Thanks everyone for another successful year of SSBMRank. Many people contributed to the entire process that I want to personally give credit to. I’ll also comment on some frequently asked questions in this article.

How did SSBMRank work?

A.) The nomination process (August)

The nomination process started back in August 2014. Players who placed in the Top 32-48 at Apex 2014 or Evo 2014 or Top ~30 at MLG were automatically considered for SSBMRank2014. On the MeleeItOnMe Facebook group, people could nominate players based on local and regional success.

To maintain some integrity, I required that the player must have attended a US National or be highly active and successful in his or her local scene. This meant popular players such as Wobbles were not considered, mainly due to their lack of activity. While they are talented enough to be in the top 100, the greater purpose of the list was to celebrate players that were active in 2014.

There were several complaints about the lack of Europeans such as OverTriforce, Jeappie, Zgetto (to name a few). I made the decision to exclude them, mainly because of the difficulty to rate these players in comparison with the other players on the list.

There were many complaints in regards to excluding players, but hopefully everyone keeps in mind that standards need to be made or else panelists would have to rate 300 people instead of 160, which was already quite cumbersome already!

B.) The voting process (October – November)

Panelists were handpicked based on their knowledge of the community. Primarily, the panel consisted of top level players, tournament organizers, commentators, and figureheads. To maintain balance, I tried my best to make sure each region was well represented. Unfortunately, certain regions were less willing to fill out ballots in a timely fashion.

Panelists were given a ballot with all of the nominees. Each nominee was rated on a scale of 1-10 (0.1 increments) based on perceived skill and 2014 results (Apex 2014 –> The Big House 4). Each panelist was expected to rate a minimum of 85 players. This was to ensure that enough data was collected for normalcy as well as making sure panelists did not rate players that they knew nothing about.

C.) The Number Crunching

The ratings for each nominee were averaged to obtain a final score. To reduce variance, the lowest and highest ratings were thrown out.

D.) Blurbs/Pictures/Formatting (November,

Arguably the toughest part of doing SSBMRank2014, the blurbs and pictures were compiled by a small team of volunteers.

Frequently Asked Questions

1.) Why wasn’t ______ rated?

There were a few notable omissions such as Professor Pro that were a goof on my end. If a player wasn’t rated, it was mainly due to inactivity or their lack of participation in a US Tournament. Alternatively, people had a 1.5 month window to nominate players and if you weren’t there to nominate during that generous time window, then that’s your bad!

2.) Why wasn’t ____ rated higher? He beat ______

It’s expected that you’re able to beat people that are higher ranked than you during the span of a year. Usually people who private message me, fail to mention the greater picture of a player, including overall wins and losses, often excluding the embarrassing losses and only accounting for “good” wins. In addition, people need to also consider that people not only win against better players, but also lose to players that are significantly lower in rank. When everything is looked at in whole, I felt most players were ranked appropriately

3.) Why wasn’t rated higher? He placed ____ at _____!!!!!

Most tournaments, even nationals, don’t have everyone in attendance. A player who finishes 33rd is not defaulted to being “33rd best in the world”. Furthermore, 33rd means you are top 48, not top 33. Everyone has an awesome tournament, but players who are consistently placing higher are the ones that warrant a higher placing on SSBMRank. The only person that got shafted was Plup in this regard.

4.) Your list sucks, Tafo!

Greatly appreciated, but this wasn’t my list. This was a panel vote of 30ish people. Also, this isn’t a “MIOM” list even though more MIOM members participated than I realized.

Looking Ahead

1.) Blurbs

I know that the blurbs weren’t really up to par and I don’t blame the blurb writers as much as I do myself. For SSBMRank2013, I hand picked people to write blurbs for players from their own region. This added more personality to the blurbs as best friends and training partners were writing the blurbs as opposed to random strangers. I worried if I added too many writers that the list would have been leaked. In hindsight, I should have gotten much more writers and delegated blurbs to people. I underestimated the amount of free time that I had. As a result,  I wasn’t able to do the little things to make the blurbs magical and I apologize for the endless errors.

2.) Editors

My actual job took up a lot more time than I realized. I thought I could have done better job as an editor, but I didn’t have the time to edit. I should have foreseen this by having a dedicated editor in chief to oversee that any errors would be fixed prior to publishing. By adding an editor along with more writers, things would have been done much more smoothly.

3.) Stats

The placings at majors were done after the voting was done. These placings could have helped the panelists in properly assessing ratings to each player. Hopefully, a crowdsourced (gAR PR?) data source can be used for SSBMRank2015 to give much more intelligent and interesting data.

Credits

1. Panelists

West Coast (9)
Daniel “Tafokints” Lee
Sheridan “Dr. Z” Zalewski
Zac “SFAT” Cordoni
Kevin “PewPewU” Toy
Johnny “s2j” Kim
Jeffrey “Axe” Williamson
Hugo “HugS” Gonzalez
Kris “Toph” Aldenderfer
Sam “Laudandus” Rohrer

Midwest (5)
Frank “Frootloop” Borden
Robin “Juggleguy” Harn
James “Duck” Ma
Kelly “Kels” Smith
Josh “Coffeemug” Lozar

South (5)
John “SleepyK” Lee
Juan “Hungrybox” Debiedma
Sami “Druggedfox” Muhanna
Joshua “s0ft” Davis
Chi “clowsui” Wong

East Coast (11)
Julian “Zhu” Zhu
Charles “Cactuar” Meighen
Matthew “MattDotZeb” Zaborowski
Anthony “Slox” Detres
Michael “Nintendude” Brancato
Landon “DoH” Cox
Austin “Redd” Self
Kashan “Chillindude” Khan
Will “Reno” Hsiao
Tim “Swift” tilley
D’ron “d1” Maingrette

International (2)
Roustane “Kage” Benzeguir
Julius “King Funk” Vissing

2. Blurb Writers

Zachary Ripple
Chris Davis
Charlie Bullock
Jackson Roman
Daniel Lee
Noah Gordon
Michael Weber
Connor Cone
Arian Fathieh

3. Editors (People who helped out randomly without asking)

Robin Harn
Dylan Sweet