Feedback on the MD/VA PR
Dingus Joe - February 20, 2018First and foremost, I am not writing this because I’m salty that I’m not going to make PR this season (I genuinely don’t believe I deserve to this season anyway), nor am I writing this to point fingers at anyone in particular. (In fact what first made me think of writing this was a joke I made earlier on twitter) I am writing this because I do not care about the power rankings in my region. In my opinion, every serious player should care about their regions PR. I am a serious player (sort of) but I don’t care because I believe the ranking system may be faulty at this point.
My original long time goal for smash 4 was make PR using only Mr. Game and Watch. I’ve since then dropped that goal in pursuit of other goals since I have realized the silly faults of the power ranking system here. So what exactly is the problem? What are these faults exactly? Here’s a list
- Region is too separated
- PR wins have too much priority over consistent placing
-Resulting PR does not accurately portray the skill proportionally to the region
Let's start off with the first one. Maryland and Virginia aren’t huge states, one would think we wouldn’t be that separated. But we are. The reason for this is the ridiculous amount of traffic from D.C.. I have lived in Maryland practically all of my life, I have witnessed the astronomical growth in population here within the past 10 years. Rides to smash venues like the cave that should take me 45 minutes with no traffic will take 2 hours with normal weekday traffic. Very few smashers if any have a schedule that would allow this. That being said I don’t think the solution would be to split the region. I think we still interact with each other enough to be one full region. However I do believe subregions would be in order. Many other larger regions do it so I don’t see why we shouldn’t either. The only counter argument to this that I would imagine someone saying would be that this move would separate us. But we are already separated enough physically through traffic. I don’t see this separating us more. I don’t see how this possible solution could hurt our local smash community.
My second point may be weaker as I am not fully aware of all of the details the PR panel goes through to come to a decision, but from my own perspective, this point still stands. From what I have witnessed, the panel seems to care a lot for wins more so than consistent placings. Using myself as an example, last spring I placed consistently in top 8 at Xanadu for nearly 2 months and still, from what I was told, I was not close to being considered for PR because I lacked PR wins. This makes sense of course, I believe at the time, 16 of the 20 PR were Virginia so they weren’t at Xanadu often. Grant it, it was still top 8 with a fair amount of 5th place placings. I would like more information on how placings are factored in if anyone can provide any.
And my final point, the PR isn’t proportional to the skill in the region. There are many unranked players in Maryland who I would argue is just as good or better than some of the previously PRed Virginia players. I won’t mention anybody in particular as to avoid conflict but you guys know who you are. Also hell! didn’t we have a crew battle already to prove this? But I digress, I think I have another solution to solve this if we don’t use any of my previously mentioned solutions. A quota of sorts, say at least 5 players from each state will be on the PR, which works for the current PR now. The counter arguements I have heard to this is that this will take away from some players that could potentially deserve PR. I don’t realistically see how this could be true, at least more so than it already is for Maryland players. Example: VA player with 6 PR wins doesn’t make it because MD player has 5 PR wins and they make it because quota. But the MD player would have more consistent placings and less negative records against PR because there are less PR players in his side of the region. It would suck for that unfortunate VA player but that is exactly what it feels like for many of us MD players with having so little PR players here, especially since most of our PR players are on the higher side of the PR.
Anyways, I don’t see this as a better solution to what I have mentioned previously about subregions, but I do think it would work better than the system we have now to proportionally represent the regions skill. Thank you for reading, I hope rock hear other’s ideas on the matter
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