Friday, July 22, 2011

Swings & Roundabouts... the rankings for 2011 so far

Hi ho!

As some of you may or may not be aware, the rankings formula for NZ for 2011 changes quite considerably. Points for winning a max sized event dropped from 120, down to 100 (give or take a little as the rankings HQ database works its magic), meaning that 2010 events were worth substantially more than 2011 events.
Rather than going back and amending older events to their new value, it was instead decided to leave them as is, and let the Rankings sort themselves out over the year.

I thought I would have a look at 2011 events only, and check out how people were looking so far. I did this for 2 reasons, a) because I was a bit bored and had a few minutes up my sleeve so wanted to see what kind of effect this points change was having, and b) To get a bit of a feel for what this years masters field may look like.

To do this I looked at the current top 25 players, their rankings in rankingsHQ, and then stripped out the 2010 events and looked at peoples new placings/totals. This doesn't mean it is the new top 25, as I only recalculated the current top 25 people.
Also, its probably important to not forget that there are still events to happen in 2011, it's only July! This particularly effects the south island, whos events are normally in the latter half of the year, and for obvious reasons Christchurch probably hasn't been in the most charitible mood for hosting events.

This is also however, strongly effected by the massive decline of the Wellington 40k scene. With no fields of blood 2011, no Maelstrom, no Warpstorm, in fact quite possibly no event other than Call To Arms (whos player pack has seen many people email me stating that they won't bother making the journey) - very few points are being generated out of the capital, and you'll notice the players now floundering at the bottom of the pack have a certain geographical feature in common.

Without further ado, here's how they're looking initially!

All up, so far I think it makes for a pretty interesting masters field, it's good to see some new faces in there :) That being said, the top 15 now consists of 10 Aucklanders, 2 wellingtonians, and 3 'others' - which marks a pretty stark shift in the national 40k scene.

Keen to hear your thoughts on the subject, have at it!

8 comments:

  1. Yeah the lack of tournaments in the second half of this year makes the points a bit messed up, certainly makes it hard to jump up the rankings if your not already up there. I've been trying to work out roughly where I would end up once the points from Fields etc was removed so this is pretty helpful.

    Out of interest is Masters done based straight off these Rankings or do you only include points NZ tournaments?

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  2. Yeah i miss the wellington tournies :( It was a decent weekend away....
    Also seeing as masters is so long away there is a VERY good chance Charlie will have his wolves done...ohhhh boy that will be fun to TRY to beat :P
    I'm pretty impressed with how well the "second rate" armies are going, lots of nids, orks and chaos up there; it's going to be interesting when the wolves/dark eldar start to show up next year...
    And on that note, what do you reckon Charlie and Jack, Jizz nids for masters, or a hopeless case? Would be very interested to hear your thoughts on it?

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  3. Well, Charlie's wolves are all but but finished right now, so I think there's a very high chance they'll be at the masters :)

    As to whether you take the Nids, it depends on a couple of things. Are you wanting to go with the main intention being to get a podium finish, or just to test yourself against the other players in a hard weekend of gaming? If it's the first, you need to ask yourself whether the Nids will be able to cut it against the rest of the field.

    The big difference with the Masters is that there are in theory no easy big wins in the first few rounds, so you need to be able to handle the tough matchups to do well.

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  4. I finished my 7th rhino/razorback today, so that leaves me with 10 more grey hunters to paint and I'm done with the new wolves list.

    The question is, can I paint another different army in time for the masters? With the new speed im finding thanks to getting a lot of traction with learning how to airbrush, the answer to that very well could be yes!

    @Powerguy - masters is done off NZ tournaments only, but so are rankingsHQ itself. If you have an overseas event, that only applies to that countries rankings.

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  5. Is there a reason Blaise and I are somehow last nameless? ;-)

    2 more tourneys down here, Tempest (1k, 4 games, this weekend) and Conquest (early October i think) as well as TagCon (1st weekend in August) in timaru that i'm gonna pop in and try.

    would like to finish top 12. i enjoyed masters last year, even if i only beat Mark Buttle ;-)

    wes

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  6. Because you and Blaise are Canadians, that basically makes you not even real humans. As such, no last names.

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  7. Hey Wes, any ideas on the Conquest format? If it's anything like 1850, 5+ games, etc, I would be keen to come down for a weekend :) especially as it will be one of the last, if not the last, tournament opportunity for the nids :(

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