I agree with Etch  
I think we should write to different standard pages, one for ZZMT and one for non-ZZMT.

Ah! I see what you mean. mmm Yeah, that could be a good idea, just like they did in SMK ^^

nice God+ times for that SuperYoshi1

I think ZZMT PRs are as follows
PC: 44"34 / 13"19???
BC1: 42"10
BC2: 1'01"47
SGB: 46"58 / 12"48
MC: 52"50 (5lap)
SL: 17"50...you're good btw
YD: 1'01"73 (5lap)
SL: probably 1'00"30

I think I know about the retro ones (ZZMT):

MC1 - 44"49 / 6"75
DP1 - 57"00 / 9"19
GV1 - 47"46 / 6"99
BC1 - 1'11"99 / 12"40
MC2 - 56"40 / 7"90
CI1 - 38"80 / 4"75
GV2 - 47"77 / 7"65
DP2 - 1'08"20 / 10"99
BC2 - 1'23"60 / 14"49
MC3 - 1'11"90 / 11"69
KB1 - 27"30 / 2"92
CI2 - 47"97 / 6"35
VL1 - 38"88 / 4"88
BC3 - 1'13"49 (using Bowser I guess) / 12"60
MC4 - 1'18"50 / 13"10
DP3 - 59"20 / 9"09
KB2 - 42"72 / 5"00
GV3 - 57"30 / 8"00
VL2 - 38"30 (the Karel way ) / 4"79 (THE FUCKING KAREL WAY)
RRd - 1'09"30 / 11"60

God times should be, for the most part, impossible to attain.

What do you mean? Well then Etch, give us an advice as you are a mod (so you may be used to creating new standards...)

They weren't rushed, I spent hours on them while I was at work. Needless to say there were some mistakes, sue me!

Need to chill everyone, when the standards were first put out no one said they were perfect, infact quite the opposite and I stipulated that we would review them after 6 months to see what progress had been made and see how players are grouping in the stats.

This is a democracy in so far as I want players input in helping to devise the standards. To be fair etch no one posted back then saying they wanted to create demi god times for non-zzmt and it sounds logical. The God times were set by what I thought was possible at the time in zzmt, thats why they are "zzmt charts". I then took benchmarks for certain standards from the players times in the chart at the time and made standard benchmarks for which I put incrementals in between, thats why some of the incrementals aren't static. I was also looking at how much per zzmt saved and how many per lap you could do to improve times on currently what they were.

I dont think we should have God + 10/9/8/7 etc, i dont think we need it. God is a "perfect" zzmt time, maybe the highest nonzzmt times should be Myth/Titan level. I'm more than happy for people to heavily contribute to making standards, maybe we should all go through together track by track and share thoughts. If we do one a day we'd cover it off in a month or so?

I could've stayed in the MKSC site frozen so I can max half of my PRs

I bring these issues up because there doesn't seem to be a solid plan here.

That's kind of important when making new standards.

I am still sensing some disagreement on what should be a god time and how zzmt and nonzzmt gaps should be covered.

Easiest solution is to treat zzmt like nbt is for smk.  The problem with the mksc site though is that there are so few players.  It's harder to gauge what good times are with so few people making a serious attempt at it.  Setting the bar higher for newbie might encourage people to get records that don't involve falling off the track ten times.  Once people learn how to drive, they slowly improve by adding mt's and shrooming better.  Some strats are harder so you see larger gaps on some charts.  Since there is such variation between the tracks, going through them one by one is probably necessary to create balanced standards.

Not every course gives zzmt a huge advantage but we can't have the best nonzzmt time ranked expert a for example.  At most, the best non-zzmt times should be ranked low myth.  This might be a good compromise but the fact is there are only a few players who have good zzmt times.  On some charts, you would still have a large gap between those times and non-zzmt.  At least on smk, you have a lot more people so it looks like there isn't a bunch of empty space.

Three Choices
1. Make standards that are strictly zzmt
2. Make standards that are designed for non-zzmt leaving ranks near god as a zzmt buffer
3. Make standards that are strictly non-zzmt leaving ranks above god as a zzmt buffer

I don't know about you guys, but I don't see this site getting a whole lot larger than it already is.  In the interest of making nice looking standards but allowing god to be possible for non-zzmt players, choice 3 is probably the best.  At any rate, we need to make them hard enough so they last forever so to speak.  What we decide to do will come down to preference.  Standards are arbitrary but if we are going to do them, make them pretty.

I've already said that I like option 3 best, but in the interest of fairness, I'll go over the pro's and con's of each option. The standard names I use are based off of the current names for standards, and not the SMK standards like I hope we change it to.

