Think the majority of players would.

With the new system starting at 800 from a 1 year break, Managed to get to 929 rank in UK with the new system from tournaments, not the rank games

Yeah but Adam lets say you won 50 out of the 70 games you played, the amount of ranking points you lost in those 20 games would need you to play and win another 50 or more games just to make up again. The ranking system itself is fine but you lose to much in my opinion it is just not balanced like it should be.

Some of the points made in this thread are hilarious.
Some others make for interesting reading though!

After seeing that the Max. Overall. (ish) you can achieve is now about 50 points lower than it used to be, I cant say I'm surprised. People lose points from a level that is 50 points lower than previously and even though its taken a long time (which of course it would) this is the reflection of that change.

You should play everyone anyway as this gives a true reflection of your ability and therefore accurate rank. So saying you cant only play certain ranks (and this is therefore unfair) is utter nonsense.

Now onto the only bit of this I know a fair bit about...UK 8 Ball rankings.

Firstly, Adam (Onua) is the best UK8 player ever on the site. Having such a high win average, especially taking into account the ratio of tournament games he's played, with so many games puts this beyond dispute in my opinion.

This doesn't mean the rank he's set is unbeatable. I couldn't do it now, but I've had winning streaks of over 50 games on several occasions. I reckon a couple of these close to each other would propel me to around a 935 rank, or higher, depending on who I played.

There are fewer players playing this game type now though, which has made it more difficult to find games consistently. Especially against people of a similar rating which is the quickest (but not the only) way to gain rank.

I believe the ranking system is fair. If there's a player who has say, a 700 rank, they'd be rated as about 2500th or something (plucking that figure out of midair but you get my point) on the site. If I were to be ranked 1st on the site, the difference in ability should reflect this 2499 player gap. I'd therefore expect to be winning with a ratio of around 15(W):1(L) every time I played them.

If I don't win by this margin, I'm not as good as I'm aspiring to be, or they're better than their rank suggests. The point reductions/additions will reflect this based on way they are currently set up.

The problem of course is that a large number of current ranks do not reflect the true ability of the player. Reset accounts hold some of blame for this I feel. Say someone reaches a rank of 825, doesn't play for a while, comes back to find it at 800.0 then feels they want to start afresh. They reset back to 675.0.

This has in effect drained 150 points from the current pool of players.

This is of course offset by new accounts being made, bringing 675 ranking points into the current pool, however there are few players playing UK8 who are new so there is an imbalance.

So yeah, that's one contributing factor.

Next there's the increase in the range of rank reductions. By this I mean you start to lose rank from 800.0 instead of 850.0. This was to stop having 20 people sat on 850.0 rank hogging up the leader board. Which worked.

However this has of course made it more difficult to reach those levels and has led to a lower average rank amongst UK 8 players.

I think this is the main contributing factor to it being harder to reach higher rankings.

However, I'm saying its harder, I'm not saying its impossible.

Once you reach about 920.0, if you play anyone under 750ish you only gain 0.1 rank for a win. So you would need someone else to play against to keep climbing (realistically). Due to interest in the many new game types (I include US billiards as new, so all of the other ones ) there are fewer players likely to be highly ranked (and active) at any one time. Thus making it harder to advance quickly.

If you don't advance quickly, the task becomes harder. If you lose 1.0 ranking, that's another 10 wins you need (without losing). So some healthy competition is definitely needed.

Finally, my thoughts on resetting the ranking table.

NO

Resetting the old leader board would annoy the hell out of me personally as I've been on it since it was created around 7 years ago.

This is completely personal and is probably against the advancement of the site as a whole.

However, the current "All time" rankings table is not quite that. It's been running for about 5 years or so. Myself and a few others I know often reached ranks of 930+ on UK8 ball. However, since the "All time" leader board has been put in place the highest I've managed is 909 or something like and that's what it says on there I think 945.1 was the highest I got to personally, although I may be a few points off.

The only leader board which is accurate is "Most wins" which of course counts for nothing if you've got just as many losses


Food for thought

I don't think anyone can really argue with what you've said. It seems like you're the only person who knows what there talking about.

I don't understand how the rankings work, but I thought it was ridiculous when you used to get summit stupid like 10 points for winning a game. It was far to easy to get to 900+, especially on UK8.

Haven't read through the thread properly but it seems most people haven't got a clue, like me lol. It seems much better now tho to me than how it used to be.

Edited at 10:42 Thu 18/10/12 (BST)

After reading back through what I've put, I've noticed that my mind does wander off on its strawberries are nice at this time of year.

If this happens I'll break everyones jaw, I got my 8US rank with the new ranking system

It won't happen, obviously they changed it for a reason!!

