The eGrader bit of my post on Friday was incoherent waffle, some of it was flat out wrong. Should know by now to not post on forums when not got time to think clearly. What I should have said on Friday if my head wasn't full of other stuff was this:
"eGrader 2.0!!! This time we get it right!" - JB
Any attempt at an eGrader is never going to work. I'd like to think that's one thing we can agree on.
Aside from physical difficulty, there's just too many factors involved for any algorithm to handle.
If you really wanted to, you could make the current eGrader slightly better, with a few tweaks:
Firstly, just ditch attempting to deal with anything under E6. That was a non starter as the opinions on French grades are too all over the place when people are predominantly onsighting. Secondly, the basic grade conversion for well protected routes needs a bit of tweaking above about E8, to make E grades a bit narrower than 2 Fr grades.
That would be a bit better.
But it would still be pretty much useless for any not completely safe routes.
Why?
Because it's just way more complicated than physical difficulty plus danger element.
You could change the "danger" element to be an "everything else" rating in an attempt to cover off the "what's it LIKE" bit of what Andy Popp was talking about. That could take into account loose rock, soft rock, location and atmosphere of crag, how weird the gear is, level of intimidation. But how would you give a number to that? All you're really doing then is reverse engineering what E grade you want to pop out.
But even
that doesn't actually help a lot for a particular subset of gnarly routes. Because of the other half of "what's it LIKE?".
More concretely, for example, a really insecure smeary Font 6b sequence miles out from gear, might be what dictates the E grade of a route. Not the Font 7B+ crux sequence by the gear. Or even perhaps the Font 7B+ sequence miles out from gear, if it's on positive holds so that if you're strong and you have it dialled you're unlikely to fall off. So any attempt to simply add overall difficulty plus some other element to reach some kind of answer just is never going to work for at least this kind of route.
So the whole thing simply isn't doable, and that should have always been obvious to anyone who has climbed a fair bit.
The only way to suggest an E grade for non safe trad routes is to compare it to other routes. I'd like to think it could be compared to
any other trad routes. Given what we've talked about on this thread, currently it only works if you compare it to similar things in the same area.
However... It wasn't all bad.
To me at least, there was a kernel in the eGrader that is useful.
And that is the basic comparison of E grades to French grades for well protected routes.
That they largely got right (once I was looking at the correct conversion table).
ie: for well protected trad routes
7a+ - 7b routes would be E5
7b+ - 7c routes would be E6
7c+ - 8a routes would be E7
8a+ - 8b routes would be E8
8b+ - 8c routes would be E9
8c+ - 9a routes would be E10
9a+ - 9b routes would be E11
9b+ - 9c routes would be E12
This table is pretty much spot on from E5 to E8, but above that it seems to drift off target a bit. So, as said above, if you want a model that actually fits how grades are used in the real world, then from about E8 upwards, E grades need to be a bit narrower than 2 Fr grades. So that you end up with well protected 8c's being given E10. And so that E12 isn't supposed to be the equivalent of bolted 9c - 9c+, which seems a long way out if Bon Voyage is E12.
So the basic conversion is a bit out, but that's straightforward to fix.
And whilst it's hardly revolutionary as tables like this have been around forever, the above conversion table is by far the best thing about the eGrader.
Crucially, for any given Fr grade, the above (rightly to me at least) sets a lower limit to the possible E grade for any given physical difficulty.
ie: for long routes, any Fr7b+ is at least E6, any Fr8a+ is at least E8, any 8c (once the table is adjusted a bit) is at least E10.
And that does match reality for long routes - e.g: I can't think of any long Fr7b+ trad routes in the real world that get less than E6.
And it's clearly how lots of hard climbers think about the basics of grading long routes - it sets a lower limit, and then you need to think about whether the E grade needs to be higher because of everything else.
But...
Where even
that bit completely falls apart currently is when you look at short routes. Where something which would be Fr7c+/8a ish - currently gets E4. It's not a bit out. It's miles out. Something of that physical difficulty only even vaguely makes sense at E4 in the sense it's used outside of micro routes, if you're comparing doing it after lots of work, with onsighting trad routes (which is I think at least how some people have traditionally graded highballs).
So it feels like a completely different grading system for short routes currently. I had naively thought that that circle could be squared by some relatively straightforward changes - not giving highballs E grades, and adjusting some of the grades of slightly higher stuff upwards a bit.
But that would require some changes to how E grades are used and thought about, which if this thread is anything to go by, seem highly unlikely.
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