recordings that would be/are in the top 3 for that particular game.

And until then, I think nobody would really object if at least the recordings on MARP that have 0 (zero) percentage points were deleted immediately. It's pretty hard to find out how many of those there are (or at least, I haven't found a way), but it should at least help a little in alleviating the load.

And should we go back to a 10-7-5-3-1 or similar system, are ties going to be handled the same way as before? So the first one to upload a number one score gets 10 points, the second one to upload that same score gets only 7, etc.? There are pros and cons to doing it that way:

Pro: Reward for "pioneering". Several games require a lot of time figuring certain things out. For those games, people watching the recording of that pioneer, can simply piggyback off of the pioneer's knowledge and efforts and reach that same score with a lot less invested effort. In a system where the first one to upload a certain score gets the most points, this person actually gets rewarded for his efforts.

Con: On other games, it makes no difference whether you're the first or the tenth to upload that score; the achievement is still as good as the first nine who did it. And not everybody has the time to immediately start playing all new games as soon as a new version of MAME is released. Should someone who has less time than others be punished for that?

Just some thoughts...

Ben Jos.

-- Ben Jos Walbeehm (walbeehm@walbeehm.com), October 27, 1999.

to Aqua : your interpretation of my posts is completely wrong ; I haven't an unlimited faith , not in other gamers as you say , but in the fact that there are playing with exactly the same material . This has nothing to do with suspecting someone to cheat , it's just a constat : our PC probably hasn't the same microprocessor , the same memory and it can have an incidence on several games like NeoGeo not running with the same speed . Other example with trackfld : my inputs had been recently erased (elsewhere nobody tell me about that , I casually noticed it yesterday) and replaced by recordings made with a joystick I never heard about . It is not a problem for me , material is improving , nobody has the same and , as I said in a precedent post , everyone has to take the best of its own material All that I want to say is MARP is a fantastic site but it regroups inputs inevitably made in different conditions

Concerning the LB ranking : I would prefer a "points ranking" (if you think 10-3-1 is maybe too unbalanced I don't care about a 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 or something like that) even if "%ranking" is not so bad ... but why Zwaxy doesn't make a second column we can click on it ? (instead of the "3days ago" which have no real utility)

-- Phil (plamat@club-internet.fr), October 27, 1999.

I think in general we all pretty much agree percentage scoring is a better system even with it's warts. Otherwise, we all would have gone back to 10-3-1 and we haven't. Right now the biggest problem with the current system is the lame recordings. Fortunately, it is also the easiest to fix so as Aqua suggests: let's have a cutoff!!

Perhaps 10% is a reasonable cutoff, so those that make an honest attempt at a game at least get some points. All the single digit scores are a joke, even more so all the goose eggs out popping up.

Watch how quickly the top 10 LB positions would change if we made this simple enhancement...

Zwaxy: Hopefully it's a one liner:

IF %SCORE<10 THEN SCORE=0

-- Pat (laffaye@ibm.net), October 27, 1999.

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.

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

-- Brian McLean (bmclean84@hotmail.com), October 27, 1999.

Brian: There's a simple solution to the problem you brought up: Have the cutoff work both ways. If a score is too high compared to the rest, remove it as well! Hmm... err... that would affect some of my top scores as well. :-)

Seriously, though, I don't care how people try to make their way up the leaderboard, but I *do* care the way it seems to be affecting the servers running MARP. If people want to nickle and dime their way to the top, fine, but if their flooding of the servers and scripts contributes to the MARP site going down all the time, then, maybe, we should force them to go for a little bit more quality and a little bit less quantity...

Ben Jos.

-- Ben Jos Walbeehm (walbeehm@walbeehm.com), October 27, 1999.

How about something like this: Have a cutoff at 10 percentage points (or something similar), but don't remove/refuse submissions that are in the top 5 (or some similar number) for that game? This way, it should cut down on the load on the servers, while at the same time still giving people who are not as good as Steve Krogman a chance of getting their Galaga score on MARP.

Ben Jos.

-- Ben Jos Walbeehm (walbeehm@walbeehm.com), October 27, 1999.

