Michael VII wrote:So K&P, can you try to explain to me, (not a newbie, but not the most experienced guy out there either! haha), why NSFS should have the highest ranked team set to the max possible points?
More of a curiosity question, because I primarily use xkoranate except for domestic cups which I want to get done quickly, but still interested. (Don't worry World Bowlers, if you read this, I am still using xkoranate for the WB finals!)
It's complicated, but I'll try and breeze through a response.
NSFS 3 requires a max points setting so that it can calculate a team's overall skill as the quotient of a team's ranking points divided by the max points constant, so the closer a team is to max points, the better they are (duh).
Let's say the best team in your league (Team A) has 80 ranking points. Maybe the second best team (Team B) has 70. Now, no matter what the max points constant is set at, Team A is always going to be better than Team B. But think about this:
If the max points is set to 80, Team A's quotient of ranking points over max points comes to 1. Team B's comes to 0.875. The difference is 0.125.
If the max points is set to 100, however, Team A's quotient of ranking points over max points is 0.8. Team B's is 0.7, for a difference of 0.1.
If the max points is set to 120, Team A's quotient of ranking points over max points is 0.6667. Team B's is 0.5833, for a difference of 0.0833.
As you can see, the higher you set max points, the smaller the difference between Team A and Team B gets and the more random your results will be league wide. The problem isn't that Team A won't be good; they'll still be the best in the league, in fact; but when you set max points too high all the teams in the league get mashed together in a bottleneck.
So if people are selecting a max points constant and think, "well, I don't want Team A to be that good, so I'll leave a gap," they need to understand that they are making results more random all across the league.
All of this, I should add, is entirely moot in xkoranate. While there is a place to enter max points in xkoranate, it doesn't have any effect when you're using SQIS (the formula simply compares two teams' ranking point totals by dividing the smaller one by the larger one, and the smaller the resultant quotient, the more likely the higher-ranked team is to win).
Does that make sense? I mean, it's possible that the moral of the story here is not necessarily "don't set the max points higher than the best team," but rather "the more randomness you want, the larger the gap should be between Team A and your max points constant." Because, as TBI says above, some nations like randomness more than others. It's just a matter of preference, and everybody has to figure out what they prefer by toying around. There's no right or wrong way to do it. My personal opinion is that NSFS is heavily random even without mashing all the teams together via a too-high max points constant, and that's why I recommend keeping that constant the same as that of your highest-ranked team.
