SGTBilko:
genorb: If the game would evolve to become more challenging, I would prefer to see the addition of new parameters associated to each shots than to see a decrease of the equipment performances.
You mean uphill/downhill lie as well as the ball above and below the feet. If these were put into play you would see the scores go up.
Yes this kind of stuffs.
But I am not in favor of making this game more challenging. I don't care personally, but if you think twice here is what you get.
It's true that when one looks at the scores of ready-goes and weekly/monthly tourney, they can be low (but it depends strongly on the conditions and the tee distance for free tourneys, not all free legend tourneys are played from legend tee). But who can shot those low scores? A rather limited number of legends.
One (unperfect) way to determine roughly this number is to say that most of the time it concerns legends with an average lower than 62.5. I know that average doesn't mean anything but first of all, you can check that this is quite often true and secondly, it allow to quantify. Indeed, I showed in a previous post that there are less than 20% of legends with an average below 62.5% (and 5% of the legends have an average below 60). So I think that we say safely than at least 80% of the legends are not responsible for these very low scores (except for exceptional rounds once in a while since everybody can have now and then a very good round).
Making the game more challenging would make a lot of players quite frustrated. Then you can say: not really since the conditions would be harder for everyone. Then there are two ways to see this:
- Making the game harder will affect all players in the same way. In that case, you are just adding shots per round to everyone and the order of the various leaderboards will essentially not change, only the scores will be higher. So you don't solve the problems, you just make the game harder and the score higher. Don't know if this is that important that the scores posted here matches those posted by real golf players... We are not playing real golf here anyway...
- Making the game harder will not affect all players in the same way. I do believe this: the harder the game the larger the gap between good and very good players. One example of this was the british open. The qualifier was low wind + tourney greens and the difference between the best score (52) and the cut (57) was only 5 shots (I know it was unlimited play but still). The fact is that only very good players qualified. However, the first round was high wind with championship green and the gap between the best score and worste one was around 20. So imagine that under those difficult conditions, you add additional parameters to the game, I think it would be unplayable for many players.
I think one should not focus too much on the low scores that are posted only by very few players. One possible solution, I think, would be to implement a system to evaluate correctly the level of play of each player (other than this average which only decreases at some point) and to create groups of players (legend A, legend B etc) and to propose competitions for each group. Of course, some players would not be fair and some new kind of sandbagging would appear... But it depends perhaps on how the system to evaluate the level of play is implemented...
I do not know how the game will evolve, but we should not only think to a handful of players who can shot low, we have to think to the majority of players. The game has to be enjoyable for most of them.
Regards