betiko wrote:DoomYoshi wrote:jsnyder748 wrote:I think this is a good idea, but the lowest score is sort of dumb. I was around 850 one time when I started. Am I anywhere near that skill level now? no. So how would that help people know what type of player I am?
How does highest score help people know what type of player I am?
My point is that "highest score" is a statistically meaningless number. Let's say I want to know how populated cities in the United States are. I get a result of 10 000 000 for NYC. Does that help me figure out the population of Des Moines, Buffalo or even Los Angeles?
Likewise, if I want an idea of how good a player is, do I need their score after they won a Battle Royale? Does that indicate to me that I have just defeated a fierce rival? No.
This stat isn't about "helping people know what type of player I am". If it were, it wouldn't be highest score you would be reporting, it would be a mean or median, or some quantiles. This is about, and only about, making people feel better about themself. Not that that is a bad thing. But let's call a spade a spade, shall we?
I call that self improvement. You've reached X score as your max and you just want to beat your high score. Or isn't there something called high score in any video game? Isn't waht we all try to do when we play a game? improve our best score?
I don't mind including median score as well though, seems like a good idea.
You do have a point here that the context of gaming it makes more sense. And when you go to the arcade it does list the top 10 scores for the games. What it doesn't tell you is that it took 850 tries to get there, and that's a lot of quarters.
@jsnyder: I do care about points. I care about variety more than points admittedly, but that isn't my point (no pun intended).
My point is: why should "highest score" be the value we are trying to improve? Why not median score? or score averaged over time, or some value that is statistically relevant?
Even better would be random score. It takes one archived score from your entire lists of scores (remember that the database only updates every hour, so discrete values are possible) and presents that.
However, you must still answer the fundamental question. If it doesn't make you feel better about yourself, and you claim it lets people know what kind of player you are, in what way does it do this?
If your highest is 3500, current is 2500 or highest is 2700, current is 2500 what does this mean?How am I to interpret this information? We need to make a guide tabulating Current, High and Median scores and then assign categories.