One instance in how many? It's not a question of how much it affects you at the time, it's a question of how much it affects your overall ranking. Build up a large enough statistical base, and the effects of sudden unstoppable lag become irrelevant.Jonathan wrote:I'm pretty much immune to constant lag of incoming data. But what if you stop receiving data for a sec? Or if your own turns can't reliably reach the server?Lucifer wrote:The best player will be immune to lag, rather than use it as a crutch to explain why he's not such a good player.
[/quote]Only rounds/matches are seriously and permanently affected by that.Lucifer wrote:I further think that the best player should be determined off the ladder, ideally, and that the ladder itself should be addressed to do it. I don't really care if your ladder position suffers because you don't play often enough.
And I don't think the ladder, as it is now, is suitable. Basically all it does is give you points when you win a round, or take some away if you don't.
Right, which is why I said "the ladder should be addressed" to handle it.
There isn't any way to definitively determine who's the single best player. Seems like the best player should be able to play and dominate on any server, regardless of scoring, regardless of settings, and so forth.
If I were to go about setting this up, I'd want to run tournaments on each server amongst their regular players. Then I'd take the top ranked players on each server and pit them against each other in a tournament that spans all the servers, using consistent scoring for each (so the MBC guys would be at a disadvantage when the scoring is chosen to match the current most common scoring system). And I'd run the tournament in multiple rounds where each server clones one of the others, so Swampland would run with Tigers settings during a round, MBC settings during another round, and so forth for each server. That should eliminate the perpetual problem of some servers being easier to play than others because of ping, so someone who might be good on Tigers but isn't because of an unstable ping (and he's located in Tahiti) will have a change to play Tigers settings on the server that gives him a stable ping.
ANd then the whole series needs to be regularly repeated, because the best player is going to change over time. What is the turnaround exactly? How often does the current best player get toppled by someone else? Furthermore, how do you deal with the plain fact that the best player may not even get involved in the tournament series in the first place?
It's an ambitious undertaking, to try to determine the best player. I'd tend to want to set it up as a peer opinion thing, actually. Where your peers judge you based on a series of qualifications, and leave actual scoring out of it. The best player may never win any matches, not because he can't, but because he doesn't play for points. But maybe nobody can kill him, which would certainly rate him at least being "pretty good".
Anyway, yeah, I'm in agreement with everyone here, actually. I think it's going to turn out to be near impossible to determine definitively, and that if you don't like it, then don't get involved. That'll skew the rankings anyway, right? What if the best player protests the initiative and doesn't get involved?
