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General Climbing Discussion

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Pioneers of Tassie's Best Climbs 14-Sep-2016 At 11:08:03 PM Wendy

Message

>
>So the locals that Rowan spoke to who said to take two stars off my climbs..if
>they are not some of the people I have listed above, then their opinion
>has little credibility in my opinion. Which probably leads into another
>potential thread..I hate the star rating system..it is too subjective and
>results in many excellent climbs of 1 or 2 star rating being neglected,
>because everybody only wants to climb 3 star routes

The star rating system serves a purpose, but what I think Gerry is wishing for here is something that identifies which of the not classic routes are actually really worth doing when you have climbed all the other routes. Which leads me into my problems with thecrag.com ratings. I have done a lot of obscure routes at Araps and Frog (plus a few new ones) which are actually quite good, but I wouldn't give most of them a star because if you haven't done other more well trafficked classic routes at the crag, you probably should go and do them first. They aren't "average", but if you rate them as "good" to reflect that they were actually worthwhile climbs, the system automatically lobs a star on them. The whole averaging out system fails when a route has very few recorded ascents and you end up with a disproportionate value of stars of new or less trafficed routes.

There's also something to be said for knowing a crag or looking over a person's history when assessing their ratings and comments. Someone for instance recently rated Lord Drool at Frog "megaclassic". I can only assume they were super excited about their send because it is a miniature top rope problem in the descent gully. It's like that list of the 3 star hard routes in Oz on .nu that someone linked to a while ago. It didn't differentiate between routes at Kangaroo Pt or the Hole or at actual megacrags. These things don't really stand up on their own but can be useful with judicial use of broader knowledge of the country/state/crag/developer/rabidonlineticker.