In the absence of a 2-Player mode in NeoLemmix, and following
kaywhyn's recent query regarding his status as a solver within the community, I thought it might be a good idea to compile a leaderboard for NeoLemmix only.
It would be easy enough to compile it in terms of levels played, levels solved, number of lemmings saved, number of skills used, that sort of thing*, but pack difficulty would be potentially problematic, since a pack's difficulty depends a lot on the person playing it.
This bring me back to my suggestion that the community has a
standardised difficulty rating for packs. If there were also a way to
upload packs to NL (in the same way that styles are uploaded, for instance), they could be organised in terms of difficulty for players to download, and perhaps levels in more difficult packs could be weighted such that players who complete them get moved further up the leaderboard.
For example, let's say Player A completes 3 levels from
Easy McLemmings, rated "Easy", and Player B completes 1 level from
Unnecessarily Difficult Lemmings, rated "Extreme".
The scale could be organised thus:
Easy - each level in this pack is worth 1 point
Medium - 2 points
Hard - 3 points
Extreme - 4 points
This would mean that Player B would appear higher in the leaderboard than Player A, for having completed a more difficult level. Even though Player A has solved
more levels, the points totals reflect the difficulty of the levels solved.
It could even be that bonus points are awarded according to which rank the level is in, so an "Easy, Rank 4" level would award 1 + 4 points, and a "Medium, Rank 3" level would award 2 + 3 points. That way, If someone only completes the 1st rank of an "Extreme" pack, they wouldn't be awarded anywhere near as many points as someone who completed just the 4th rank of that same pack (assuming all ranks have an equal number of levels).
Just a thought, really. I'm sure the idea could be developed into something compelling.
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*N.B. This info would always reflect a player's best performance on any given level. So, if a player completes
Just Dig! using 2 Diggers but only saving 1 Lemming, and then completes it using 8 Diggers but saving 10 Lemmings, their leaderboard result for
Just Dig! would be 10 Lemmings saved, 2 Diggers used. As I imagine it, the
Lemmings Saved field for that player would read 10, and
Skills Used would read 2. Any further attempts at the same level would overwrite the data already gathered from that level, so if a player plays
Just Dig! 1,000 times always saving 10 Lemmings, the
Lemmings Saved field would still read 10. It would only be increased by playing a different level.
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N.B. Just to be clear, I'm suggesting that this be an automatically generated Leaderboard populated by gathering level data from players whose copies of NeoLemmix are connected to the internet, rather than a manual one on the forums. Of course, players would be prompted to agree (or not) to their level data being used for this purpose.