“Speed Points” - A way to tell who is the best speedrunner on this website.
2 years ago

To encourage more people to get WRs or anywhere on a leaderboard from 1st to 3rd place, “Speed Points” should be given to an account that achieves these placements. 1st place = 3 Speed Points, 2nd = 2, and 3rd = 1. For example, a person who has 3 world records (1st) and a 2nd place speedrun would get 11 Speed Points total. This person would be put on a GLOBAL leaderboard to compete for more speed points against others across the world. Thoughts?

England

"Best speedrunner"

EDIT: Was going to post a more serious response, but the forums now appear to have a relatively short character limit for new posts, for some reason. Good website.

tl;dr such a system is very surface-level and doesn't take into account many factors such as level of competition, effort put into a given game, or percentile weighting on a given leaderboard.

Edited by the author 2 years ago
ShikenNuggets, MarthSR and 7 others like this
French Southern Territories

this is a terrible idea :D

Edited by the author 2 years ago
MarthSR, Ivory and 5 others like this
Denver, CO, USA

I would have a ludicrous number of speed points and I'm nowhere near the best speedrunner on the site. It's difficult to quantify skill vs volume using weightless metrics.

ShikenNuggets, MarthSR and 9 others like this
French Southern Territories

People grinding to win the title of most games played, most world records, most categories, etc. are already a very annoying problem on this site (for example, otterstone_gamer submits hundreds of short runs at a time to farm categories, often overwhelming moderators). Having something like this would just encourage that behavior even more. Besides, just because I have more world records than you doesn't make me a better runner, for all you know all of them could have been 1 try runs in categories with no other runners at all.

Edited by the author 2 years ago
ShikenNuggets, nupali and 2 others like this
Japan

There is and there will be no way of determining who the best speedrunner is.

ShikenNuggets, MarthSR and 4 others like this
Finland

this has been talked about multiple times trough the years. and its a stupid idea. it will just encourage people making dumb small categories with free wrs.

MarthSR, nupali, and Walgrey like this
European Union

[QUOTE=Hi] There is and there will be no way of determining who the best speedrunner is. [/QUOTE] Wrong. I am the best.

Ivory, Vapo and 7 others like this

@1 Only one of us can be "the best". And that's clearly me.

Gaming_64 likes this

i already thought about this once. and this just has as much problems as counting WR. a way better system is counting people which are below you on leaderboards. so WR in a LB with 200 people would be worth 200 points. and a "WR" where there is only one runner is worth 0. maybe do a ^(2/3) to have a bit of bias to mid sized boards though.

Argentina

Something very similar has been discussed here. While it's not exactly the same, I think most of the reasons being pointed out in that thread can be applicable to this discussion.

In essence, these "speed points" would be a meaningless metric, as with the wide variety of available games on this site you can't really compare the level of complexity of 1 WR vs another. One could be highly optimized run with a lot of top-level competition while the other could easily be a random miscellanous category the mod created just to get a free WR, but both would get the same amount of "speed points", implying they are equal.

There's also the matter of game genres, length of games, platforms (PC/Console), main vs miscellanous categories, etc. Attempting to unify them all under one leaderboard is nuts and doesn't really tell us anything about the runners themselves or their level of commitment to their respective games. So why bother?

MarthSR, Hi and 3 others like this

@Liv a shit forgot: i would only count the main category of any game. no easy way to sort memes from serios runs.

United States

A decent amount of games have their meme categories on the main boards, and another decent amount of games have serious, competitive categories with slightly arbitrary goals under misc., so even that correction doesn't solve the proposed issue. Even if you tried to limit things to just any% or 100%, it still falls short as some games have their main any% named something like "any% no S+Q" and their 100% "120 star" or "117%".

Israel

I disagree about the number of runners in a leaderboard having any weight on "speed points" for a WR. Let's say I got a WR in a leaderboard of 10 runners. And over time 90 more runners came and submitted runs, but none of them passed my time. Why would I get more points because of that? I didn't do anything myself, my WR stayed the same.

If the line of thinking is "more runners means there is a greater chance for at least one of them to pass WR", that is a fallacy. Not all runners try to get world record - some just want to have fun with the game and submit their best attempt, some runners just submit their first ever run and then disappear forever, and some might try to get WR and fail (especially if the WR is close to optimized).

Alternatively - if I want to get a WR in a leaderboard with 100 runners, I don't need to beat 100 runners; I just have to beat one - the current WR holder.

Edited by the author 2 years ago
Gaming_64, Ivory and 4 others like this
Canada

That idea is so flawed in so many ways. No matter how you flesh it out, it would be easily cheeseable. Plus, not all speed games are created equal, so you can't measure "the best speedrunner" simply by sheer volume of games/WRs held. Finally, all it'll create in the end is more drama over a metric that, quite frankly, will only serve as an ego boost to the very few that would care about such a title.

I mean, we as a community have always prided ourselves over the fact that we're far more cooperative than competitive. This sort of idea would end up destroying this facet of our community... and for what? For a few people that need a self-esteem boost? Nah, I'll pass.

Edited by the author 2 years ago
Japan

@Ihavenoname248 Is that THE Ihavenoname that I know from SM63??

Canada

Just out of blatant curiosity, a while ago I tried to implement a similar-ish points system for a series of games I run. No matter how many different things I've adjusted to try to make it actually representative, it was, and still is, horrifically unbalanced, within a single series. I cannot imagine how you could possibly make any kind of global point system actually work as intended when I can't even get it to work for a single series of like 4 fairly similar games.

The whole conceit of this is kinda silly from the start because "best speedrunner" is extraordinarily subjective. But even if everyone could agree on what that even means and how to objectively define it using nothing other than leaderboard data (leaderboard rankings aren't a terrible metric, but it's only one aspect of speedrunning), you'll never come up with a system that actually rewards being a "good" speedrunner (whatever that even means), that also can't be exploited with relatively little effort by people that only care about the points.

O.D.W., 6oliath and 6 others like this