I'm with zombie on this. Total credits doesn't make sense as you cannot compare credits across different projects. This incongruity between the definition of 'being the best' and the false comparability of project credits has led to horrible attempts to normalize credit. An example is DA's creditnew, which in my mind makes the problem worse as it seems to penalize faster pc's over slower ones.

A better more accurate measure would be to compare overall average ranking of each person and team per project. You could easily give points based on percentile and then average them out over all active projects. This would make each project have equal competitive value regardless of how many credits they give. This could even be broken down into sub categories based on the type of project, for instance math vs bio-med. Or even best in nonactive projects.

It seems to me that the stats sites have the power to redefine the definition of 'top team' or 'top user'. As long as total credit is the basis for competition instead of average ranking we'll always have the rush to the high paying projects. It forces teams who want to be competitive to constantly crunch for the high paying projects at the expense of the other projects.

I wonder what Bok would have to say about this.