The only level playing field is a virtual reality game. Assuming that the s/w
is not hacked or
shared/leaked ahead of time, then only skill, tempered by luck, will matter.
I love Igor’s comments. Reminds me of what my mother used to tell me. I cried
because I
had no shoes, then I met someone who had no feet. Yeah. Perspective counts.
So if we’re talking non-gaming via s/w, you are out of luck. But this has
always been the case.
In the old days in the US, the East Coast guys would complain about the W6 and
7 guys. The
west coast could muster up a multiplier equal to the east coat with just one
QSO per country
in EUR or Africa and then have a bottomless pit of JAs to work. If the band
didn’t open to JA
from the northeast, oh well. Now that the population of JAs has disappeared
from contesting
(relatively speaking), that story has changed.
And I remember when N5AU won M/M USA from Texas while us east coast guys tried
our best,
but didn’t make the grade. Anything is possible.
Even in a small geographical area, there are “complaints” about advantages.
For those of you
who have been around contesting for a long time and saw the movie To Win the
World, the
classic line is, “Conditions favored the competition to the north,” even though
it was just over 100 miles away.
And in the so-called exemplar of WRTC, there are always complaints about how
“their location
was better than ours.”
And since Russian track and field doping is back in news (at least here in the
USA), you always
have the cheating factor to worry about. Just how big an amp was he really
using?
The idea of a scoring system based on distance, ala the SPTBDXC, has always
been intriguing.
And really, anyone can “try it out.” The CQWW databases are on line. Come up
with an algorithm
for assigning a grid to each QSO based on prefix and let it fly. Perfect? No.
But let’s see what
happens. I can envision one contest, unchanged, but with two scoring systems.
Why not?
Force the entrant to enter their grid square in the header and then perfect
scoring by distance. Easy!
While I love the idea of “points per km,” I really do miss some sort of
multiplier. Working a double
mult late on day two really pumps up the adrenalin.
So failing something that will work in reality (always impossible), are you
willing to give up using RF
and instead use a magic black box? Yup…Dr. DX all over again, but for
contesting.
So until that happens, QRZ contest!
de Doug KR2Q
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