Webmaster   Joined: 1970/1/1 From: Posts: 1 |
Re: Player Gradings
an excelent question, glad you asked as it will give me the chance to remind coaches of a few things.
Grading is determined by several factors. Team composition, Experience, Past performance, Individual past results and what is the perceived strength of the overall tournament this round.
If that teams has played before, if so what grade and how well did they do.
If they have not played together then individually how did they go in the past.
Is there any A grade players and what has the remaining team been graded in the past. There are certain A grade players that even if they are playing with 2 other D grade players will always push that team into A grade.
If a team has won the final of a grade the previous round then they normally move up to the next grade but sometimes this depends on the overall strength of the tournament
When I am grading teams I use the following process:
First I seperate out all the obvious A grade teams, if we dont have at least 4 teams for A grade I look at the B grade teams to see who is the strongest and who could possibly be moved up, in some cases I contact the coach, let them know I am considering moving them to A grade and see if they can shuffle their team to make them stronger to deal with A grade
Next I look at teams from groups that have submitted several teams, normally one in each grade. This is normally an experienced coach that should be familiar with their teams ability and have shuffled their teams to suit the various grades, each season this gets reviewed based on performance in that grade and either team composition is changed or teams are moved up or down grades. In some case these coaches dont get their wishes and they end up with say 2 teams in B grade. Again I will normally contact the coach to give then the opportunity to shuffle their 2 teams to make them more balanced.
Once this is done I have a good feel for how the tournament is looking and will normally have 1/2 the teams or more slotted into the grades.
Next I look at each remaining team and see what grade they were in and how they did. Many of the teams are obvious where they should be and that then leaves me with only 3 or 4 teams to grade.
Final step and normally the most time consuming is to take the remaining teams one by one and evaluate where they should be, then I compare them with the teams already in that grade and see if they are a fair match. at times when I do add in that team it becomes obvious that a team already in that grade is starting to look like they may be too strong and need to be moved up a grade. So this final step can mean a bit of reshuffling. Sometimes I am not always totally happy with the spread and wish we had more grades for a more accurate division of skill but in this case it really is a best guess scenario.
There are time when B and C grade for example are very even in ability and we could easily swap some of the teams in those grades and still make for close matches
with a team of new players I give them the benefit of the doubt and put them in the lowest grade unless I hear they are pretty good then it may be the 2nd or 3rd lowest grade. I have even sent an A grade player into their room to play with them to assess their ability
Coaches, you can help me a lot by doing a few simple things.
1. make sure you submit all players that will be playing that season so I can grade your team accurately. We wont allow an A grade player to enter a team in C or even B grades midway through the tournament. The general rule here is that teams have been graded based on the team composition you have submitted, if you bring in other players that may have affected that grading then it makes your allocated grade invalid and we will take action. We have already had a situation where a B grade team has brought in an A grade player mid season and that player has been blocked from playing.
2. If you have a player that is scoring more that 75 points each match then they are probably in the wrong grade, the exception here would be if they are from a group that only has 1 team and they are not winning many matches. Once on a team you are locked to it for the season but this is something for a coach to monitor so if the team is to remain in that grade then that player needs to move up or the whole team might have to move to a higher grade
3. submit your teams early, the later you submit them the lass chance I have of being able to contact you in time if there are changes to be made
I am always looking to improve the current system and way we do things so if anyone has suggestions on how to improve this situation please feel free to comment. I have actually written some code that does grade teams but I find it works best at the end of the tournament when it has all the data, its a handy system for me to see how close I was with the grading process. I am happy to post this code for scrutiny if you wish.
My goal here is to make the tournament as exciting as possible for everyone involved and everyone knows close matches are exciting to not only watch but be a part of. So it is in my best interest to try to make the grading process as close and even as possible.
Now, this is probably a good time to mention that I am looking at changing the season champ system and this will affect the way people are graded. The change I am proposing will affect the champ points gained from ROW, CPM and FAST.
With Row the change I want to make is if you get 2 in a row you get a row bonus of 2 points and this doubles each time you get another in that current row, so it would be 8 points for 3 in a row, 16 for a row of 4, 32 for 5 in a row etc.
With Fast you would get say 500 points for an answer between 1 - 2 secs, 100 for a 2 - 3 sec response, say 50 for a 3 - 4 sec response etc. The scores are yet to be determined and I need to find a way to recode the script so it does not affect the speed or performance.
With CPM its the same as Fast, with say 500 points for an answer over 350 CPM
These points all go towards your champ score and will determine who is the season champ in each grade and overall. I feel with changing to the system I propose it means each correct answer is rated more fairly as with the current system you get a score in fast and cpm by simply turning up to play
I also hope to add graphs to each persons profile so they can see how they were doing but it will also help with the grading. My ultimate goal is to have a script do the entire grading process, it will assess all the players submitted, rank them all and then do a kind of points system per team so all teams can be then ranked and graded as fairly as possible
Grading will always be a subjective process, there will always be teams not happy with the outcome. I always feel for the teams that come in the bottom of each grade cause I think I could have made it more even, but the simple truth is there is always going to be a runner up not everyone can win, the ideal outcome here is to give all teams the best chance of winning.
hope that helps
FireHorse
|
