ranking

This one is good to go too. A pity we missed it last year. Working Group please 🙏🏻

While the idea of fighting organizers’ manipulation through selective choice of pilots seems entirely justified, the above proposal to change the scoring rules, in my opinion, has a fundamental flaw. This is not my own argument, but I think it’s worth bringing up here. Namely, in a low level competition I take first place and receive 50 points. I have defeated 100 pilots. In an alternative scenario, I defeat the same 100 pilots, but in addition there are 20 new, better pilots who finish ahead of me. In this case, I place 21st. In both scenarios I have beaten the same pilots, yet in the second one I earn significantly fewer points simply because better pilots appeared. Even though my performance in terms of defeated pilots was identical, I was nevertheless “penalized” for the fact that new, stronger competitors joined the event.

Hey everyone,

I really like the idea of improving the WPRS ranking formula — the current version definitely has some issues that can be “abused.” However, I might be misunderstanding the new approach, so please correct me if I’m wrong.

As I understand it, the new idea is that a pilot’s score depends on roughly one quarter of the total pilots ranked below them, weighted by the rankings of those pilots (similar to how it worked before).

If that’s correct, it means that in a typical competition with a normal distribution of pilot skills, the winner earns a lot of points — because the top 25 or so pilots below them already have high rankings. In contrast, pilot number 25 won’t gain many points, because below them are mostly average or low-ranked pilots.

Even if that 25th pilot manages to beat the best pilot in the world (who happens to rank 26th in that comp), they still wouldn’t gain much because the lower-ranked portion of the field carries less weight. Overall, this could lead to a situation where the top 20% of the world ranking gain even more points, while those ranked around 21–80% earn less than before. So the system ends up benefiting top pilots the most.

The documentation says the top 10 rankings won’t change much, but in practice it actually is the opposite — the top pilots gain more relative to everyone else, this is also visible in the garphs shown in the documentation. This statement dosnt make sens. It’s a bit like an economic system where “the rich get richer.” Please correct me if I’m interpreting that effect incorrectly.

Now, here’s an example of how this system could also be abused or produce strange results:
Imagine the German league sends 25 top pilots to a 100-pilot comp, but they only fly one day and then leave — ending up at the bottom of the results. The top 3 French pilots in the world also attend and actually compete, finishing 1st to 3rd.

Under this system, those top 3 pilots would only gain points based on the rankings of the pilots directly below them (places 4, 5, 6, etc.), who might be relatively weak. Meanwhile, pilots finishing around 70th place suddenly gain huge points, because they’re now ranked above 25 world-class pilots (the Germans) who ended up at the bottom.

So in that case, the top 3 — who clearly performed the best — get less benefit than random mid-ranked pilots, which doesn’t make much sense.

Overall, this new formula might actually make things less fair. The previous version, even with its flaws, at least distributed points more evenly — even if lower pilots sometimes benefited a bit from higher-ranked pilots being in the comp.

My biggest problem with this proposal is that in our sport we are not really scoring points against each other, we are scoring points against time and distance.

Unlike with football, boxing, etc. where people really have matches against each other.

This proposal would make the difference between winners really big, even when in reality there might only be 0.1 point difference on the podium.

Do we really want to enlarge those 0.1 differences into 5-7 point WPRS results? It doesn't seem fair to me.

A fair system would be some kind of function on the final points of the comp I believe.
If two pilots are 0.1 points within each other on the podium => they should be really close on the WPRS ranking as well, not 5-7 points apart.

TBS converts to "virtual points" or "virtual seconds" or similar.

I still don't believe it's a fair system if there is 0.1 point difference between pilots => 7 point difference in WPRS points. It just doesn't feel right to me.
It's not like in football or boxing where the first place has actually beaten the second place, it's just 0.1 points after a week of racing each other. I don't know why should it be 5-7 points for the winner. But this is just one pilots opinion, maybe others believe differently.