Okay, so here’s my response about your level and the discussion about it – first: the technical reasoning to why I’m deadset on saying that you shouldn’t have won this high. Chaoticness is a visible letdown to graphics (floating items, free borders on zooming out --> wouldn’t give any more than 4), and gameplay-wise the level merely consists on reading signs, navigating through the maze of invisible blocks and some boss fight. It’s nicely made but it’s far away from being as astonishing as e.g. Into the Depths or Space Colony or Neon City were, and it could have been way more grand. Just put one of these levels next to yours and you should see. After replaying, I’m sure I wouldn’t give it anything higher than 17, rather something in the 15's.
Now, what’s so bad about judgings – I said it already in fact, it’s all way too unstandardized, and everyone is pretty much just doing their own ideosynchrasies and comes up with some grotesque reasonings for deductions or non-deductions. This isn’t a new thing in fact, remember how e.g. there were debates about Buff trampling over story levels and SMIC disliking levels without puzzle elements? Personal preferences (and bias thereof) are way too dominant over objective reasonings; this pertains all areas – gameplay, graphics, music, everything. In fact it’s been like this since the very beginning but now the more advanced level designing skills are, the more controversy shows up inevitably, and I just feel that many people like Harmless (duh) and also FF and Nan are lacking qualification to be reliable judges. All of them are way too whiny when it comes to difficulty and just being a little patient if they die in the level a few times …
Even beyond that, some way-spread judging standards are just worth nothing but shaking the head. Your level scored high just for being an impressive concept despite lacks of effort, while someone like FluorescenceLight actually really managed to bring across these vibes of “Hey, I’m playing an adventure!”, and he was undeservedly punished because he went a risk with his tiling and just because his levels are larger and it just ONLY takes ten seconds to load it … really, deductions for lags and loading times are WAY too extensive. If you actually made your level bigger and filled with more decoration, you probably would have barely won any extra points with this compared to what you gathered anyway, but you would have probably lost some points just because of loading time and the level being large. Isn’t that complete bollocks?
Now, another important point is: “Star power”. Having a bonus or a malus at judges just because of your name and past works, no matter what your current work is. This already happened with Sandworm Domain and now it happened again. You’re having a prominent name and I’m not losing the impression that this is why you won so high. If the very same level was made by a less prominent guy like e.g. Dualfreezor, they would have still scored well but definitely not this high, and I’m constantly disadvantaged just because I’m giving some challenges in terms of platforming and everyone who’s just lacking gameplay skill already scores me low. For real, I’m not an idiot! Didn’t I test my level enough times from the start to the end and didn’t I try to weed out decoration where it wasn’t needed just to have a lower loading time? It’s just totally inevitable for me to have high loading times – if I try to fix that then it happens on costs of my graphics and there’s no proper way out under this judging system. Regarding any aspects of "star power" bias, we don't have a simple solution like anonymous submitting since levels are still recognizable per style often, but we just need to get away from judging books by their cover.
And of course I also can’t get around talking about the conduct of users in response to me bringing up this subject – you know what I mean. These never-ending lines of “this is just your own opinion” and “all three judges have scored it this way so it’s valid” and “don’t make such a huge deal of it, don't be a sore loser”. I’m legitly entitled to think that this is more than just my sheer “opinion” and that there is some sort of actual reasoning behind my point. You don’t just play 3000 levels within a short span of time. And just because one judge was generally scoring high and two other ones scored your level way higher than the rest with dubious reasonings, I’m actually the minority that isn’t in the right? Come on.
Also, another reason for me refusing to trivialize this is that not only you’ve achieved a “formal world record” without deserving this, but you’re also getting this much praise and “ah”s and “oh”s and "holy shit"s just because of this score. It's almost like celebrating you for a lottery jackpot. I’m actually not writing this to disturb your happiness but please, stay realistic and just enjoy the fact that you won and not with which score you won. Space Colony will stay the highest-scoring LDC level in history just as Into the Depths will stay the highest-scoring duel level. For the record, I will keep entering LDCs despite all of these issues just because I can’t stop trying and I don’t want to give up without having won at least once, and especially I don’t want to give up after FF’s bullshit twaddling “you’ll never win because your levels have no substance at all”.