my pop rankings explained

Both Lish and mikrisa have recently asked me to explain my (url="http://"http://squibix.net/popranks")ranking system(/url), which I'm glad to do:

The base of the system is, I take the number of players participating in each tournament and subtract one from that. The resulting number is how many points you get for winning the tourney. The second place finisher gets one less point, third place one less than that, and so on. Last place gets no points, but gets a zero marked on the big list, which at least gives credit for participation.

Then, with each tournament that occurs I subtract one point from everybody's total, and then add on the new points received. I also keep track of the total points without subtraction, to rank people in case of ties and to provide lifetime achievement awards or whatever. So far we don't have any people who've risen to the top of the ranks and then stopped playing... but, as mikrisa says, 'so if lumisa would not join the next 56 tourneys she would have zero points? ;-)' (And it's actually not even that bad, aspiring ranking-leaders: she'd only have to miss the next 51 tourneys!)

So basically, if you participate in tournaments and don't come in last then you'll be in the top fifteen of the rankings. The better you do, the longer you can rest on your laurals before you have zero points again. The system does reward participation more than pure achievement, but I think that's as it should be. On the other hand, I do wish it were possible for newbies and people farther down the rankings to have a hope of reaching the highest height...

The other issue is, in the most recent tournament there were three people who'd never been in a tourney before, and two of them didn't win so much as a round (except against each other). In view of that, I decided to modify the system, so instead of the winner's points being ((participants)-1) it would be ((ranked participants)-1) -- in this case, I gave Hyko 5 points for winning instead of the seven he would have had otherwise. Was that fair? If I hadn't done that, Murdoc would have ended up being ranked higher than people like mikrisa and :)tm, which didn't seem right to me.

So I'm open to your suggestions in this case, and indeed in any aspect of these rankings. I'm sure it could all be done better, more fairly and effectiently... any ideas?

(also anyone who's on there without an AIM handle and/or time zone listed who'd like to have those things added, just let me know.)

(edit: oh yeah, and folks using Safari should go (url="http://"http://squibix.net/dan/pop/index.html")here(/url) first, read the 'note for Safari users' and get a stylesheet they can use. Unless that bug's been fixed yet...)

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(This message has been edited by Danny (edited 06-10-2003).)

hmmm....just noticed that I'm in 13th place... :-?

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Originally posted by Helix20:
hmmm....just noticed that I'm in 13th place... :-?

Don't worry, you're almost guaranteed to rise in the ranks after next Sundays tourney!

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Originally posted by Danny:
**Both Lish and mikrisa have recently asked me to explain my ranking system, which I'm glad to do:

**

How would you do your ranking, if - as it almost happened last Sunday - the first round was split into two groups?

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(This message has been edited by mikrisa (edited 07-01-2003).)

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Originally posted by mikrisa:
How would you do your ranking, if - as it almost happened last Sunday - the first round was split into two groups?

Hmm, good question. I guess I'd just sort everyone (except the top four, obviously) by matches won, and in case of ties compare round differentials. If there were two people with identical results, I'd give em both the same number of points.

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