First, I would like to say it's nice to see some good bantering and vicious attacks between other MARPers where I'm not a target.
j/k
*** LN2 anticipates vicious attack replies to that comment....at least getting slapped in the face by a big fish.
5 years ago MARPers agreed to keep clones in LB pts and still do
I agree with keeping clones...but not all clones. It should be handled on a case by case basis. There are likely some parent games that aren't necessary to track either. Like do we really need 200 mahjong games? Sure, many likely vary some etc. but I'm sure there is a lot of redundancy given that many tracks for mahjong. There are clearly many clones that play identically to others to the point you can even take a replay file played in the 1 clone rom set, and play it back in the other set and it works fine. I think in those cases those duplicates should be eliminated from the MARP scoreboard.
However, in many other cases, there is a significant difference between clones. For many games, clones are Japan vs USA rom sets where the game settings and extra men earned and timing of enemies etc. can differ making it quite a different game.
Look at qbert vs qbertjp vs qberttst vs myqbert as an example. qbertjp is much harder than qbert. myqbert is even harder...cuz you stop earning extra men beyond 190k plus more green guys coming out to mess up your progress.
There are also major differences for games like mario vs mariojp. The mariojp one has different fireball timings and awards an extra man every 30 k until you reach close to the 1 million mark for a total of 32 men for the game. The USA rom set mario has 3 start men and 1 extra man earned at 20k and that's it!
How can you just pick one and ignore the other in cases like that? I don't think you can.
In other cases, like pacman and it's various clones, it almost isn't even the same game except having the same concept. There are various pacman clones that play totally differently from pacman. However, there are also some that are identical so I ideally would like to see them removed. Puckman and pacman are identical except for the monster names. You can run the same grouping techniques and patterns and 9th key pattern on both.
For mspacman, there are clones with different mazes and clones like mschamp that change the gameplay by having a 1 minute time limit to complete each board...plus varying speeds from board to board making it even harder IMHO. mspacmab is identical to mspacman though so no need for that one.
If MARP simply said no clones we would be missing all of these types of variants of the games. It's something at some point it would be nice to eliminate the duplicate or nearly duplicate(duplicate in the sense of the gameplay being negligibly different from another rom set) clones at least and many unnecessary clones. Gauntlet is a good example here. Each clone plays a tad differently...but mainly from how much food it awards and ordering of the later levels more than anything else. Space Invaders is another....it has tons of clones. Do we really need to track all of those? Perhaps 3-5 out of the 20+ or however many clones there are of that game are worthy of tracking.
There are several other examples of this also where there are so many clones no way you need all of them for the game. Roadblasters is another one. I have many scores for these clones so just showing I'm not being biased here.
In regards to the leaderboard, I do wish there was a link to order and show the leaderboard based on the 10-3-1 system also. I thought it had that somewhere..but I can't find it. It should be on the normal leaderboard where you can toggle between the current LB points ordering and the 10-3-1 place points ordering.
with that. 
