My second column is, interestingly enough, inspired by a quick scroll through the forums. One of the first things that popped up in my mind was that the “Player Rankings” forum is…

Completely blank.

Part of this is because our tournaments have been somewhat few and far between in the past year or so. Dating back to November 2007, we’ve had 3 Third Strike tournaments, with one soon to come at FFTF II (and we hope to see all of you there), and even less tournaments for the other games. With some highly-anticipated releases in the near future (Street Fighter 4 and Super Turbo: HD Remix), I expect it to be somewhat of a breath of fresh air; everybody gets to start from scratch with SF4 and I look forward to seeing how the game evolves, and hopefully ST:HD will provide the right balance between the new players (who feel like they missed the boat on Super Turbo) and the old school guys (who get an opportunity to try to find some new tricks in the revised version of the game). I can’t say for certain what will be happening in the future re: tournaments and ranking battles (ranbats for you hipsters who like shortening things), but rest assured that we are looking forward to having new games available for competition.

Which leads to the second part of the puzzle; if there’s a competitive game, and we’ve got regular tournaments with good numbers for said game…how do we rank/seed the players? Ideally, we get a system that answers two questions: first, we should be able to assess who has had the best “season” (where the season is comprised of a series of tournaments that occur within, say, a calendar year). Second, if we’ve got X number of players who enter a tournament, we should have a good idea where it is appropriate to seed those players so that people get a fair shake, taking into account momentum/current level of play.

The two are distinct questions: for example, if Player A dominates the first five SF4 tournaments with a nice gimmick, but gets peaced out of the next five pretty easily once people figure out his trickery, one measure should say “Player A has had a good season” and the other measure should say “People have caught up to Player A; if we have a tournament coming up, Player A should be a middle-to-low seed”. Or if Player B has been leapfrogging other players recently after a modest beginning, we could say “Player B should probably be seeded fairly high at TST, but doesn’t have as many points this year as some of the other guys he/she has passed”.

Ranking is more of a measure of past performance, whereas seeding is trying to measure present ability and predict performance for the immediate future. As such, seeding is much more of a gray area; and it’s not entirely perfect. It’s not really designed to properly account for counter-matchups (a situation where a mid-level player just seems to have a top player’s number) or the fact that what is “supposed to happen” doesn’t always happen (take it from somebody who won some money on the Giants this past Super Bowl). But it helps as an objective guideline to try to save those really good tournament matches for the end of the tournament rather than having them occur at the beginning.

Having set the table for our rankings (and having put most of the people reading this to sleep), it seems like a good place to leave this column for now. I think I’ll probably pick up this subject again a little closer to the start of ranking battles, and once we’ve ported over some of the old tournament results. In the interim, expect some reader e-mails to be answered in the near future :P.