Litl Red

And changing a computer program is fairly simple for most good programmers.

When you earned 11 rank points that meant 10 other people finished ahead of you on that stage alone. Rank points really is a count of how many people finished ahead of you in the entire match (minus the number of stages in the match). It gives you a value for your performance over all the stages. Think of it as how many times you were beaten that day. The guy who came in 2nd with 8 or 10 points..... You won 4 stages so the best he could have done on them was 2nd. That'd give him 8 points for those 4 of the 5 stages. So he probably won the match with 9 or 10 points. That meant for the entire 5 stages, he was beaten 8 or 9 times that match. He finished with 9 or 10 points. How often was he beaten? Either 4 or 5 times. You finished with 15 points. How often were you beaten? 10 times. Who got beaten the most that day? Rank is just a scoring system. It makes a pretty good job of showing how many times each entrant had someone finish better than they did. Matches that have a lot of different length stages, rank is a very good way to pick the best shooter. With matches where all the stages take very little time, rank still shows what it shows. However, speed is the name of the game, and rank isn't a speed result. So using TT is probably the most suitable way to score today's matches.

Rank points came about to make up for the disparity between long stages and short ones. A time based penalty really screwed you in a very short stage and often did little or nothing much to you in a very long stage. 5 seconds in a 19 second stage hurts more than one in a 30 second one. Nowadays with almost all the stages taking about the same amount of time, TT makes more sense for choosing a winner. Simple solution is quit basing penalties on time if the results are based on rank points. For matches based on ranking, base the penalties on ranking. The confusion and unfairness comes from having the results based differently than the penalties are based.

Bingo.... and dead simple to code

It's even simpler than you describe if you're talking about coding the logic into scoring software. Scoring software in use now has a point in the computations where the time penalty is added in. It has to be computed of course, just as misses are. Simply delete that computation and move the penalty logic into or just beyond where the pass is made that assigns rank points. Or do you wish to keep the time penalty as well? That would require a touch more sophistication to the changes, but still is easily possible for most programmers that understand the new rules.

For matches based on rank points, basing the penalties on rank points makes sense. Simply write it into the scoring software and move on.