I'm making a post about this because it has happened to me many times.
What do I mean by default scores not being representative of actual scores? I mean when you play a game and set a high score and the current default scores are way off in comparison to an actual score.
For example I just played a game where on the rankings it said level 10 and 30,000 points as a default score, but really if you managed to get to level 10 you would probably have a score around 500,000 points.
So is this due to the programmers not really knowing what kind of scores are possible or did they simply just not really care to have it matching up with real playing and real scoring.
You would think that they would want you to try and challenge a big score AKA play more of the game and insert more money (for arcade games) or maybe possibly they figured that other players out there will set super high scores and so people at arcades won't really be trying to beat the default high scores but rather the top scores saved on that game by another person.
It just sometimes doesn't really make any sense when you see some default score list on the game where it says:
90,000
80,000
70,000
60,000
50,000
40,000
30,000
and then getting like 100,000 is just from getting past the first two screens, but then again a lot of arcade games where meant for the player to die early and so maybe a reason for low default scores is such that it is only supposed to represent a causal player who just picked up the game and gave it a few tries and who isn't supposed to get very far.
I think sometimes the people making the games just slapped on some random numbers and said, hey that looks nice, and then they called it a day.
There is this one game where I seriously pretty much maxed out the game in terms of points and yet on the score list I'm not even in first place. The programmers actually estimated a default score that was too high to beat and so it's impossible to have the first place spot on the listed scores for that game.
And I actually think that's pretty funny. They posted an impossible score and they probably didn't even know it.