The Medal Counts are making a comeback...

You heard it here... the official medal counts are making their triumphant return to the site.

There will be some very significant changes, and here is the list of all the new things that will be happening:

-Medals will be separated by 6 categories... one for each simulator plus a combined.

-There will be two separate divisions of medal counting... one running count which counts all medals ever earned, and one that resets at the beginning of every year.

-At the end of every year, there will be awards handed out for overall achievment based on the yearly lists.

-I will also be delving into the past by posting the final yearly tabs from 2003, 2004, and 2005, and handing out the appropriate awards.

-The medal lists will be kept safe in an Excel file rather than simply written on pieces of paper, so that I don't lose them again.

-Eventually, I will be doing all of the above for what I call 'designer ratings', where each coaster a person submitted for weekly contests will be averaged to give the designer a score to award quality in contrast to the quantity-based hard counts. There will be yearly awards for this as well.


So, I'm working on all of these at this very moment. I will post the appropriate yearly awards from the site archives as I finish the counts from each year, and then the running count and 2006 medals will be posted and I'll start working on part 2.

Questions? Comments? Post them up.

[Oscar]

check the drop down menu for the exchange, I added a little code that displays all tracks that have medals for gold silver and bronze, let me know if you need it for any of the other medals [:)]

^Yeah, that feature was definitely helpful.

Originally posted by cjd

-Eventually, I will be doing all of the above for what I call 'designer ratings', where each coaster a person submitted for weekly contests will be averaged to give the designer a score to award quality in contrast to the quantity-based hard counts. There will be yearly awards for this as well.

One minor change I would suggest is that contest entries be included in that. I know that I, as well as quite number of others have produced some of our best coasters for site contests, especially in the tournaments. So I only think that it's fair to include them in "designer ratings".

[hyyyper]

i don't get that last part, got a more details description of it?

[Oscar]

I will see what I can do about contests, I notice that sometimes they forget to award the contest medal

^Contests will be included, Wing-Over. I Just forgot to type it.

hyyyper, here is an elaboration of the designer ratings...

-You must win at least 2 medals to recieve a rating

-Starting with your first medal, each coaster you submitted that qualified for either the weekly contest (at least 2 rates within the week), or was entered for an official site contest, will have its score averaged.

-This average score is called your 'designer rating', and will be posted in a list in descending order just like the medal counts.

-While the medal counts award people for making lots of coasters, this number awards people for consistently making high quality coasters.

[Coasterkidmwm]

Make sure this gets done in a timely fashion unlike lots of other things you've done.

^^ Will the scores be taken from what they are now, or from what they were at the end of the week, like how the weekly medals work?

^At the end of the week for weekly medal coasters, official judge's rating for contest coasters since not all contest coasters get ratings from the members.

BTW, I just finished tallying the medals from 2003. I'll be posting them tonight.

BTW2: I just created the excel spreadsheet that will be doing the designer ratings, and I'm going to do those tonight as well so that everyone can see just what they're about.

BTW3: It looks liek I'm going to be off sabatical a lot sooner than I originally thought. I've spent the last 3 days doing nothing but playing RCT2 and NL during my free time, and I love it again!

[Dirk_Ermen]

Just wondering, what happended with the monthly medal awards?

I don't know... that was Edge's idea.

[Dirk_Ermen]

EDGE?!? where are ya? We want answers!

Progress Update:

School set me back the past week, with a major research paper being due and my first Physics exam on the same day, so I didn't get a lot of work done outside of that.

8 designer ratings have been calculated thus far, and more will be coming. They're about 15% done at the moment. More progress updates soon.

lol... Wow this whole situation sounds so familiar... And last time you admitted to making up excuses because you dont like coasters anymore... Who knows what it could be this time.

...except this time I didn't make any promises or excuses. I just told everyone what was going on, for their information.

[hyyyper]

About the designer ratings, i don't know if it has included yet, but wouldn't it be better to make the average over the last 10 coasters instead of every coaster, so that the 3's and 4's of a user's first tracks won't take the present rating down

^the initial 3's and 4's don't count. The ratings do not begin to count until the user wins their first medal. And even after that, the coasters only count if they recieved at least 2 ratings during the target week. The only person this rule has affects negatively so far is IntaminFan397, since his first medals were from coasters with ratings in the 4's.

[hyyyper]

ok, tanx for the effort you guy(s) are making

For a quick update, I'm back to work on the 2003 designer ratings. I have all of tonight and tomorrow free from scheduling conflits, so I should be able to either knock off a good chunk of them or even finish them. I'll post updates throughout the day to let everyone know how they're coming.

UPDATE:
Bedtime, and I got 16 designer ratings done in the last 3 hours. When the update is posted, I will be also be including each designer's highest rated coaster for the given year in a link next to their rating. This will give some nostalgia to go along with the scores, and catch everyone up who missed some of the year's coasters.

PROGRESS METER:
Completed: 24
Remaining NL: 9
Remaining Other Sims: 17

Percent Complete: 48%

UPDATE:

NoLimits designer rating have been completed, including every multi-medal winner from adept999 to whitewolf2759. Moving on to the Scream Machines, RCT, HR, and UR ratings now...

PROGRESS METER:
Completed: 33
Remaining: 17

Percent Complete: 66%



PROGRESS UPDATE PART 2:

I just did lots more ratings, and now all that is left is RCT. I'll be finishing RCT ratings, then combining them for an overall and posting them, tomorrow. Tomorrow, not tonight, because I'm getting really bored and RCT will be the most time-consuming ratings because of Tycoonman and DE@NO posting so many freaking coasters to be rated. :p

also, I seem to have mis-counted the numbers of ratings. there are really 51, not 50.

PROGRESS METER:
Completed: 42
Remaining: 9

Percent Complete: 82.3%

UPDATE:

Ratings are done! Compiling them will take a while longer than contest results, though, since the combined scores are not necessarily just a combination of the individual sims. I'm not sure how much different it will be, so I can't quite offer a legitimate time estimate on the posting, but I can tell you this: The results here did exactly what I was hoping that they would do, and gives credit to the designers who focus on quality instead of quantity. Most of the highest rated designers only posted 3 or 4 tracks, and most of the winningest designers were somewhere in the middle of the field ratings-wise. It will be fun to show them for sure...

"will take a while longer than contest results"

Not goin' anywhere for a while? Grab a Snickers...

[;)]

Hopefully you can finish soon, it should be really interesting to see.

Originally posted by dcs221

"will take a while longer than contest results"

Not goin' anywhere for a while? Grab a Snickers...

[;)]

Now, now, I said "compiling" them would take longer. That means that everything is done, but I just have to prep them for posting and make the overall results. It usually takes about 20 minutes to do this for contest ratings, but will probably take about 2 or 3 hours for these. I'm going to bed at the moment, but very little work remains, so tomorrow is looking very good for getting them posted.

Once the ratings are up, I'll set to work on the 2004 medal counts and designer ratings, then 2005, 2006, and cumulative. Still a lot of work before the medals are officially back, but I've found my new methods of finding time and updating as I go to be quite effective so far.