Records vs Finishes¶
This is the most important distinction on the platform, and the one that most often gets used wrong. A finish and a record are not the same thing, and they don't come from the same place.
The short version¶
| Finish | Record | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Every time a player crosses the finish line | A player's best online time on a map |
| How many per player/map | Many, every attempt that finishes | One, their best |
| Includes offline / imported times? | Yes | No, online only |
| Use it for | Finish counts and history | Best times, ranks, world records, leaderboards |
If you remember one rule:
The one rule
Never work out a best time, a rank, or a world record from raw finishes. Finishes include offline and imported times with no way to tell them apart. Best times, ranks, and world records come only from online records.
Why the split exists¶
Kacky's data comes from two kinds of play:
- Online play on the live game servers: fully trusted, every time tied to a real session on a real server.
- Offline or imported times: historical data brought over from Kacky's older systems, or times that never went through the live online pipeline.
Both are real finishes, so both belong in the finish history. But only the online times can be trusted to rank people against each other. Drop an unverifiable offline time into a leaderboard and it could claim a world record it never earned, so the platform keeps the two apart.
What each one answers¶
Finishes answer "how much has this map been played?"
- How many finishes does a map have? (all of them: online, offline, repeats)
- Has this player ever finished this map?
- Finish history and activity over time.
Records answer "who's fastest, and where do I rank?"
- What's the world record on this map?
- What's my personal best, and my rank?
- The hunting leaderboards, the website's records, the in-game record list.
The trap in the numbers¶
Two counts look alike but mean different things:
- The raw finish count: every finish on a map, including offline, imported, and repeat runs by the same person. A "how much action has this map seen" number.
- The unique-finisher count: how many different players have an online record on the map. This is the number the in-game map list and the records widget show, and because it's built from online records, an imported offline finisher can never inflate it.
Building something that shows a time?
Ask yourself: is this a count, or a ranking? Counts come from finishes. Rankings, world records, and personal bests come from records, online only. When in doubt, it's a ranking, and it's online.