Stop talking about it and actually try to come up something concrete. Send it to the MT contact form on Summits on the Air . Not an idea, but an actual worked example for say 100 regions. It’ll have to be regions, not associations, because there’s quite the variance in many associations (eg, ZS, VEx, VKx/ZLx off the top of my head) I’ll bet that whatever you come up with is both more effort than you realise, and going to be just as subjective as the current approach.
The approach we take is roughly 10% of summits in an association will be 10 point summits. Roughly the same will be 1 point summits, and the rest will be roughly evenly spread, with bands separated on a “round” number of metres altitude. The only caveats to that are:
- 1 points generally will not start lower than 400-500m in altitude. This usually results in low associations having much more 1 point summits. There are counterexamples to this that are either historic or have reasons.
- 10 points will not start higher than 3500m in altitude. This results in high associations having a disproportionate amount of 10 point summits.
Indirectly, this applies both an incentive for people by providing at least some nearby 10 point summits that won’t require having to travel to far-flung regions of the world or perhaps require mountaineering experience to activate, and not overly reward lower associations where the difficulty, perceived or otherwise is generally lower, while also giving high associations with their comparative increased perceived difficulty more 10 pointers.
It avoids having to characterise different regions and make subjective determinations of the perceived difficulty of a region. It’s simple to explain, and therefore keeps the inevitable arguments simple. And every time someone has suggested that something better needs to be made, and we ask for an example, the example never appears.
Prove me wrong. Be the first that actually offers something tangible that we can assess. I’m genuinely interested in how this might work.