I gotta go with Dave Kaupp - just get rid of the darn leaderboard and we don't have to argue how it works.

Sides, if you're #1, then we know you're the best player in the world at that game... until someone beats your score.

-- Gameboy9 (goldengameboy@yahoo.com), October 27, 1999.

I don't so much have a problem with people uploading the scores; it's the subsequent effect they have on the scripts. Maybe the best way is to restrict people to only maybe upload 10-15 per day each. At least that way as people have said previously, they might only upload their better scores.

As for the Galaga scenario, so what if someone gets nothing for 1 million points scored. They're not going to go away from MARP becuase of one game are they? If they're really bothered about the leaderboard they'll sure as hell have to contribute in more than one game anyway.

If they do say "sod it" if they can't get a point for Galaga, then we're hardly losing out, are we?

I just want to be able to see the last 50 uploads be ones I might actually be interested in, not have to customise it to 150 so I can see something other than N.Kosaka batch uploading. Granted some of his scores are not too bad, in fact he has a few 1st places, but I just want MARP to be working a little more often, and not be bogged down searching through 100's of database records that most people would agree don't give anything to the rest of us.

Crash.

-- Crash (crash@tcp.co.uk), October 27, 1999.

Let me insist with the need of a cutoff....I don't mind how high or low the limit will be set (50%....?!?!....kidding....10, 20% of top score, or percentage points, is more reasonable). I also think that the problem raised by Brian of games locked up, as Galaga, is actually a false problem....those games are locked up, and they will be so, whtever scoring system and strange LB you could use! Those unreachble high scores discourage anyone, newbies and regulars.....so pls, why discussing about 3 or 4 games, when MAME supports +1700, and the server is collapsing day by day?!?!?
Cicca

-- Cicca (cicca@writeme.com), October 28, 1999.

Mind you, I didn't say what I did to say that the people that score 500K or whatever in Galaga have a ~chance~ against Steve, my concern was that it's going to discourage them if they can't even upload it and have it worth a few measly points for all the effort they put into the game.

I dislike the idea of a cutoff simply because the skill level required to be 'good' at a game in the leaderboard's eyes is still highly questionable. Take Mr. Goemon, a Japanese game that I happened upon. I played that game a handful of times and got first, and for that matter, there was only one other score up there anyway. :) If I ~really~ cared about that game and I ~really~ put forth a first-class effort with it like I have for a handful of others, I wouldn't have stopped until I beat the silly thing on one credit. As it happens I think I got to round 2. There, now everybody has a game they can play a few times and beat me on. Don't say I never gave you nuthin'. ;)

I beat around the bush on that point a lot, but I hope you all see where I'm coming from. What a person's score on a game is can be totally unrelated to the effort they put into it. Lots of players never broke a million in Galaga despite their best efforts. ~I~ hadn't broken a million until the tourney rolled around and I had to do it, or else. :) It doesn't mean that the person didn't try, or that they're not good, even. I don't see why they should be punished for not being the best.

In more practical terms, I'm aware that my idea isn't the most workable. This being a competitive atmosphere, giving out grades for effort, as it were, can and will grow tiresome. But as I've said before, MARP is not the 'elitist group' of a select few that Stig talks about (ooooh, I've got a flame coming to me now, I can already feel it :), it's several hundred guys (and girls, I'd suppose) that like MAME and want their scores to be known to the world. Being denied leaderboard points is not a ~big~ problem, more than that I'm thinking of a situation where the script simply says, "No, that score's not big enough, you can't upload that." If I were a newbie to MARP, that first attempt would also be my last. Screw a bunch of people that only cater to the ones that spent all their lives playing one game!

Well, that's what ~I'd~ say, anyway. :) Your mileage may vary, natch. Anyway, it's 7 a.m., I'm losing coherency and my train of thought just hopped off the track and wiped out a small tribal village in a fiery wreck. Time for bed. :)

Brian

-- Brian McLean (bmclean84@hotmail.com), October 28, 1999.

Ok, I started removing my lame scores (By my standards, not by anyone elses). I'll play some new ones and only upload ones I deem worthy by my standards after the tournament.

-- Dave Kaupp (info@kaupp.cx), October 29, 1999.