Leader Board Changes
Posted by david on 16 Aug 2006 at 02:07 am | Tagged as: news, technical
We made a change to the way the scores are ranked on the leader board. Today I pushed the change to the main site. The change is this: If you play a game multiple times and get the same score then only the first game will be shown.
Why did we make this change? We wanted to combat the technique of playing a game multiple times and getting the same score, but each time incrementally decreasing the time. This seems like gaming the system to us. Not only that but it pushes everyone off the high score list which can be annoying. So now only your first game of a particular score gets counted.
We’ve been calling this the “Kathy Problem” amongst ourselves as Kathy in particular seems to engage in this activity. Don’t worry Kathy, we still love you. 🙂
Think this is a good change? Hate it? Feel slighted because we singled you out and named a problem after you when you’re really not the only person to engage in this activity? Leave a comment and let us know how you feel.
Since I play klondike incessantly & get higher and higher scores & lower elapsed time in playing, how come the higher scores & lower times are not factored into the leader board?
Hi Paul,
Thanks for the question. The higher scores *are* represented on the leader board. The only thing we eliminate are multiple games with the same exact score. If we don’t do that what happens is that the whole table fills up with one person trying to improve their time.
The reason we take your *first* game at a particular score and not your best is that if we took the best then the high score list would devolve into a list of who can memorize a particular game # and then click the cards the fastest. To me, that takes the fun out of what are, essentially, puzzle style games. We wanted to try to make the high score list (a) attainable, and (b) representative of how good you are at a particular game without practice.
-David
i am pleased about this letter about the score as i thought it was me doing something wrong, also could this be me? it keeps sticking Ann