I'm in the "score" camp, and I think Scott nailed it.
Jeff, I must respectfully disagree for 2 main reasons:
- Due to the widely varying nature of DK's randomness, a game that progresses further than another (in terms of # of boards) isn't necessarily the greater accomplishment.
- A ranking list based primarily on "final stage" reduces the game to one dimension (safety) and essentially neutralizes a point pressing approach. A key strategic element is lost. A list based on total points allows the player greater freedom; the points are out there, and how you go about accumulating them is entirely up to you.
Give a mediocre player a game full of free passes and bottom-spawner firefoxes and he's going to beat the tar out of the very best player who gets piemageddons and high-spawners.
By ignoring score and focusing only on where the game ends, you're actually exaggerating, rather than mitigating, the role of luck in the rankings.
Imagine this scenario: Player A has a game ending on 18-6 and ends up with a higher score than Player B whose game ends on 20-2.
Under a "final board" ranking, Player B would rank higher than Player A.
But, all things being equal when it comes to rivet/conveyor luck, Player A is getting more points per board, which is an indicator that he's playing better.
In reality, maybe "B" actually was craftier/YOLOier on the fire boards but didn't point press, while "A" point pressed but did not play the fire boards as well as "B". In that case, okay, it would be right for "B" to get the higher ranking, because "B" was better at surviving through the tricky challenges that make no-hammer what it is.
But what if that's NOT the case? What if Player A crushed Player B both in terms of point-pressing AND in what he had to deal with on the rivets/conveyors? Now ranking B over A becomes very silly and unfair.
Until somebody comes up with a way to analyze games against one another to calculate a luck differential, then score is a better metric of achievement than level/board.
By squeezing more points out of the game (grouping barrels, efficient springs, forcing the "discount pass", grabbing prizes, etc.), it means Player A was leaning in to the skill-based aspects of the game and extracting points from the places where he has more control, rather than just relying on the whims of the rivets. That should be rewarded with a higher ranking even if he didn't go as deep, especially because it's harder, more tedious work.
If Player B was steering every barrel out of the way, taking a nap on the elevator boards, blessed with free passes, and bottom-spawn after bottom-spawn on the rivets while "A" was busting his ass to get points and having all the adversity in the world thrown at him, then he's really getting screwed by a level-based ranking. It also kills any incentive to point-press (or pay attention to score at all).
In fact, an interesting strategy for no-hammerers who want to go higher on the HSL might be to point-press as much as possible on the non-fire boards so as to crawl up in the rankings while facing less randomness. Kind of a neat approach.
It's not perfect, but when you add it all together, the edge has to go to score as the more reliable indicator/metric of how players should be ranked.
A level-based ranking presents at least a few ways in which players can get screwed weirdly, whereas there's no way to get screwed (at least not that I can think of off the top of my head) in score-based ranking.
Imagine if somebody did one of those low-score runs with NH and made it to the KS with 250K or something! Things could get bizarre...
