Players BCA MVP Update and Thoughts
One week to go
With one week to go, here is are the unofficial weighted MVP standings. I don’t think the top three is very surprising. All three are excellent players.
Let’s look a little closer at how provisional Fargo ratings work. I’m going to use Neil as an example because he’s in 4th place. (Nice work Neil. You’ve been playing well.)
Neil started with a provisional rating of 250. He’s played 27 matches at a skill level of 316. His effective Fargo rating is calculated as follows:
The Fargo rating you see in the app that’s used to handicap the matches is the weighted average of actual performance and starter rating. The starter rating becomes less and less important as you get more matches. At 200 matches the starter rating is gone. So you can see it’s having a huge impact early on.
Here is a breakdown for a few of the top 15 with the highest benefit of handicap.
You can see the provisional ratings are actually pretty good. I think an argument could be made that if a player performs more than 50 points higher than the provisional rating, that provisional was probably off and could be adjusted up to the next 50 point threshold. In fact, I think this should be automatic and just part of the provisional system. Unfortunately, it falls on the league operator who may not have the resources or time to look closely at it.
IF that were happening, three people would have a effective Fargo ratings 39.7 points higher on average. Please understand I’m not accusing these people of doing something unethical. I think the initial estimate of skill, probably based on APA skill level, was just a little off. My starter rating was manually adjusted TWICE in my first 15 matches by a total of 200 POINTS.
Since this chart only shows the top 15, it’s easy to forget there are players on the extreme low end of the scale as well. Are there people stuck with a starter rating that is too high? I’ve looked at that a little and I think in a couple of cases the answer is probably yes. At least one player has dropped about 60 Fargo points this season and didn’t get a manual adjustment as far as I can tell.
Speaking of manual adjustments, I’ve only spotted one. If you’re aware of one, please let me know.