Announcement: Super Smash Bros. European Ranking, 2019

We are proud to announce that the European Super Smash Bros. scene has finally made efforts to do a power ranking, which so far has never been done before in a public and “official” way.  This post is therefore not only an announcement for such a ranking, but also a document to give some context to our endeavor.

There have been many discussions around the creation of some sort of public official power ranking for offline European Super Smash Bros. performances, especially in the hidden TO backroom channel on our Discord server.  Kaki gathered all data of the relevant offline tournaments (which tournaments are “relevant” is mostly undisputed), and created a ranking with the help of TrueSkill, a popular ranking system developed by Microsoft, which (re)sparked the current discussion. There was concern with Kaki publishing the ranking, as this would then be the first and only publicly posted ranking, which would run the risk of it being the standard reference with a lot of influence, even though this list does not reflect a consensus.

Some members of the TO backroom from the Discord server then contacted all members of the scene that were deemed relevant to join the creation of this list.  The result of this was the formation of a private chat consisting of Bert, Kaki, Olikus, and Anotherish.  In this chat, discussions for a public ranking are currently taking place.  The four of us are hereby announcing the creation of a ranking for offline performances of players from the European Super Smash Bros. scene for the year of 2019

• All results considered are from this list of tournaments (only those in 2019), which are mostly undisputedly accepted in the community as the relevant offline tournaments of 2019
• The data from these tournaments are put into a ranking system of braacket.com, based on TrueSkill, which shall be the main guide for the ranking
• We adjust the ranking as to reflect the perceived “true” skill of the players

The last point is the part where it gets subjective. One thing we are probably going to do is set a minimum of attended tournaments that each player must have, as we found that players who haven’t attended enough tourneys are not in the correct spot on the TrueSkill ranking according to our judgement of their skill.  We do want to note that this minimum was partially set such that a posteriori the resulting ranking after removing said players won’t look completely wrong.  Afterwards, we switch placings of players with a close TrueSkill score where strong arguments for such a switching were found. We do also recognize that there are problems with the transparency of how the TrueSkill influenced score is calculated specifically on braacket.com. We want to stress that this was only meant as a loose guide.

The ranking will be released soon on this blog. For comments, questions, and concerns, please use the comment functionality of WordPress, write an email to berthold@lorke.de, or join our discord in the #rankings channel.