I’m happy to announce that a first version of a Street Fighter World Rankings has been released.
Summary
The ranking given to players is analog to ATP and WTA. Players earn points by placing in tournaments. Tournaments are ordered by importance and given a classification. The players in those tournaments are then assigned a score based on their place within a tournament, adjusted with the tournament weight.
Read more at http://rank.shoryuken.com/about/
First of all, incredible work! This is a great place to start and indeed, will be sufficient for most purposes as-is for quite some time while refinement is done.
My first initial thought regarding the ratings is that it needs some kind of Strength of Opponent formula to count as a minor percentage of the final weighed, result. Right now (correct me if I’m wrong), you have a baseline of established numbers imported from a similarly-set up (successful) system, which assigns static values to tournaments based on a cross-indexed, weighed ratio of the top 8 players to determine what level the tournament falls, and people are provided scores accordingly.
I think you need to go further, something along the lines of Microsoft’s TrueSkill system. That way you can have an independent value of every player in every tournament, and that would allow you to more accurately gauge the level of competition in a given tournament outside the top 8. Large formats like EVO - which of course would be top-ranked because the final 8 are impeccably credentialed - are actually underrated under the existing system. Regardless of skill, shit does happen, bad matchups do occur, and the deeper the pool beyond that top 8, the more difficult it is to assess just how hard it is to get there in the first place. You may have a tournament where Poongko slips into the top 8 due to a string of favorable matchups, while Laugh arrives there by overcoming long odds. The result is the same, but the path to get there reveals a very different sort of measurable metrics. The benefits of a more evolved system like this would not only give you more accurate ratings, it would allow you to present the information in all kinds of interesting in unique ways not currently possible: Tangible data on character advantages, match histories of specific players, strength of bracket in a current tourney (who had to work harder to get there), etc. You’d also be able to forgive people outside of the top 16 easier if they just unfortunately happened across Daigo or Infiltration in their bracket. The real story is found in discovering the value of disparity in each individual matchup.
Hopefully that all makes sense, and please do not take any of this as criticism. I’m just excited to see someone doing interesting things with the data and hoping to be helpful and encouraging as possible.
So happy this got picked up. Congratz! Have you considered taking record of smaller league style tourneys? As in something that occurs less than monthly but more than once a year. They would have to be long running(for credibility) and would get minimal points, but that would be nice. A good example would be the ceo tourneys that aren’t CEO you know what I mean? Just food for thought. Good luck man hope this becomes the set standard. More stuff like this brings in sponsors and clears up the mud about skill more definitively than: “X guy beat X guy once, godlike”, or “bro man this 4000PP dude wrecks online must be sponsor worthy”,<-silly. The fgc needs more easily digestible information like this for the deveolopers, sponsors and even the average stream/pot monsters themselves. Looking forward to more stuff like this in the future maybe now invitationals could be graded now and if a TO was deciding what caliber of player they wanted in lets say the C tourney they could decide it with the help of your point based + a skill curved based system. That way people who wanted to amateur level play exclusively could do so accurately. Just like people who watch college level athletes vs always watching the pros. So many opportunities to make the fgc better and more efficient. All of them possibly, hopefully, stemming from this. I want to be a part of it all honestly.
P.S. I think TO’s are gonna be the biggest benefactors of all with this. No more questions like “was this a major or just a big local.” Now it will all be classified and ranked, and tournaments can be marketed as such. This way they will know where there events stand and there will be less ambiguity when going to tourneys. I always hated some tournaments not getting enough credit for just how grand scale they are. DTN was a great example.
Agreed, and you’ll probably see more top-ranked players getting sponsored/invited to participate at said tournaments in order to boost their level of competition and ranking. Just the fact that we’re already able to account for all kinds of things we couldn’t before is a wonderful game-changer.
Edit: The logical extreme of this future, of course, is real-time analysis of button input on all tournament stations and a sabrmetric-style breakdowns on player setup success rates, hit confirms, dropped combos and defensive strategies. Other major esports like LoL and Starcraft already do it, no reason to think the FGC won’t eventually get there too.
I’m glad this was pointed out to me. Coincidentally, I’ve been asked to created something like this to use for the Texas scene (beta) before sharing it with the rest of the FGC. I totally agree with RageouX. Top 8 will not make that list as accurately as it should be. I would further like to talk about how you’ve compiled all the data and more. I’ve skimmed through the FAQ and noticed you were using mySQL and JavaScript, which was what I was going to use, but haven’t yet decided what to use for storage (like cloud).
Tournament results are taking from our coverage posts. For larger tournaments, it’s usually not much of an issue to have results for Top 16 or even Top 32. However, for smaller tournaments that usually only stream Top 8 or just a partial Top 16, it proves more difficult. We also don’t live cover every event since it’s just not possible given our limited staff resources. This is where the community can definitely come in and report additional results that we were unable to catch.
Great stuff with the rankings. The only thing I would suggest is that there be a subsection for tournaments won since, in regards to ATP goes, points are reset one year later
Example: Infiltration wins AE 2012 at EVO 2012 giving him 2000 points, but when EVO2013 rolls around, the 2000 is removed (or put into the subsection) then 2013 points are calculated into his ranking.
For the time being we are resetting rankings per version of the game (SFIV, SSFIV, etc) instead of per year. However it shouldn’t be too difficult for Bavo to create a filter to sort by year similar to ATP.
If I can add some things to the database for some fellow ranked Vega players, I (El Cubano Loco) placed 7th at Hadocon 2 in Union City, CA, 9th at Hadocon 3 in Burlingame, CA, 13th at Hadocon 4 in Burlingame and 25th at NCR 2010. Tatsu placed 4th at the first Hadocon in Burlingame, CA as well as placing 9th at NCR 2009 and 9th at NCR 2010.
Here are some links for my placings. The vid I’m embedding is my match against Mr. Naps to get into top 32 at NCR 2010:
I have two different names in the rankings as I used to enter as Bren2xt but now I just enter as Brentt. If they could be combined that would be awesome!
Hi Marcos! We can’t add individual results. They have to be full tournament results (top 8, 16 or 32) like the challonge you linked to. Also, at the moment we’re focusing on entering as much AE:2012 data as possible. Most of the tournaments placing you mentioned are for earlier versions of SF4, which we’ll try to add later. Some of the older data is harder to find since there weren’t as many streams as there are nowadays, but we’ll try. Thanks for input.
Great work! This will definitely help in seeding as well!
Thanks for picking Red fight District 2 amongst the tournaments! I saw in the WTA wiki that the category is based on the Prizemoney. Is this the same “requirement” you’re using to classify the tournaments?
If there is anything I can do to help out, please let me know!
Just found you on Twitter. Yes, I would like to find some results of European tournaments, to make sure the EU scene is represented as good as possible.
The prizemoney is not used in the weighting, only player skill weight is. Which is another concern, anyone that can advise on some better player skills weights is welcome
@Kineda: May I get credited too at the bottom of the site for my MegaMan-styled SSF4: AE char sprites being used? P.S. - Sprites for the new USF4 chars are in the works!
