Reply To: Community Chat – A Place for Weary Flingers

[to mock a mockingbird]

Of the other sites having AB strats and scores, the only one I am aware of that is still up is http://www.theater333.com. According to that site or Poached Eggs 3-1, the cut to make it into the top 10 (in Massachusetts!) was 69370 as of February 2011 (but the video presented there does not make the cut). Such scores would make it into the top 50, so at that time it must have been a doable level, but how? (The set-up suggests luck rather than skill must be involved, but to me it’s not even clear where that luck should come from; some lucky collision toppling the stack maybe?)

Looking through the top-50 of PE 3-1, I recognise roughly a quarter of the names (typically the ones having played a lot, as can be seen by their status), and also that (and those names) suggest top scores were reachable in early versions of AB.

The highest player in that top-50 I recognise, is thee-michelle. I had some nice exchanges with him on Seasons in the past. He is a genuine player (e.g. he’s #5 on Star Wars 2) and iirc he played on android. Don’t know whether he still plays, but you can ask him? He used to give great answers, but his English was sometimes hard to follow for me (he’s Japanese; my Japanese is way worse than his English though; 残念). Other good players there are birdjo (topped the Mighty Hoax leaderboard at some moment) and bastieroxxor (topped the overall leaderboard for quite some time and made the Guiness Book of Records because of it; should be around 2014; the more impressive since he played on a phone). Again, you could try to contact them. Granted this was all a long time ago, 10+ years, so they may have moved on (not respond) or may not recall the strat for PE 3-1 (but some players were quite systematic, taking notes of their strats and how they obtained their high scores, I recall being surprised to learn).

I vaguely recall some acrimonious exchange  (should be still in the comments sections) between murash and the powers-that-be at the time (I would guess with their resident mathematician amslimfordy, who did a lot of great moderation work), over some of his scores being not accepted because of being platform-specific, or going without proof, but that was for another level (I know how the level looked like, but am too lazy to search for it; there’s no easy way to do that on ABN).

In any case, good luck.