I personally have preferred a decay rate type of approach to scoring on Best Game events for the reasons that have already been shared by others.
I dug up an old e-mail from 2016 that I sent to my co-director for an upcoming selfie league, so I’ll copy and past some of that content here:
One of the things that I find challenging as a mid-tier player is the incentive to try to go for #1 or #2 if those scores are completely out of reach. There’s a big reward if I can hit that mark, but no additional “bonus” to jump from say 6th to 5th or 8th to 4th aside from the single point per place.
I was looking on Tiltforums and one of the older topics was around scoring schemes (PAPA scoring schemes), and Bowen suggested a “decay rate” which would end up using fractions. I played in Excel and thought about a modified “decay rate” which would award bonus points all the way to 10th place, but still retain integers. After 10th place, you still get a point per place.
Current -> 100,90,85,84,83,82,81,80,79,78,…
Proposed -> 100,90,81,73,66,60,55,51,48,46,…In my mind this provides more incentive to people who have a game in the 4th to 10th range. If I’m currently 10th on a game, I get an additional bonus point to every place I pass from 10th on up to 1st.
We ran that scoring scheme for our selfie leagues and PinFest in 2017. The problem with the 90% Decay Rate for PinFest is that the curve ended up being too steep for the number of people.
For PinFest 2018, I noted that the NYC Pinball Championships were doing it based on 200 points, so I fiddled with the numbers until I got to a ~97.5% Modified Decay Rate which is what we used in the event and what we plan on using for this year’s PinFest again. It provides a increasing bonus for the top 12 (which worked out for being in the Top 10%-15% based on the number of plays on the machine).
| Position | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | … | 169 | 170 | 171 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Points | 200 | 195 | 190 | 185 | 181 | 177 | 173 | 170 | 167 | 164 | 162 | 160 | 158 | 157 | 156 | 155 | 154 | 153 | 152 | 151 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
If you’re using NeverDrains, you can define the chain for how the points decrement. If you’re using MatchPlay, then Andreas was kind enough to add two different Best Game Decay Rates for me (90% and 95%) based on a 100-point scale.
