Sonic Central > Rules Revisions

Scores and the Secret Rings?

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Ring Rush:
Sonic and the Secret Rings has a history of having issues with score competition. First, while invistigating some (at the time) extremely high records in Sand Oasis, we found out about being able to get bonuses from speed and time break, that were never announced anywhere and weren't factored in until the final screen. After discovering this weird bonus, we have found more and more ways to manipulate it and create infinite scores. Currently, to keep competition different for each level, we have rules in place that ban seven different skills, stop you from dieing in a run, and stop you from restarting from a previous run at a certain time (although the last really isn't about the issue of the break bonuses as much as it is about following the precedent set in Cannon's Core 1&5 rings division).

So for a while, this division has been under stress from artificially imposed limitations. But for nearly a year it seemed like we finally pinned down everything. Then in one of the levels, SO8 I think it was, some people started getting 20 points higher than the average score. Nobody understood why this was, and it was left as simply a mystery for quite a while. However, it was hypothesized, after a few not-very-accurate tests, that this bonus came from something about grinding a rail.

This month, that hypothesis was finally proved, and to make matters worse, it was proven you could get infinite points simply by grinding rails. Unlike the previous bonus, there is no simple way to ban grinding a rail multiple times. In score runs, you will be backtracking a lot, and it is very easy when using sonic's backstep move to accidently get on a rail you don't want to. There are more complications with banning grinding a rail multiple times, yet I don't feel like going into them. Not to mention if we do put this in effect, nearly all charts would have to be wiped as nobody knows if they've double grinded.

Another solution is to remove the levels with rails from the score division. This sounds like a nice solution in theory, yet not when you look at how many charts would be left. A quick estimate I did based on a few randomly selected levels showed me that around 55-60% of levels have rails. It seems a bit weird to have a score division yet only have around 50 of the possible 110 charts (keep in mind a lot of levels already don't have score charts). It just seems we are grasping at every thread to keep this division. Which brings me to my next point:

I propose that we remove the score division of Sonic and the Secret Rings. There are simply too many artificial limitations we are adding just so we could keep this fairly unimportant ranking. I didn't make this entire argument to Rolken, but what I did say (about too many random restrictions) he agreed with. With the rail exploit being stacked upon everything else so far that we've done, it just doesn't seem worth it anymore to keep trying to save scores. So, yeah, this is what I think, and I hope we can finally come to an agreement and plan of action instead of me just being ignored when I talk about it in chat.

EngiNerd:
Agreed.  The score charts are getting kinda pointless, and if this continues, I give it two months before someone discovers that JUMPING increases your score.  Plus, I don't know about the individual missions, but only Dinosaur Jungle has no rails (I think) and only maybe one or two missions of Lost Prologue have rails.  Otherwise, it's a pretty clean sweep.  It's definitely not worth it.

So yeah, some mod needs to add a poll here <_<

Rolken:
These kinds of decisions aren't really best made by polls.

BenB raised the possibility of it being like Rush wherein certain bonuses are capped. If that is true, there could be something worth salvaging; if not, probably not. As such, it would be a good idea to do a proof-of-concept run to see how high the bonuses can be taken in comparison to a similar run that doesn't exploit such shenanigans. If it's either unlimited or, to the best anyone can determine, too ridiculous to justify competition, then it's time to bust out the axe.

Stefan:
jumping won't increase your score..

anyway rr, I know a few missions I conclusively grinded (is that a word) every rail and ending up tying a "max" score. So.. I am not so certain that rail bonus is infinite.

Can you prove it? =/

Ring Rush:
Well Stefan, go to one of the Sand Oasis missions (iirc it was the diehard, I know it was either 5, 6, 7, or 8). Go to the platform before the enemies you have to homing attack to proceed. Clear this platform off of enemies, then walk backwards as far as you can. You should hit an invisible wall right at the end of the rail. Now, backstep so you land on the end of the rail and fully grind it til the end. Walk backwards and repeat. I did this for a bit and at the end I had 100 more points than normal.

Okay, did some more, formal tests, with the following results:

4 grinds ~ 40 extra action points
1 grind ~ 10 extra action points
22 grinds ~ 220 extra action points (took 5 minutes for a 1 minute long level)

I think this proves that this is either infinite, or has an unreasonably high cap to expect players to do it on every level.

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