1. Make standards that are strictly zzmt

Pros: 4
- More room for competition in ZZMT
- GOD standard will be very hard/next to impossible for a top level ZZMT player
- Still leaves the option for GOD+ times for ZZMT players that go up and beyond that of 'top' ZZMT play
- Ignoring Non-ZZMT players, this is the easiest way to balance the standards, as you would only require finding the theoretically fastest ZZMT time instead of finding both.

Cons: 5
- Many players do not want to modify their GBA/DS/DSL to be pro-ZZMT, or do not have the tools necessary
- Non-ZZMT top level players would most likely end up getting to Hero/Expert at best
- It would be impossible for a non-ZZMT player to get a GOD time.
- Many average non-ZZMT players would probably be ranked somewhat near Adv/Inter at best.
- Shunts the ARR ranks for non-ZZMT players, leaving a significant gap between them and ZZMT players.

2. Make standards that are designed for non-zzmt leaving ranks near god as a zzmt buffer

Pros: 5
- Allows more ranks for ZZMT players.
- Still has the option of GOD+ for above and beyond ZZMT players.
- Top level non-ZZMT players would be able to get low Myth/Titan times
- Balances the gap in ARR a bit between non-ZZMT and ZZMT players
- Would be possible to alter GOD+/Myth times (or ZZMT times in this case) by changing the exponential gap, although it has a possibility of making a non-ZZMT player's standard lower.

Cons: 4?
- Would still be impossible for a non-ZZMT player to achieve a GOD time.
- Doesn't allow non-ZZMT players to get a 'perfect' ARR of 0, which should be the highest achievement in standards reachable by 'any' (top) player after putting in many hours to a course for a 'perfect' time.
- Would be harder to balance the standards for non-ZZMT players with less room to put lower ranked times; Exponential gaps would be bigger than they would be in option 3.
- Changing the exponential gap at Myth would look weird, as all of the standards on every site have a history of having the standards go exponentially down from GOD. This is more of a personal opinion and doesn't have a lot of value, but it should be pointed out.
- Would require us to find the theoretical best possible times for both ZZMT and non-ZZMT.

3. Make standards that are strictly non-zzmt leaving ranks above god as a zzmt buffer

Pros: 7
- Top level non-ZZMT players would be able to achieve GOD times with a 'perfect' non-ZZMT time.
- The gap in ARR between non-ZZMT players and ZZMT players would be as close as you can achieve realistically.
- Allows non-ZZMT players to achieve an ARR of 0.
- GOD+ to GOD times can have higher exponential gaps than GOD to Myth/Titan/etc, allowing it to be insanely hard to climb the GOD+ charts even with ZZMT (I'd like to point out that in my personal opinion, GOD should be like slightly optimized TAS time for non-ZZMT players, and GOD+10 should be a slightly optimized TAS time for ZZMT players. (I say slightly optimized because fully optimized would involve delaying MT's by a frame to increase your speed by 1, completely straight ZZMTs, or other small things similar to that, which would be impossible for a player to do in real time))
- An insanely skilled non-ZZMT player could still have the possibility of climbing to GOD+1/GOD+2 depending on the gap/usefulness of ZZMT on the course.
- Would be easier to balance than Option 2, as it gives us more ranks available to lower level players, decreasing the exponential gap for non-ZZMT players and allowing the lower standards to be a more accurate display of skill level.
- Would also allow for alteration of GOD+ times (due to exponential gap) for ZZMT players without affecting non-ZZMT players.

Cons: 2?
- Makes the exponential gap for ZZMT players bigger, as this option has less standards available to ZZMT players.
- Would require us to find the theoretical best possible times for both ZZMT and non-ZZMT.
- I'm sure there's more, but I can't actually think of any more.




If anyone has any Pros/Cons to add to any of those options, please tell me, I'd like to keep a list of them and start a poll tomorrow so we can effectively decide on which option we want to follow.

For the tracks where ZZMT doesn't save any time, we just set the highest possible time as GOD+10. and (depending on the situation/strategy) scale correctly. It's a pretty simple solution.

karterfreak wrote on 08/17/09 at 04:48:41:



i'm gonna write some thoughts about the tracks tomorrow. hm i'm inactive quite long and never wrote down my fastest splits and stuff...

sorry that i didn't say anything earlier here

option 3 would be the best solution without a doubt.
the main point of standards is to motivate people, right? (never really cared about them   )
so new players have more accurate non-zzmt standards to reach and the top non-zzmt player should be able to get god times!
another point is that i don't expect many karters to modify their gbas.

maybe we can change it to zzmt standards in a few years when there is good amount of zzmt players (like Sami did with the smk standards)