Reply To: FSM Ratings

[schnee]

Lots of things:

First, thanks for the feedback. Keep it coming. Don’t be shy. I can probably handle the math; I need ideas.

The ratings will take the place of the Greatest Evar / Greatest Recently reports. They may or may not replace them, but keep reading.

I want the FSM to be a value-add to Fark first, Farktography.net 2nd. That means that the FSM will strive to match the results on Fark. Since Fark allows for votes after Farktography.net “calls” the contest (thanks for doing that, veruca!), we have at least two versions of the truth. Probably three since “striving to match” doesn’t mean “exactly matching”. The FSM stops picking up late votes after 4 weeks; I’m not sure when Fark “archives” a thread – there’s probably a window. Personally, I really like the Farktography.net placings – they give a sense of urgency to the contest (come on Secret Voting Block! Get those votes in!).

I was talking to some co-workers about this. One of the guys was a moto-cross rider and he told me how those scores work. In his league, place-finishing was all that mattered – points were scored according to 1st, 2nd, 3rd, &c. In other leagues, points were also granted based on “fastest lap”, “winning pole position”, and other factors. In his league, not finishing really killed chances at the championship. In the other leagues, not so much. But in the other leagues, riders tended to be more conservative since they could pick up points for other things. Not sure how this applies to Farktography, but it is interesting.

Marley, I hear what you are saying. You’ve already taken a hit by missing those months, why heap insult on injury by using my R ratio. Very good point. “Participation” is built-in to place-scoring and voting. I’ll probably nix the R ratio. Keep in mind, however, that I’m going to do an “Evar” and a “Recent” rating: “Recent” only looks at the past 10 contests. My “fascination” on participation is based on the “Greatest Averages Evar” report – there are some amazing averages from people who don’t participate all that much. I introduced the artificial threshold of 10 contests to keep that report distinct from the one-hit-wonder report, but 10 is pretty arbitrary – I have a vague feeling of uneasiness.

Elsinore, your ideas of multiple scores contains echoes of the conversation that I had with co-workers. One guy had the idea of something equivalent to the Bowl Championship Series in US College Football: multiple rankings that combine into some overall rating (the FCS, if you will). The software engineer in me is very intrigued (oooohhh, pluggable scoring engines – shiny!), but I’m a bit hesitant to really formalize that. 1) It sounds like a lot of work and, well, that’s about it really. Still, I live in the US, home of the BCS and with fresh memories of the 2000 Presidential Election. I love that sort of conflict (seriously, I live in Austin, TX but I’m a USC graduate (which if you don’t follow college football, doesn’t mean much)). Maybe I can come up with something – total votes, place finishing, best averages – maybe they all combine into a rating that we can argue about forever (‘we’ the community, not you and I – we’re cool).