Today Baxter, adelikat, JXQ and I were discussing user ranks, and there was a point that we currently have only two ninjas (a rank that is granted selectively and subjectively, although hardly arguable in the light of each ninja's achievements), and a whole lot of simple players ("active player" is just a forum rank, it doesn't mean the user is active as a player, rather that they're active on the forums).
So some of us decided it would be kind of neat to give people another interesting goal to strive for in TASing, so I came up with a bit of technical data and logic base for a possible new rank I'd call "expert player", which is granted semi-automatically (as with "player"), rather than manually (as with "ninja"). Keeping in mind the existance of topics like "
I call for a Top 10 All-Time TAS authors list!", it would also give a simple and open way to reward the most active and thorough TASers (see below). But its main goal as I see it is to encourage TASing activity and production quality.
The semi-arbitrary criteria for being an expert player would be
• having an amount of published non-obsoleted runs of different games more or equal to 5;
• having an average tech rating on all the published non-obsoleted runs (including runs of the same game) more or equal to 7.5.
Rationale.
Having a great number of runs is one of the main criteria to show that you're indeed able to TAS and have experience in TASing. However, having lots of runs of the same games wouldn't show diversity (making you an expert of one game, rather all-round expert), hence you need to have runs of different games published. I decided not to include the obsoleted runs into picture due to possible difficulties with low confidence rating of the movies obsoleted before rating system became popular (though I agree it might have left some players out of the picture as well, so it's open for discussion). Requirement of an average tech rating is where its subjectivity can help, since it more or less represents the voters' (= community members') opinion on whether any given run is good enough technically (even if it isn't very entertaining, which doesn't tell much about the quality of a TAS at all), and thus, the player's
perceived achievents on that part. In short, it can show whether the community thinks the player is a good player — an expert. Since a player is given the expert status, it should not be changed (the amount of published movies can decrease due to obsoletion in the future, but that shouldn't affect the player's actual achievements).
To sum up the formula variables to consider:
1) the number of published runs (currently 5);
2) the number of different games been run (currently 5);
3) whether to include obsoleted movies (currently not);
4) the average tech rating to achieve (currently 7.5);
5) how to round numbers;
6) whether to include other variables or exclude existing ones.
A small table of player "nominees" based on the number of published solo runs and the formula described above (note that my math can be a little off, so feel free to correct me):
adelikat — 16 runs of 15 different games, average tech rating: 139/16=8.7;
Walker Boh — 15/13 runs, ATR: 114.2/15=7.6;
Randil — 13/13 runs, ATR: 108.9/13=8.4;
FODA — 11/11 runs, ATR: 86.3/11=7.9;
JXQ — 10/10 runs, ATR: 83.4/10=8.3;
Acmlm — 9/9 runs, ATR: 75/9=8.3;
Baxter — 8/7 runs, ATR: 68.1/8=8.5;
SprintGod — 7/7 runs, ATR: 52.4/7.5;
TheAxeMan — 7/7 runs, ATR: 55.6/7=7.9.
Discuss. :)
