Character Score?

[Yeghishe]

I apologize if this is addressed somewhere else here (which I am almost sure it is but I cannot find it) but please explain the "score" to me. Or link me to an explanation.

How is it calculated?
What does it mean?
How does it go up/down and what can I do to make it go up/down?

Thank you!
~y

[Xavier]

The actual description page for score is here: http://www.elderstats.com/stats/?p=score

If you ever want to back to that page, just go on the leaderboards. The word "Score" is listed a couple times in red as a clickable link that will lead to the the description.

[Yeghishe]

Ah. I see.
I need to complete my information.
Thank you so much.

[baratron]

Oh, hey. Thanks for asking, I've been wondering this too!

I'm not sure I agree with this, though: "Top Skills" count 3 times more (for Skyrim characters).

Like a few other things that have come up, it's a difference between the way the site programmers intended the site to work and the way in which people are using it. Perhaps you intended for people to set the Top Skills to be the highest level skills which their characters have attained? But that's not how I use the site. My characters' "Top Skills" are the skills which are most important for my character in a roleplaying sense, since they are the skills which are displayed on their signature file card.

For example, my character who is based on Martin Septim has Destruction, One-handed, and Speech as his Top Skills - since the primary skills that Martin uses in Oblivion are Destruction magic (Ice) and one-handed Blade weapons, and he is very charming and persuasive. These are by no means his highest level skills - he has only reached level 88 in Destruction and level 93 in One-handed. I do not like the idea that players could manipulate their scores by simply choosing different Top Skills .

If you are able to access the data easily (e.g. if you have a beta version of the site), it might be interesting to recalculate every Skyrim character's score by taking the three highest stats. Or, perhaps (if it's easier) to recalculate the scores with the Top Skills being worth the same as others.

[C0RteZ48]

Check out http://elderstats.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=493&start=0 for an interesting view about revising the score-system and it's topic!

[Tom]

Like a few other things that have come up, it's a difference between the way the site programmers intended the site to work and the way in which people are using it. Perhaps you intended for people to set the Top Skills to be the highest level skills which their characters have attained? But that's not how I use the site. My characters' "Top Skills" are the skills which are most important for my character in a roleplaying sense, since they are the skills which are displayed on their signature file card.

Actually, the way in which you're using the site is exactly how we intended it to be used. We thought it made sense that a character's chosen "Top Skills" would be the skills that the player deemed most important for that character, and thus we figured it would seem sensible to attribute greater weight to them in that character's score calculation. Having those skill levels count for more in the character's score just sounded like a nice way to differentiate scores across characters and promote a wider score distribution, since every character has the same skills but allowing the player to choose which skills count more adds diversity. Maybe our original line of thinking was flawed, but this is definitely what we had anticipated in terms of usage. If we wanted the "Top Skills" to just be the character's three highest-leveled skills, then we would have had them determined automatically instead of giving the player the option to choose them.

Still, you have a point. Maybe Top Skills shouldn't count more toward a character's score. It's something to consider.