Today, we here at Shoryuken are very excited to announce a special partnership that will expand the functionality of our website and the community as a whole.

By now, I’m sure some of you have seen the very interesting ranking system developed by Bavo Bruylandt, which collates tournament placings from the past two years to provide a look at the world’s best Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition ver. 2012 players. While rankings of this nature can naturally devolve into subjective arguments, Bruylandt has developed a system that assigns points to tournament placers, weighted by the size and general skill level of the event, that makes personal opinions a smaller part of the equation.

[button link=”http://rank.shoryuken.com/” size=”large” target=”_blank”]Street Fighter World Rankings System – rank.shoryuken.com[/button]

Much of his inspiration for this project was pulled from professional sports organizations, most notably the Association of Tennis Professionals and the Women’s Tennis Assocation. We’ve included much of the technical information on his system below, which you can also found in this handy about page.

How data is entered

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Tournaments results are imported in top 8, top 16 or top 32 format if available. The name, date and location of that tournament is stored and players are registered if they were not in the database before. Along with the result the main character of that player is stored into the database.

How tournaments are weighted

Every player that is entered into the database has an initial skill weight value. A tournament weight then becomes the average of the skill values of the best 8 reported players.

How tournaments are classified

The tournament ranking is done by sorting on weight and then ditributing them into the tournament types used by WTA. The score distribution for tournaments in bracket format is:

Tournaments in league format that are not auto-weighted score as:

Currently the points in Single and Double bracket mode are the same. A tournament can be a fixed type (the Grand Slam, Championship and Tournament of Champions types) or auto-weighted. For auto-weighted tournament types the following order is used:

These are distributed according to tournament weight, which is the sum of the best 8 players that entered the top 32. Tournament organizers take note: providing result lists above top 8 results in better ranking results. Championship and Tournament of Champions is reserved for leagues, with Championship being top-level and Tournament of Champions being lower-level. Grand Slam is assigned to large open international events that had aualifiers or seedings upfront.

Home Page Infiltration’s Player Page Evo 2013 Tournament Page Japan Rankings Page

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As with anything of this nature, nothing is 100% perfect, and that’s where the community comes in. We are looking for any constructive feedback you may have, so feel free to contact us through the official discussion thread and our contact form. Far from an isolated Shoryuken endeavor, we are merely providing a way for Bruylandt to have his application seen by more people, who can in turn provide further information and help improve his initial vision.

Furthermore, this entire project will be open source, meaning everyone will be able to access the latest data as well as the full application code. Transparency is our goal here and we want everyone to understand the inner workings just as well as Bruylandt.

At the moment, the website only supports AE 2012 data, but plans are currently in motion to expand the app to include other titles. There is also an over-abundance of data from tournaments held in the United States and Japan, so the results are going to be skewed towards those results while we work to expand coverage.

In that same vein, players who rarely make it out to tournaments may not be ranked as accurately as possible due to the nature of the ranking system itself.

Another issue the app currently presents is even point distribution for each character a competitor plays, which results in interesting things like Infiltration listed higher than Daigo in the Ryu rankings, which will be addressed in the next version.

To make a long story short, this is a project by the community, for the community, and we look forward to seeing it evolve in the coming year. Be sure to check it out and provide feedback on what can be done to make it better.