Over the last year I’ve been upkeeping a ranking called the Melee Almost-Live Ranking. It’s based on the Cloudhead Live Rank for Smash 4 by @CloudheadLive, specifically the CLRv4, since that was the most recent CLR at the time of creation. You can read a little more about how it works here, and on the Random Policies tab on the MALR sheet. The system worked fairly well for Smash 4, so I wanted to see whether it’d work for Melee as well.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t.

what in the world

Don’t worry, it gets worse as you keep on going.

The main issue with the MALR system (which is adapted and in my opinion improved slightly from the CLR) is that it rewards attendance far too heavily.



with # of tournaments attended

Here it’s pretty easy to see that the players who seem to be more overrated (Hbox, Zain, SFAT, S2J, Swedish, Westballz, Lucky, AbsentPage etc.) all have very high tournament attendance rates, and those that are more underrated (Armada, Mang0, Mew2King, Axe, aMSa, Crush, etc.) didn’t attend as many tournaments. This is because the point calculation formula is a direct sum; attending any tournament at worst does nothing, and at best boosts you up the rankings. Players are able to farm points simply by attending qualifying tournaments and doing decently well, or honestly, just well enough to get points.

With that in mind, I tried to take some sort of average, to see if that would make things any better.

taking a straight average, and the resultant reorganization of the top 30

Already this is significantly better. There are still some oddities, like PewPewU at 11th, but overall this would not be a particularly farfetched list.

One problem that this method might run into, however, is the fact that each tournament has a different point value. Since placing points are determined by the tournament’s value, and the number of strong wins a player can get has a bit of an upper bound based on the tournament value, attending lots of smaller tournaments could be detrimental to a player’s ranking; in fact, this is likely why Hungrybox ended up under Armada.

To illustrate this further, say that in addition to the 9 tournaments Armada entered, he also entered 2 tournaments with 150 entrants each where he was the only top 100 player. Each of these tournaments would end up as a very small C tier of 300 points. Now, obviously we’d expect Armada to win all of these tournaments. In fact, him winning these tournaments ultimately means very, very little when we’re trying to figure out Armada’s skill level. By winning these small tournaments, Armada shows that he can reliably beat sub-top 100 players; but we kind of already knew that. So really, whether he attends these tournaments or not shouldn’t impact his ranking at all.

In practice though, it’s a little different. By winning each of the tournaments, Armada gets 300 more points, ultimately adding 600 points to his total. We now have the following data for Armada:

Total pts # tournaments Avg pts 26144.8 11 2376.8

Inspection shows that this would actually end up putting Armada at 4th, between Leffen and Mang0. Those two small tournaments moved Armada from 1st to 4th. Clearly that doesn’t make a lot of sense.

In order to control for the tournament value, I tried instead dividing by the sum of the point values of the tournaments each player attended. This way, when we take this weighted average, adding a small tournament as we did before wouldn’t have as big of an impact.

a “weighted” average based on adding the tournaments’ values for the divisor, and the resultant reorganization of the top 30

This one is… odd. It’s better than the original, but definitely not as good as the straight average. However, if we look at the aforementioned scenario with Armada farming small tournaments:

Player Total pts Total tournament value Avg pts Armada + 2 26144.8 17774 1.47095 Armada + 10 28544.8 20174 1.41493 Armada + 25 33044.8 24674 1.33925 Armada + 52 41144.8 32774 1.25540 Plup 33406.9 26630 1.25448 Armada + 53 41444.8 33074 1.25309

It takes a lot of tournaments for Armada’s number to change significantly, and even more to actually make a difference in the final ranking. Granted, some of this is because Armada was already significantly above Plup.

If we do the same, but with Plup, we get the following:

Player Total pts Total tournament value Avg pts Plup + 2 34006.9 27230 1.24887 Plup + 8 35806.9 29030 1.23344 Leffen 35646.9 28928 1.23226 Plup + 9 36106.9 29330 1.23105

Even with players as close as Leffen and Plup, it takes several tournaments to actually see a difference in the ranking.

And… yeah, that’s basically that. I will not be making a 2019 Melee Almost-Live Ranking; if you want to, feel free, and let me know so I can see how badly it turns out at the end of this year.