Dec 26, 2020
The point of grades is to direct climbers, give feedback and validate achievements. Precision and consistency are more important than accuracy. Halifax was developed by a very small group of developers. The two most prominent developers had a grading scheme that averaged 2 full V-grades apart! This lead to wild inconsitencies depending on who did the FA. Inconsistent grades have a real negative impact. Many good problems are ignored: I did 17 second ascents of decade old problems in the past 2 years - almost all Ghislain lines.The problem had to be fixed, and there were only two options: scale up Ghislain's problems, or downgrade Nick's. Personally, I sided with Ghislain's standard. However, the community preferred Nick's standard. Conflict ensued.
The beatiful thing about a living programable guidbook, is we can have our cake and eat it too. A new toggle on the site will allow users to choose the standard they find most appealing. The default is Halifax Classic, since these are the grades the community seems to prefers. Grades will look a lot closer to the old guidebook, with adjusments based on modern consensus, better consistency, and the sandbags scaled up. Climbers who aspire to climbing double digit problems outside of Nova Scotia will want to stick with the International standard to more accurately assess their training goals.