Once again, a total ranking suggestion

[Brainmaster07]

Ok, so you can't go through and find every single one of your best scores, add em all up, divide them by the number of songs, and rank that, so why not keep it simple. We all know your total score is saved (It's used now for the total rank in fact), why not just divide that number by the total games played? (Also auto-saved already). The info is already there, no extra querries and it's a whole lot more accurate (Although it's not perfect, it's still much better.)

[banditcom]

Like an... average?! OMG WHAT A NOVEL IDEA!!!

:P

[Gnik]

The only problem with that is that someone could make a new account, AAA For FFR and then never use it again.

There would be no way to ever get them off the top.

The total rank should be something you are constantly improving. This way, each additional game played is detrimental to you, because you might do bad and blow your average.

I think the "your best" category is really the only way to go.

[alainbryden]

Also, people who were really good at SM come here and all their songs are really high scores.

If you started here as a noob, you may now be better than someone who came good, but they would have a higher average because they don't have all the crappy ones played as a noob to weigh their av3rage down.

[Brainmaster07]

You could always throw in a minimum of 350 games or something... But like I said, it wouldn't be perfect because 90% of peoples accounts started off when they sucked.

It would actually be a very bad idea. (No offense.) How many times have you "quit" a song just by holding down the arrow? I know I've done this at least 100 times or so in trying to FC songs.

I still see no negatives to my idea of adding your Best Rank on every song together and lowest number gets 1st place.

[Gnik]

Originally Posted by chardish

It would actually be a very bad idea. (No offense.) How many times have you "quit" a song just by holding down the arrow? I know I've done this at least 100 times or so in trying to FC songs.

I still see no negatives to my idea of adding your Best Rank on every song together and lowest number gets 1st place.

There's only one. It's unbalanced. One song that you haven't played adds like 15000 to your counter, whereas if you just add the best scores up it makes relatively little difference.

It also wouldn't save one second over the adding up scores method. Both require a running total to be kept that is altered each time you beat your old best score for a song.

[GregHead]

Originally Posted by Gnik

There's only one. It's unbalanced. One song that you haven't played adds like 15000 to your counter, whereas if you just add the best scores up it makes relatively little difference.

It also wouldn't save one second over the adding up scores method. Both require a running total to be kept that is altered each time you beat your old best score for a song.

I like Chardish's idea. Just make it so it doesn't display your total ranking until you have played every song. Super Smash Bros (and melee) use this idea when they give you your best time for Break The Targets and such. They don't display the total time till you've cleared every character's level.

Also, only your best score should go towards the rankings. It kind of sucks when one guy has cleared the song really well 100 times, bumping everyone else down 100... if that's how it works, I'm not sure.

[Cenright]

I dislike that, because I will never play any hip-hop songs (especially ones labeled "Parental advisory"). The same goes with fetts vette. They are offensive, so that ranking system forces you to play those songs to be part of the ranking.

[Gnik]

Originally Posted by Cenright

I dislike that, because I will never play any hip-hop songs (especially ones labeled "Parental advisory"). The same goes with fetts vette. They are offensive, so that ranking system forces you to play those songs to be part of the ranking.

That's why you just need to add the best scores up. It's extememely easy to program too.

At some low traffic time, Synth has to run a program through the DB and add up everyone's best scores for each song and store it somewhere. (Probably in place of the old total score stat)
You are now ranked based on this new variable.
The main issue with this is that if the game went and added up your scores each time, it would go slow. So you'd keep the variable on hand, and alter it only when a score is beaten.

Example:
Let's say I've never played For FFR before. My best score is 0. Then, I play it and get 50000. My total score increases by 50000 (50000-0).
I then play again and get 60000, my total score goes up 10000 (60000 - 50000).
I play again and get 30000 and my total score is unaffected.
The code for this works out to be
if currentscore > previousbestscore then totalscore += (currentscore - previousbestscore)
The number of queries to the DB doesn't go up because this is being done instead of adding to the old grandtotalscore. FFR clearly loads your previous best each time you clear a song, so that's not an issue.

If you really wanted to use ranks, it could be done exactly the same way, but scores tend to work out more evenly.

Cenright, just turn off your speakers. I'm sorry but you're in a minority here. Any system that requires you to NOT be good at every song to determine rank, will ensure that you can suck completely at some songs and still get a higher rank than a well-rounded player. This is undisputable.

[aleco]

What's with the holding down an arrow to lose? Just refresh the page.