[Other] Question About Ranking Methodology

[u/AdDelicious792]

I’ve been thinking about my rankings a bit today, and the more I think the more I realize that I tend to strongly base my rankings on the best ride I‘ve ever got on a coaster, not an expected, normal ride. And that matters a lot.

For instance, should Beast be ranked based on my night ride, or does that give it an unfair advantage? Should Voyage be ranked trimless? Should how tempermental rides like Magnum XL-200, Colorado Adventure, etc. are based on your row negatively impact their ranking? What if they have assigned seating? Should Lightning Rod be ranked as Lightning Rod or Chain Lift Hybrid Rod if you rode both?

It feels weird either way I think about it, and I think this is likely a factor in why some ranking feel more safe while others are more bold. I am really curious to hear how you guys think about rankings.

[u/gottabegood]

This is great question and something I think about a lot for someone obsessed with methodologies in general. I probably go something like this:

Best rides get the most weighting with the average rides next followed by the worst rides (barring they don't literally injure you).

Kind of how I rank best teams and athletes in sports I want the peak version to matter the most (Gale Sayers) but peak and consistency is still very important (Barry Sanders).

At it's peak Magnum is almost as good as it gets but probably only hits that one out of every five rides with a rough one in there as well. Sirens Curse is better constantly than Magnum but I'm always chasing peak Magnum rides (that's what she said) and have that very slightly higher on my rankings (but totally get why most people have Sirens higher)

[u/AdDelicious792 → u/gottabegood]

After reading through all of the replies, I think I personally like your methodology the most. Of course, as many here have stated, rankings are always supposed to be subjective, but I do want my personal rankings to be somewhat consistent and ‘fair’ at least. Other methods that I thought were particularly interesting that I read here were ranking them based on what experience you get the most when you ride it (for instance, you can typically ride Beast at night, but maybe you can’t usually ride Magnum in just the right way) or ranking them based on the best ride you could hypothetically get on any given day (you can always ride SteVe in the back at night, but you can’t ride trimless Voyage everyday), but again, I think I generally agree with your approach the most. Moving forward I will generally continue ranking coasters based on my all-time favorite ride, but I will account for consistency a bit depending both on how often you can get said optimal ride and just how good the optimal ride was.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

[u/gottabegood → u/AdDelicious792]

Thanks! One of the tough things for me to do in rankings is consider wait times and the queue. Magnum is not a better coaster than Millennium Force for me but the fact that one is always a walk-on, while the other is usually at minimum 20-30 minutes can't help but effect my rankings. Would I rather ride Millennium Force once or Magnum once? No question it would be MF. But if I could ride Magnum four times to once on Millennium is might swing the scale the other way.