2011 Pong National Ranking

 

Pong Debuts National Ranking System for First Time

By popular demand and through careful consideration and analysis BalloonPong has developed its own National Ranking system and has rolled it out for the first time.  We found the easiest way to develop a standard scoring system was to base it on the current BFA National Ranking system.  Above you'll find the first installment in a series that will carry on throughout the rest of 2011 as scores are updated in the BFA's ranking system.

  

Disclaimer:
The Pong National Ranking and BFA National ranking are different.  They are intended and were developed for unique purposes.  The BFA's National Ranking system aims to select the top pilots who will be eligible for the following year's National Championship - which it does well.  The Pong ranking as noted below is all inclusive of a given pilot's full "body of work".

The Goal:
The idea behind the ranking system is to capture who the best pilot was throughout a given competition season.  The system is new and will continue to be revised in the coming years as needed.  We're looking forward to using this system during the 2011 season to track how pilots are doing and hopefully we'll have plenty of exciting changes as event's scores are submitted and we watch pilots move up and down the list. ranking file

Basis:
The general idea behind the system is to download every score for every pilot that is submitted to the BFA's National ranking found here.  Next, we assign a score according to the below tables and then average all the scores each pilot has recorded.

Obstacles:
There were a number of issues considered while developing the system and the idea was to weigh the effects of them all in order to come up with a system that would capture who the best pilot was.  A few of the issues we considered are listed below with brief explanations of the complexity each presented:

1) Differing fields of pilots at each event - Each competitive event features a different field and inherently never the same pilots.  Some pilots are better than others, making it theoretically harder to win certain events.  

2) Number of points awarded changes in the BFA system changes based on the number of HACD pilots - As noted above the Pong Ranking system is based on the scores entered into the BFA's ranking and we don't think that a field with 10 pilots is necessarily better than one with 15 although under the BFA system more points are awarded regardless.  By dropping the last two digits and just keeping the first we are minimizing the effect the size of the field plays on the system.  

3) Reward consistency - As you can note in the chart below the Pong ranking penalizes pilots who have bad tasks.  For most point ranges the formula simply drops the last two digits of the score, but for the final three ranges (299 and below) less points are awarded and for a score between 0-99 pilots will actually lose a point. 

4) Include the U.S. National's scores in the system - We think the most important scores to include are the scores where pilots are flying against the best field of the year.  Naturally that is at the U.S. National Championship and we've developed a separate scale for pilots who compete in those tasks.

5) Reward pilots who compete at Nationals - See the U.S. Nationals table below to see that for each range an extra point will be added to scores to compensate for the difficult field those pilots are competing against. 

6) Include all tasks flown - As the goal notes the object of this ranking system is to tell the whole picture.  No tasks will be dropped.

7) Have a moving (rolling) average - In the same way that it's important to include all tasks in the ranking system it is likewise important to allow for a moving average throughout the competitive year.  A pilot's average can go up and down depending on how they have been flying recently.

8) Reward pilots who win tasks - It is important to reward a pilot who win's a task regardless of field size and this will be done by giving them a "10", or "11" if it's a U.S. National's task.

 

 

HACD Events			U.S. Nationals
Win	10		Win	11
900-999	9		900-999	10
800-899	8		800-899	9
700-799	7		700-799	8
600-699	6		600-699	7
500-599	5		500-599	6
400-499	4		400-499	5
300-399	3		300-399	4
200-299	1		200-299	2
100-199	0		100-199	1
0-99	-1		0-99	0