I think I have the solution to monthly rankings which reduces the advantage of being prolific. Use points per game but eliminate starting players at 1,000 as that skews the results. I pulled 10 players who were either in the top 5 of current monthly rankings and then pulled players in the top 30 with a winning percentage of 40% or better as it was clear they would likely crack top 10 on a PPG basis. Here are the results:
Since the points awarded are based on tournament Hearts where all the players play the same number of games which keeps things equal without rewarding being prolific basing the monthly rankings on points per game is the way to insure you determine the best player. I know there are 2 players (Fingerprint and Giovani) that have winning percentages higher than Ace but I was unable to see them in my monthly rankings as they had not played enough games to be in the top 53 players as that is all I could see. I believe the monthly PPG ranking should have a minimum number of games played to qualify. I would propose you start with 30 games as that requires a player to average 1 game per day to qualify for the overall ranking. I think it would be good to show monthly rankings with the PPG ranking determining the order they are shown rather than total points.
I should have also noted that Ace may not make the monthly ranking qualification of 30 games though this month started on August 7th when Aidan made version 3 active. If it were a full month I believe Ace would qualify.
It would be good to get input so Aidan can implement for September monthly rankings.
I would also take players that don't play enough games to qualify for the monthly ppg ranking and put them at the bottom of the rankings in order of total points accumulated.
I would also recommend the ppg ranking take effect 10 or 15 days into the month since some players may play no games in the first few days of the month.
Please Aidan, change this silly method of monthly scoring. No possibility for those who play a smaller number of games to move up the rankings.
Better could be something similar to: +5 +1 +0 -5. Thanks, best regards