Yeah prolly wouldnt..plus look at leader boards now and b4 compare who is on now and who was b4 most time :P

Nice point sqeezy..i just cant win no mmore than 10 if im lucky, so ill NEVER get to pro again! I got 820 since coming from 9ballsniper account. 860 was my best and i do agree there was time where u could get 10 points in a game, and now ur lucky to get 4! The majority of funkypool isnt "highly skilled" imo, so what makes it "fair" to make this site possibly 3 times as hard to gain rank as before? I havent really complained, since im garbage anyway last year or so. My point is majority of users may enjoy gaining more rank from the wins they get. TRUST ME im not for changing leader boards! Thats history and shouldnt be changed..but bring the fun days back!!!!! Yeah u won tons of rank, but it is a bit more even, and more challenging playing the top ranked players when theres more of em.

been 6 years since i came back on here, must say though, the amount of players in the big tournys is shocking! ive noticed that the high ranking players only play in the full tournys and not in the micro ones? but from the amount of players in the full tournys, i would only ever call then micro's as before it used to take ages to complete and get to a proper winner! the likes of (cant say as against rules) they pick and choose their tournys (not like before) so i dought i will stay here long like a few ive been talking too, also. Far too many micro's and not enough proper hard on competitions. Funky (nick) sort it out mate, dont let money take the fun out of this site, i see how things have changed because its years since ive been on, and i will say its by far a better graphical site and more interesting forum pages but, .... the whole point of you creating this site was to get people to play on line pool games? anyway ive said my peace.

Players have never been able to pick their own tournaments, they can choose what ones they want to play in but that is fair and everyone can do it.

I myself and one of those players that 95% of the time you will never see me playing in a micro, i hate those little tournaments and only really play them if i am bored and i have not got a clan game or their is no other games going on.

I agree that a lot of fun has been taking out of this site though in the last year maybe, and as i have always said tournaments are a big part of that, their is far to many now.

All fine points. If anybody knows (Nick) or any (admin) that could get his attention to this, i would like to think hes seen it but not up to here, (on phone cant tell when Nick was last on) sum 1 to help make changes needs to see this all and take a vote or something. There needs to be a change soon, or i think the way this game is headed, we will lose some more top players and vets soon :/

Pretty simple really, you don't need tournapoints and rank at stake in a tournament. If tournaments weren't ranked a lot more people who like to look after their rank would play and if the old rank system was back at the same time would increase rank games.

Also drop the micro tournaments maybe just have a main tournament every 2 or 3 hours, simple things like this would make it more competitive in tournaments and ranks, just my opinion.

must be reading my mind, i know nick wanted to make tournaments the main factor and in a sense it has worked but tournapoints and the medals alone can achieve this and having a tournament every 2 hours gives you a break as they say at my college after a while on the computer take 10 minutes for your eyes to rejust, the current system won't allow it as you literally have to be playing 60-75% of the day to win a medal. Fewer tournaments mean more prestige, Friendly means you can play for fun which is what this site is about isn't it? ranked tournaments people are too serious with their gameplay. instead of "i lost, ah well next tournament" it is "i lost 10 points, wa, waa, waaaa", you also get better sportsmanship in friendlies.

chris will say the rank would be unfair if we went back to old system but so is this one as you can still rank up by choosing your opponents but for it to be fair you need to do ranked in just tournaments or normal ranked games

Friendly only tournaments go completely against the aim of producing any form of a genuine 'ranking' table. An analogy would be Rory McIlroy, Tiger Woods and the other golfers being able to climb to the top of the world rankings purely by repeatedly beating the members at their own local golf club whilst the resuts of the Majors and other Tour Events were irrelevant!! Clearly ridiculous. Unless of course the majority do not want ranking tables and would rather have the high score tables that existed before. If that's the case then that is a completely different issue to decide on.

At the risk of repeating something yet again though, what would really improve the situation for everyone would be if it was possible to introduce automatically paired ranked games. That way the rank weighting for those could be equal to the ones that apply in tournament games as almost the same conditions would apply. You would then have a system where any player - ones that like tournaments and ones that either dont, or dont have the time to commit to them - would be able to compete on a reasonably level playing field to reach the higher levels of the ranking tables.

I have to say that anyone who worries about losing ranking points in a ranked tournament games is either probably on a falsely high figure, in a falsely high position or fails to grasp that having a fluid ranking table where players move up and down depending on current performance levels is exactly how they're supposed to work.

Finally discussions on ranking systems, numbers of tournaments, tournapoints, lack of new players, loss of old players from the site etc are all very interesting but are likely to get lost in the overall scheme of things as they are not relevant to the topic. Regarding this particular thread topic I think it would be hard to reset the all time tables when you have players on there that achieved their positions playing under a system currently in place, and a system that is likely to remain in place, more or less, for the forseeable future.

if that were to happen i probably wouldn't play many ranked games (not that i play many anyway), i like tournaments but i don't like the "ranked" aspect of it as i prefer to choose the rank i play.

One time in a friendly original tournament a year or two ago, i played the legend buddytobud, he taught me the tactical side of the game (along with watching Ronnie O'Sullivan on TV), i made 2 massive flukes and got to final blue where i told myself "NO! i am not winning this way so i just potted the white and said good luck in final after explaining why" another example is the "time out" as in friendlies if you got to final minute one would leave to save a double disqualification thats sportsmanship you only see in friendly games.

regarding the subject of resetting, my answer is no, resetting is only needed if there is a major change in the ranking system which happened when the rankings went from 2 decimal places to 1