let me talk about why the system was designed as it was before i address anything specific. the three separate point rewards (top10s vs groups vs formula) address 3 main design goals:
- WRs are paramount. in a competitive time trialing game, WRs are the standard to which every other run is held, and naturally (just from competition) are VERY, VERY difficult to achieve, and so should be extremely incentivized.
- (basically just agreeing with aart) groups are an effective, if a little bulky, way of organizing relative skill groups, and incentivize players within groups to aim for getting into the next best group. giving players a big, tangible goal to work towards is hugely important in my opinion: yes, purely exponential/formula-based points might be neat, tidy, efficient, whatever -- but it makes big improvements feel valueless. getting into the next skill bracket should be very rewarding.
- formula points basically serve one purpose: to make incremental improvements within groups not feel completely pointless. improving from the bottom of a group to the top of a group won't reward a big chunk of group points, but might have taken a lot of effort, so you at least get a little share of points so that your time doesn't feel wasted.
there's another important design goal: a good ranking system should be (at least TRYING to) sort players by skill, not by grind*. that ties into point #1, why WRs and top10s are worth so much -- if you're capable of setting even just a few top10s, you're already in a very elite skill bracket, and so the points should address that.
and why top10 instead of top5? why award such huge points for the top-x players anyway? well, it's arbitrary. but, it's a metric to measure high-tier players that might not be setting WRs, but are significantly better than the grouping system can adequately describe. coming from surf, top10s (and groups) are really good for setting personal goals, for discussing player skills, etc etc. i just like it.
*just by nature of a time trial gamemode with 500+ maps, that's incredibly difficult and arguably impossible -- but it should be the goal to strive towards
(also, i would like to look into trackmania's points system, because i think it might address a lot of these goals in a more elegant way)
now to address a few more specific things:
this system was designed with surf in mind, i completely confess that. surf maps, historically because of KSF's 1hour time limit per run and no saving between rotations, have never had that issue. so maybe there's a better way to account for that.
but... that said, if a 5 hour improvement to your time doesn't improve your rank, i would argue that it still doesn't deserve any points. is it a huge improvement? yes. but we're trying to rank people competitively, and you didn't beat anyone, just yourself. i understand why that might be demotivating, but that's such an extreme case -- a run that long means that for every time you beat it, you're still going to be shaving off HUGE amounts of time. we can't reward huge points for every HUGE cut in time, there's so many things wrong with it-- just set a 100 hour time, then beat it with a 90 hour time, then a 70 hour--etc. how many points should a 100 hour time be worth anyway? these are questions that would need to be answered either by a completely different system, or some different mechanism within this system, but in my opinion such extremes aren't worth designing around.
map difficulty and tiers... i personally hemmed and hawed for a long time about awarding some flat number of ranked points based just for setting your first PR on a map, based on the tier of the map. i'm still not opposed to that, but i didn't include it in this system because, in a way, it's naturally addressed by the system: a hard map will have fewer completions. therefore, just completing a hard map will give you a better rank, no matter how competitive your time is. and with a better rank, the system is naturally rewarding more points anyway. so it kind of solves itself... the question is, is that natural chunk of points actually representative of the map's difficulty? maybe not. it might be too low. so that might need to be discussed, and maybe there is merit to having a "completion points" element.
one thing that i am personally adamant about is that the tier of the map should not affect how group/top10/WR points are distributed. in my opinion, there's no reason it should. again, this is a competitive time trialing game -- your times should be purely compared against other people's times, and the group/top10/WR systems are already doing that, so there's no reason to confound them. again, i think there's a very real discussion to be had about "completion points", but not in the context of tweaking the other systems.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk
e: to be clear, i'm open to the discussion of different ranked system ideas, + tweaks to the current system, etc. this is just my personal argument/defense of the system as it is now.
