The SRK ranking system is pretty much an exact copy of my system, except more limited since it doesn't allow "claiming".
They probably just stated its from the "Woman's" association to try to pretend its different from mine. I have a lot of beef with those guys and they would rather not give credence to any work I've done.
*EDIT* In fact, they go further to pretend its different in their FAQ where they talk about tournaments being rated based on "weight" of the relative skill of the top 8 players... but then immediately afterwards completely contradict this statement by clearly defining static and flat point values for tournaments.
It also looks like they don't "stale" out older rankings, nor do they put an emphasis on limiting result totals... so even though its the same system, they score a flat amount, don't stale old rankings, and give advantages to people who can attend the most events. If anything, the way they use the system gives more precedence to Pig of the Hut's complaints than mine. Since mine is specifically designed to fight against the idea of "east coast having more majors".
While I am sure you and your ideas are great, you are a little bit heavy on the conspiracy side of things. There is inconvenient truth to this; I started the ranking site as a pure SF4 ranking hosted at
http://sf4ranking.bavobbr.eu.cloudbees.net, and I wanted like a few others to do a better job at ranking players in a top 50 then Eventhubs did.
To eliminate favoritism and bias I wanted to base it on some neutral scoring system, knowing that if you make it fair enough and put in enough data, quality should come out on top. I did not know of any systems, but I figured that Tennis has the same league formats and 1-on-1 approach, and WTA is popular in Belgium (we had many top10 players and even a few ranked 1) so I took off with that.
To eliminate bias as much as possible I needed to honor people for wins regarding the difficulty level of winning it. That requires me to rank tournaments, and that is different than WTA. The rank is not decided beforehand, but after the top32 (if available) is known. Then the players get assigned points.
However to start of ranking tournaments you need some system to tell you why EVO is harder than for example CEO. This is where player weight comes in, and a littler bit of bias. I assigned skill weights to all players I knew, and take the average of the best 8 (not necessarily the top finishing 8) in the tournament. The idea was to auto-update skill weights after the system got enough data, to correct my bias, but it would still be the result of an initial bias so it is not fool-proof. At least it would be recursive. I did not implement this yet, currently I manually update player weight when I see he is performing different than I expected. The manual process does give me a benefit: people who rank high because they maxed out their tournament attendance (which actually is limited to 16) can still have a lower skill than the ones who play little tournaments (think Daigo) but when they do wins most of them.
To cover your other points:
- you can only get scores for your best 16 tournaments, in SF4:AE2012 the top 50 players almost all have reached this limit and thus need to do very well to get more points (better than their worst performance in their top 16)
- there is no time limit but SF4 for example uses Version as the window, which doesn't last longer than 2 years. The scoring is new for USF4 for example
- to rank high you need to attend tournaments, and those who live in regions that don't have them wont rank well. That's logical if you want a tournament ranking system. They need to come out and play, it reflects the best tournament player not the best player. A player can always have a hand in increasing his ranking by making results public (so we can find them), even if the tournament is small and ranks low. It will rank and the chances are the player weights will get adjusted over time which will rank it better
- the ranking is completely dynamic, you can get high points early due to the system thinking your tournament was the best thing next to EVO, but each time a new tournament is registered the system will update ALL the scoring, to make sure it ages beautifully.
Regards
