It's a difficult choice to make - I've always preferred the general scoreboard myself, but I very much see the value in splitting things by ship in certain cases. I've made general scoreboards the default for several reasons:
- In many cases, our scoreboards have few enough people posting on them anyway. Less than thirty five boards have more than ten entries - there are more with one or two. If we start splitting them by ship, a lot of them start to look pretty barren.
- People don't select their ship of choice at random; I suspect most people will gravitate towards the highest scoring ships where there is a clear winner regardless of the table format. Unless you're really into a game (and would jump around anyway) or drawn to a certain ship for a specific reason, getting the biggest number is the prime motivator.
- Some games just ruin it for everyone. Raiden Fighters Jet has 25 ships; let's not even talk about R-Type Final.
There are certainly games where characters simply aren't comparable - if you're playing Deathsmiles II, you're not going to pick Supe if you're up against Lei players. But large differences in potential aren't ubiquitous, and in many cases our userbase isn't pushing scores to their full potential in the first place. For an automated system like Restart Syndrome it's more difficult to make per-case decisions to how scores should be organized, but I've tried to at least give you the option to have individual ship scoreboards via the filters at the top of the board:
Of course, I'm always open to suggestions on how it can work better - just explaining how I arrived at the format I did.
I've been thinking about this quite a bit, and I've come to the conclusion that having general scoreboard really is the way to go. There's one thing though that could be done to encourage people to use a wider variety of ship, and would actually just improve the site in general.
Quite simply, instead of the long and detailed list containing every single score, the first thing one should see upon selecting a game is a brief and concise list of the best score for every category. (which is what people really care about really)
So for example, upon clicking on the Mushi Futari 1.5 Original leaderboard one would see something like this:
Normal Reco: GUS - 417,636,898
Normal Palm: JHA - 300,449,985
Abnormal Reco: AMW - 37,164,530
Abnormal Palm: Ken - 323,580,806
Then you could click on the name of the category to see all the other scores.
"37,164,530 with Ab Reco? I could beat that! I could be first place!" is a though that might cross a newer player's mind;
Before, all he would have seen was Gus' enormous 400 million score, and he'd have been like "Whatever, I'm never gonna score like that." and give up.
What do you think CStar?
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