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Behold!Fred, in the rankings thread wrote:That said, I think a statistical based ranking would be pretty interesting.
Introducing Excelsior Rankings - a veritable clone of Byko's rankings of yore, with a few extra features. The site is still under development, but all the basic features are pretty much there. Further major development will probably only happen around Thanksgiving or so.
Comparison with Byko's rankings:
- As with Byko's rankings, the ranking algorithm used here is stock KRACH. You can read up on the system in detail on the linked page, but basically, it ranks teams by win-loss record (which itself is weighted by packet set difficulty), weighted by strength of schedule.
- You also have a limited ability to filter rankings by state and also by total games played (to remove teams with few data points that may lead to anomalously high rankings), as you did with Byko's rankings.
- Unlike Byko's rankings, these rankings will not incorporate every buzzer-based competition under the sun; rather, only events run on good questions with relatively fair formats will be incorporated.
- There are a number of features that I have included and/or plan to include that were absent from Byko's rankings. Essentially, most of those features pertain to making this site into a results database for good quizbowl. Other features of note include a historical compilation of rankings, based only on results up to that point. In a similar vein, you can track changes in a team's ranking over time. My list of things to do and features to add can be found on the front page.
KRACH is not exactly a perfectly-suited system for quizbowl rankings. It doesn't account for PPB or victory margin or 15PG or any of those other quizbowl statistics that we all love. More importantly, though, it does not account for set difficulty in any way. If any of the resident statistical mavens could suggest a reasonable way for accounting for varying set difficulty, I'd be glad to implement it.
Also, being under development, it probably has more bugs than the average beehive. Do not complain if things labeled "Under Construction" in big angry red letters do not work. (If something that isn't labeled "Under Construction" doesn't work, though, let me know; it's probably a bug I need to fix).
How you can help
The most important thing you can do to help is to report any and all errors that you see. Examples of things you should report to me (using the red-colored link at the bottom of every page or by email or on the forums) include, but are not limited to: combined results for teams that have the same name (particularly a problem with St. ____'s schools and schools named after famous people); outright incorrect game results; incorrect letter assignments (i.e. the team that played at tournament X as High School A was actually High School's B team); and incorrect states assigned to teams.
Also, if you are a person who knows things about statistics and can suggest better methods of ranking teams (based on any aggregate statistics that would show up in SQBS output), I'm all ears.
Note: if you receive a 403 Forbidden error while trying to access the site, it is probably the result of me having taken the site down while I recalculate the rankings. I will make this more user-friendly at some point.