40k Ranking system - Feedback welcome

[Levitas]

Hi Folks,

My local gaming group has devised a system to rank its members, in order to balance tournaments and group campaigns. We have a mixed group of vets and new gamers, so the system is supposed to help both.

Let me know your thoughts...

ETC

ETC is a way we came up with to develop balanced teams. We know that the ETC score is not infallible, nothing to rank players every really is, but we feel it gets us close and solves for a way to rank players based on facts rather than perception. This will hopefully prevent any hurt feelings and bruised egos. As that is certainly not the intent!

E = Experience: Here you add one point for every active year of war-gamming under your belt. This is ACTIVE playing, so don’t count years where your army may have set on a shelf while you chased ladies or occupied your time otherwise. Some of us who have played off and on since the early days may find this difficult, but a best guess is all that is needed.

T = Tournament Placement: Here you add one point for every local (20 players or less) tournament you have placed in in the last year (top 3 - 1st 2nd or 3rd). You also add one point for every major tournament you have played in regardless of placement. This represents the WARgames Cons, Ard Boys Semis and above, and Adepticons of the world. While you may have done poorly in those events, just playing in them teaches you a lot as a gamer and therefore counts. And this is +1 point for ANY in your past, not in the past year like the local tournaments.

C = Codex. Here is where you have to decide what codex you want to run. It looks like a lot of you have already stated that in another thread, but please restate it hear for us and add in the appropriate points. 5th Ed Dex = 5 points, 4th Ed Dex = 2 Points, 3rd (and older?) = 0 points.

example:
E = 9 (I have been playing off and on for over 17 years, but when I sit and think about it, it has been about nine full years of playing.
T = 11 (this is sort of a guess for me, as I have placed in a lot of local and 380 tourneys in the last year [about 8 best guess] and went to WARgames con twice and Ard Boys semis this year)
C = 5 (Blood Angels)

[SotonShades]

So, how does this help balance teams? Just sum your E, T and C scores, then play against someone with a similar score, and/or balance teams by having equal ETC scores on each? Or would the differnce between players scores be come a handicap, taken off the higher ETC player's score for the game?

For what it's worth

E = 14. Never left the hobby

T = 5 I think. Although I'd say they were all local, they have generally had at least 40 players (more for the doubles, but still over 20 teams), and I've never placed... or even broken into the top third of the pack really.

C = 5. Orks, Guard or Space Marines. Arguable about the Orks, but still...

So 24 for me. Is that high, low, middle ground?

My other concern would be the type of game. I'm sure this works quite nicely for competitve/tournament play, but it'd have to be heavilly tweaked if you were using it to balance Apocolypse games (assuming everyone had similar size forces and super heavies.

[Levitas]

It was devised for a campaign, so we could have all the teams with a similar skill level. So, basically ensuring all the high ETC score players are not on the same team. It's actually worked well in that the campaign is super close right now with each team balanced.

I'd like to expand and play with it further, so for tournament play we have mini groups much like a sports event, where the top 2 players progress etc. Again groups are separated via the ETC. You can even use it on a friendly bases when looking for a pick up game to ensure a good match.

ETC is similar to a gamer card or Halo rank. It's not perfect of course.

[DarkLink]

You're looking to see how good a player is? Then I see no reason to include experience at all, and codex is too subjective to be worthwhile. Simply ranking codices by what edition they were released in is nonsensical. If you have plain tournament rankings, then use that.

See, experience and what codex are predictors for performance, and fairly weak ones at that. Tournament results, though, are straight performance. If you have performance results, then there's no need to include predictors in your calculations

You're not even using actual tournament rankings, just how many tournaments you've attended. If someone's gone to three tournaments that played seven games each and gotten in the top ten each time, they would score lower than someone who went to seven tournaments with three games each and got last place in each one.



You'll want to re-think the system you're using. Start with tournament results. Take the sum of the person's placing at all the tournaments they've been to (1st place=1pt, 2nd=2, etc, so lower scores are better), then divide by the number of tournaments to get the average placing. That's your start.

So in my case, I've placed 8, 8, 10, 18, 15 and 14 in the last year. That's an average of 12. http://www.rankingshq.com/private/profile.aspx

If you're putting together teams, mix them up so the teams have the same total average placing.

That's about as accurate as you're going to get, assuming you have data for everyone.





Oh, and Orks are unquestionably in the top teir of codices. They may not appear to be so on paper, but in actual practice I've seen Ork players in the top ten at every tournament I've gone in the last couple of years, believe it or not. They may not sound strong, yet they consistently place very well. In fact, I've been to tournaments where there were more top ork players than any other single army combined. And we're not talking about little local 10-20 person tournaments. We're talking 50-90 person, $50 entry fee and minimal comp.

If I had to break up the codices, I'd do it like this:

Top Tier (In no particular order)
Grey Knights
Space Wolves
Blood Angels
Imperial Guard
Orks
Black Templar
Necrons
Dark Eldar

Middle Tier
Chaos Marines
Tyranids
Daemons
Vanilla Marines
Dark Angels

Bottom Tier
Tau
Sisters
Eldar

This is based solely on my experience and what I've seen at tournaments. Top tier requires players to be able to take tournaments relatively consistently. Black Templar are there simply because Nick Rose is apparently basically undefeated with them. Good General or no, a lower tier army will occasionally fail you and cost you victories.

Middle Tier are armies that can still win, but you see them much less often in the top spots than the upper tier armies.

Lower Tier are still capable of competing, but require a perfect list and perfect play and perfect luck, so they don't win consistently. You can still win with Tau, but I haven't seen them take a tournament lately for these reasons.

Necrons are still pretty new, but they've won some big tournaments so we'll see. DE I actually question because Grey Knights and IG tend to curb-stomp them, but they can do pretty well against some other armies so whatever.

[plasticaddict]

We just concluded a multi team campaign and split the teams by relative ability simply by posting a list of who was going to play and had every player rank all the participants in order from best player to worst. Tally the results and go down the list the top rated player and the lowest rated player go on the same team, second best and second from the bottom go together, etc. The system actually works out very well as most people in a gaming group can agree on who are the best players and who have the most room to improve.