Thanks for the feedback, Shawn. Much appreciated!
At least that's how some interpret the changes, there seems to be no reward any more for benching older HW unless you have whatever is picked for the old school competition and you could manage 50 pts for a piece of HW that would likely only get 2 HW pts in regular submission.
I think that's true, and just to clarify, this is not done on purpose (as some people like to say). HWBOT has grown incredibly in the past ten years; not only in terms of user base, but also in terms of hardware and benchmarks. Back in 2006, there were only a few benchmarks at the bot and a couple generations of hardware less. I did some calculations this weekend and there are more than 40,000(!) hardware rankings at HWBOT generating over 1.7 million hardware points.
The relative value of a hardware point diminishes the more benchmarks and hardware is added to the database. Back in the day (2006) the OC League had a hardware points cap of 250 (if I remember correctly) and you could use as many scores you want to get to that cap. This gave more value to the low participation hardware categories. But this worked because a lot of the top guys had low hardware points. Look at Dancop - he's got over 3000 hardware points too!
The mathematical challenges involved in designing a mechanism that is able to cherish the low participation categories in an environment where there are so many rankings are not easy.
With the competitions having moved off site, we have a lot more breathing room for special competitions. Let's see where that goes. We can easily do 12 old school competitions a year, each with their own platform, and give the same value like the super-popular hardware categories.
