New Entries in the CoasterBuzz Top 100

But there will be new experienced riders. Doesn't matter if the old ones are still around.

But doesn't a ride need some fraction of the experienced riders to in order to enter? Half, in fact.

I mean, this is obviously a totally theoretical edge case situation, but if a huge CoasterBuzz meetup was struck by a meteor and all the experienced riders weren't updating their track records ever again, wouldn't that basically prevent any new coasters from entering the list (or at least until there were enough new experienced riders that "the portion of them that had ridden the ride" > "the portion that hadn't" + "the dead riders")?

I think Andy is hitting the notes better than I. Basing the ranking on users who have updated their record in the last x years might make sense. But that might cause some big changes to the list and older coasters.

If 100 riders in 2000 were in the top half of experienced riders and rated Millennium Force a 4, and 100 riders in 2050 were in the top half of experienced riders and rated Underwater Force a 4, then both will appear with a 4.

Now, presumably, over time, more rides will be fractionally better until the chart is all around 4.7 and above, sure. But that's inevitable if it counts data from all time.

But in 2050, when we’re all dead (yikes), won’t the required number of experienced ratings for Underwater Force to be listed be artificially inflated by all our derelict track records?

Our data for the coasters we’ve ridden is still good, no need to touch that. But counting us as a part of the threshold for statistical significance seems…incorrect.

If you "retire" riders, even older than 10 years, many of the rides in the list now would disappear. To the earlier point... were one or both of the Dueling Dragons rides not excellent? Those rides haven't scored a new rider in years because the rides currently do not exist. That's what I'm getting at... the riders and the rides depend on each other.

But do the riders for scoring some old ride necessarily have to be the same as the riders used to calculate the threshold for statistical significance for allowing a new ride to be allowed on the list?

It seems to me that the former is valid and the latter is weird and decoupling those two things could be helpful. (e.g., once a coaster is eligible to be on the list, all experienced ratings count across time, but for a coaster to be eligible it only needs half of the "active" experienced riders).

On a completely and totally unrelated note, has a coaster ever gone from eligible to ineligible because some new experienced riders were added that hadn't ridden it and it dropped below the threshold? (e.g. the week after Pantheon reaches the threshold, 10 new users who haven't ridden it sign up and fill in their track records which don't include Pantheon)

My head hurts

I don't even follow your question at this point. I think the math is explained in the FAQ, not counting some spam filtering.

Dang, Jeff just pulled the RTFM card. Nice.

I didn't mean it harshly, I just mean that I don't think it could be more transparent or explained differently.

Oh I know. We pull that on each other here at work all the time. Someone asks me a question that I'm not exactly sure of the answer, I tell them to RTFM...jokingly of course.

I have RTFM'd a lot, which leads to all these questions. My natural disposition is to find edge cases that break general rules (hence the Disney hacking passion).

To the original question (not the super, duper edge case in the "unrelated" post):

Let's say there are 100 users. 50 of them are considered experienced. A ride must be logged by half of the experienced riders to be eligible for inclusion, so 25 riders. If 26 of the experienced riders leave Coasterbuzz, literally no new coaster will ever be eligible for inclusion. If another 100 people join the site for a total of 200, now there are 100 experienced riders, so 50 of them must log a ride for it to be eligible. However, only 74 are actively updating their track records, so it becomes 50 out of 74 for inclusion. I don't actually know if these cases are good, bad, or neutral, but they seem very strange to me.

No, that's not how the math works. Being a member and having a track record with one ride won't be counted. If what you're suggesting was true, Steel Vengeance couldn't be listed. In fact, if you reversed time, the same math would apply, and you could argue retired riders no longer count. I assure you most of the current active users weren't here a decade ago.

Riders will be born and die, rides will be built and torn down. If you're hung up on the rider side of things, it doesn't matter if there are 10 or a million track records. Only the half with the most rides will count. As there are a finite number of rides but practically infinite riders, there will always be enough to qualify, and remember that the old rides' minimum threshold of riders also changes. If we added a thousand experienced riders today, and none of them rated El Toro, it would drop off the chart.

I guess my point is that unless CoasterBuzz suddenly gets wildly popular, the survey over time remains consistently fair.

I don't understand why "that's not how the math works." I'm not trying to do a "prove me wrong." I genuinely don't know if I'm missing something or if I'm not explaining my point well or something else.

1) The total number of CBuzz track records keeps growing.

2) The number of experienced riders keeps growing.

3) The required number of experienced riders for a ride to be eligible keeps growing.

4) The number of experienced track records that have been abandoned is growing.

5) Combining 3) and 4), the percentage of active, experienced track records required for a new ride to be eligible keeps growing.

What am I missing?

Jeff:

If we added a thousand experienced riders today, and none of them rated El Toro, it would drop off the chart.

(Actually my "totally unrelated question" was whether this scenario has ever happened.)

What you're missing is that by the time that scenario really plays out, we'll all be quite dead or I'll hang this thing up. But as I said in my last post, the number of experienced track records required for a ride to show up applies to all rides, new or old. The eligibility applies to all rides. You're worrying about new rides never being eligible, but old rides are in the same boat. There will be a day when Screechin' Eagle disappears from the chart. Because Underwater Force was on more eligible track records and a higher rating.

So if Simon takes over CoasterBuzz and is running it 50 years from now, the opposite of your concern is true. Long gone rides that had few riders in eligible track records will drop off the list, never having been ridden by a significant portion of the all-time ridership. That would actually be easier to adjust for, just lower the threshold for minimum percentage/number of eligible TR appearances.

Okay, yeah. It's not a real concern for umpteen million reasons, but I was curious from purely theoretical standpoint.

Bump.

Wildcat's Revenge debuts at number 8.

Wow, that's crazy. Or maybe not, my friends who live near there think it's amazing. But RMC sure takes up a lot of real estate in that list.