May 8th, 2013 by reynman
Well, ok, it's been 85 days since we released the North America ranking, but today we're very happy to introduce a complete ranking system for the ... um ... South Pacific? ... um ... Oceania? ... um ... let's just call it the Pacific region and keep it movin'. The new rankings span from Japan to New Zealand and include any teams in the Asian/Pacific region that are not already included in another system (Hawaii remains in the USA/North American system).
There’s now a specific landing page dedicated to the Pacific region and you can get to the Pacific rankings from the Rankings page. There's also a country specific rankings filter for Australia and for New Zealand. Of course, this means we now provide all the features you’ve come to expect from us to all the pacific region teams: bouts lists, rankings over time and detailed bout stats. All of these are naturally only as good as the information that we have so please check our list of bouts and teams to see if we’ve got everything correct in our database. Don’t hesitate to let us know if we’re missing a team or a bout and please continue to send in new bout results. And, if you have statsbooks of past bouts, we can upload those as well.
This ranking system has been a bit more difficult than the others due to the limited cross-pollination which I assume comes from the larger travel burdens. The specific algorithm parameters are a little different from what we're getting in other regions which may represent a limitation in the dataset or just that the region hasn't fully matured. Either way, I'm excited to see how it progresses over the year.
Comments
This is pretty special and interesting, but I desperately desperately wish there was a way to filter out home teams from the overall rankings list. Home teams, by their nature, rarely bout against each other except in specifically organised competitions (South-East Queensland has Open Season, Victoria and Tasmania have a combined season I believe).
The result is that home teams which hold a strong lead over their counterparts (such as Townsville's Roll Asylum) get an enormously inflated ranking over legitimately high-ranked teams, and it's difficult to view, at a glance, the rankings difference between NBR and Canberra, Sydney and Perth, Queen Bees and Auckland etc etc. Out of the 208 teams listed I would be surprised if more than 50-60 were true 'league' teams or B teams, but it's impossible to tell and impossible to read.
The rankings system is a huge step forward for Australia, but there are definitely some kinks to iron out.