www.twingalaxies.com is back online

[Greg2600]

www.twingalaxies.com is back online in BETA form. The scoreboard seems to be fully accessible.

[Ed Oscuro]

Has the new $15 submission fee stuck? Trying to track down some of the details of the old criticisms to refresh my mind and see if these are things that still matter. It is a shame if many WRs aren't going to be included but I think it couldn't be helped. Getting WRs in order isn't as easy with the huge number and variety of arcade machines available these days, although unfortunately I think this still means that there is no obvious path to get the Japanese scores (i.e. Arcadia) into the system or at least having a mutual recognition.

[Greg2600]

Submission fee? Probably makes sense in that they're doing a lot of time consuming work. Doesn't Guinness charge?

[Ed Oscuro]

I don't really understand the criticism that this encourages vanity entries, as if that's bad. I do understand the criticism that this might deter people from entering scores, but I don't know any way around that - they have to have some money to support the system. If somebody wants to help support TG by paying $15 to upload a score that's not an entry, just to see their name on the list, it's cool. I'm more worried about the possibility of people sneaking through faked scores despite the process. Of course the "world records" thing seems problematic when other respected score compilations aren't being represented, so I don't really grant them their "world record" status, but that's just marketing - like the World Series in baseball. However that has always caused me some concern.

I would really like it if they uploaded the WR record videos somewhere so the community could get involved. If it was up to me they would specify any play settings used and so leave it to the people to decide which type of play they like best, but going with the simple score as the on-site ranking method. Unfortunately saying that all the games are equal means they either must be played that way, but there's too many variations on themes (including glitch exploitation) that can unbalance the applecart, not to mention that many games have the ability to be played in totally different and incompatible ways - different characters, different starting score, and so on. At the end of the day they have to make a choice about what to accept, and those kinds of choices won't please everybody. However it would be helped if they specify as much about the play as possible so that if somebody wants to they can "re-rank" the games for their own purposes.