Yeah, thought about that. I think I'll do a soft cap instead of a hard cap to accomplish my overall goal while still rewarding people who make long chip-ins while still being consistent. And I think I'll make people's scores relative to the soft cap instead of each other because that's simpler and should still work out.
For the scoring system I'm probably going to set a score of 0 or higher at 0 points, the score used for the soft cap at 100 points, and then have a curve between them based on the idea that... Say a course's soft cap is -11. Then, assuming no long chip-ins, a -11 is 0 mistakes, a -10 is 1 mistake, a -9 is 2 mistakes, a -8 is 3 mistakes, a -7 is 4 mistakes, etc. So the difference of how impressive a stroke between scores is is bigger the closer you get to the soft cap. And each stroke lower than the soft cap will be awarded a small amount of bonus points that becomes smaller the lower you go.
Or something like that. The main thing is to keep everything relative so that the Top Cut works out properly. I thought about difficulty multipliers, but more skilled players would naturally get more points out of that course with this system to begin with. While grinding to the soft cap is possible, going by past GAF tourneys I don't think that'll be a huge problem since I'm doing a top cut. I want all-birdie runs to be Top Cut-worthy so I'll determine the Top Cut point cut-off near the end.
