Tempest on top as we go into the new millennium

G'day folks,

A quick check of VAPS this morning showed that Tempest finished 1999, the
decade, the century and the millennium at the top of the "top collected
game" statistics. Not surprisingly, Ms. Pacman has been hot on the heels of
Tempest during 1998/1999. (Historically, Robotron was nipping at Tempest's
heels when I ran VAPS in the early/mid 90's, however it's dropped to 12th
and needs 75 more in VAPS to begin to challenge Tempest once again.)

I've always found the "top collected game" statistic to be the best
indicator of popularity, since votes for this statistic cost hundreds of
dollars a piece. Anyone can say a given game is their favorite, but when it
comes to coughing up hundreds of dollars (for what some might argue are
"unreliable games"), well the rubber meets the road, eh?

At one point someone suggested turning the vectorlist into a newsgroup. The
general concensus seemed to be that our signal to noise ratio was fine.
However, I think we've all lamented the S/N ratio of RGVAC during the last
few years. While moderation of RGVAC has been considered at times, it never
seems to be viable (for many reasons).

Someone pointed me to http://www.slashdot.org as another possible way to
improve S/N ratio where randomly selected moderators from a pool of folks
filter RGVAC's articles and place the results on a website. The filtered
RGVAC articles on the website would hopefully have a much improved S/N
ratio, and with a large enough pool of moderators no one would have to
moderate more than a couple days a year. This is a proven idea that has
already worked for other forums regardless of topics.

In any case, I'd prefer if folks who are interested by this approach would
email me privately at sozdemir@att.com since I don't think further
discussion about this is appropriate on the vectorlist. If there's enough
interest, we'll start a discussion in email among the interested parties.

            Steve Ozdemir
            sozdemir@att.com

ps - By the way, when Tempest does drop to second place this year, I'll be
holding one person responsible. CLAY (and his multipac hack)! 8^) 8^) 8^)
Received on Tue Jan 4 10:30:34 2000