Player Rankings

[Nicholas Scarpinato]

Hello. I'm in charge of tracking win/loss records for an online forum. The
forum is host to a beat battle league for rap producers. We have a four week
battle league competition every few months, and this month we've decided to
try and come up with a ranking system that will keep the competitors more
involved with the competition. Long story there, but anyway...

Here's what I need to do:

1. Store win/loss records for each competitor.
2. Store the number of votes cast for and against each competitor in each
battle.
3. Store the number of votes not cast by each competitor in battles they are
required to vote in(there is a penalty for not voting in a battle you are
required to vote in as part of the league).
4. Calculate the strength of each battler based on how many battles they've
won, how many battles they've lost, how many votes they've received, and how
many votes have been cast against them.
5. Calculate the leader board by win/loss record, then by strength of
schedule.
6. Calculate the rank of each battler based on strength of schedule.
(Similar to college bowl rankings, 11-1 team with a harder schedule than 12-0
team gets a higher ranking.)

There are arbitrary values assigned to winning(+10 per win) and losing
battles(-7 per loss), receiving votes(+2 per vote), votes cast against a
person(-1 per vote), and not voting in required battles(-5 per battle not
voted in). The idea I'm trying to get at is, if somebody is 4-0, but they
beat four people who were 0-4, I want them ranked lower than somebody who
beat four people who were 3-1. But for the overall rankings, I want to have
someone who is 3-1 but their only loss was to someone 4-0 to be ranked higher
than someone who is 4-0 but beat four 0-4 people. I've already tried to do
this in Excel, but the ranking sort was not working the way I wanted. So now
I'm trying to do it in Access but I haven't figured out how to make the
strength of schedule work correctly. I want to average the battler's
strengths for each opponent and compare it to the battler strength of the
player in question and rank the player based on that, but I don't know how to
go about this with Access.

 

[Sharkbyte]

Everything you want to do, functional wise, is possible from Access. In
fact, I think it is your best choice. However, as for ranking "players", you
need to establish a set of criteria, unless you are going to go strictly by
the point system you describe.

Programs operate based on rules you give them, so if you want to rank
someone based on who they beat vs. what their points might be, then you
should look at modifying your points system. Perhaps you could graduate your
win/loss points based on the competitor's rank.

I think you are simply introducing a measure of complexity, by using 2
different ranking methods, combined, than is entirely necessary.

As far as creating the db, there is too much involved to post anything more
than one or two suggestions. If this is beyond your skill level, I would
recommend you seek out an Access developer to help you create what you need.

Good luck.

Sharkbyte

 

[JoeO]

Adding to Sharkbyte:

I agree witth Sharkbyte. This is pretty easy thing to do with access.
However you need good (but not necessarily expert) Access programming skill
to accomplish the task.
You need a few tables... Members, Competitions, PointFormula, Voting.

Competition table will have fields like CompetionID, PointsForWinning,
PointsForLosing, WinnerID (Same as memberID) WinnerID(same as memberID),
VotesFor, VotesAgainst

In Voting Table, Should have CompetionID, MemberID, Vote(Yes/No)

From here Query you will need to use query to report on rankings based upon
all the factors enumerated.