I won my last game but my ranking went down a few notches. Does victory margin and strength of schedule factor in?
This message will be a combination of some facts and mostly speculation, but I hope it helps.
Your team's performance is compared against all the teams in your country (country rank) and the whole BuzzerBeater world (wold rank). Since all the other teams play a game around the same time you play yours (and 50% of them end up winning), a single win won't change your rank too much and depending on the "noise" (who of 100 or so teams that are close to you in the ranking won, who lost, by how much, etc.) your rank may even drop after winning. Most probably there is a "window" inside which the ranks are calculated. This means that a season or two ago there was also a game day when you either lost or won. That game result would then be eliminated from the calculation and replaced by the new result. (This results in even more "noise".) The rank, so to speak, probably remembers X days and considers only results during this time period. It may give recent results a heavier weight.
Does the schedule factor in? I think it was confirmed some time ago that the level of competition is now compared across the leagues and countries (there was heavy fluctuation in the ranks around the time this was introduced). I don't know how significant this effect is, but I went from a world rank of 115 or so to about 60 when the change took place. My country had about 740 active teams during that time and my team was on a winning streak.
Your success in the national tournament seems to play a major role in the rank. The BuzzerBeater's Best tournament on the other hand doesn't seem to have as heavy a weight. I have not really studied this, only made some limited observations based on my country's ranks. Obviously the top ranked teams in the world are probably those who do well in BBB, but winning a game or two in the international competition doesn't guarantee you a top 2 country rank even if you continue to do well in the league and the national tournament. The apparently big difference your Cup run makes may be due to nothing else than the fact that it's possible to have huge performance differences in the Cup (in most countries, this is not true in BBB). There's a big difference in winning the Cup and finishing in top 16, and the rank should reflect this. There's also a huge difference in finishing in top 4 or top 8 and going out in the early rounds. If a top league team is a total failure in the Cup, it should be no surprise if a division II team with good Cup success (say they make the final) gets a higher country rank.
Last edited by GM-WallyOop at 9/22/2009 6:10:42 AM