As seen in the Australasian White Dwarf #294.
This tournament rankings system was initially put together for Fantasy Tournaments only in 2003 by Geoff Tewierik (GT). The system proved so popular that the players of 40,000 tournaments wanted one as well. So a retrospective 2003 rankings was put together. In 2004 the system has gone from strength to strength with up to date rankings for both Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40,000 and the new addition of Flames of War Rankings
Originally the rankings were inspired by a system putogether by Andrew Galea (Turosh_Mak), editor of Irresistible Force, in 2001 and further nudged along by Andrew Bishop's (Bish) article in Irresistible Force in early 2003. Over the year of 2003 I worked on a new system and as more and more tournaments were added, and the system required some tweaking, in which I was aided by the exceptional skills of David Capon (DaveC) as well as nudges here and there by Pete Dunn (Plague_Lord_Colthrax) and Alan Borthwick (Grendel) from New Zealand, Cheers fellas.
Wargaming Tournaments are played all around the world. This tournament ranking system deals specifically with the area of Australia and New Zealand (other Australasian results welcome!). If you are interested in World Warhammer Rankings, check out Marcus Martins website. Everyone competes in these events for their own reasons, be it for fun or to win either the event or a criteria category. The scoring systems used at tournaments are all relatively similar, players score points when they achieve something which adds up to determine the winners. It's the availability of these results which allows this system to work. While we require the raw scores to input into the system, they are not made available at any stage, nor can the system be accurately reverse engineered to determine raw scores. We respect Tournament Organisers right to not publish results.
For those of you who are interested in the system we have put together the following answers to common questions we have fielded since the first rankings were were released in Irresistible Force in 2003. It gets a bit heavy, so be warned.
The key thing to remember about these rankings is that this is a seeding system and is not a measure of capability. Top seeded tennis players get defeated by lower seeded players all the time. It's a list of what player do get, not what they should get.
Raw scores. They are a necessary evil for this system to work. The more we have the better.
Each player earns a particular score in a criteria of a tournament, i.e. 80/100 for Battle, 25/30 for Sports and so on. The players score is compared to other scores achieved by players in the same event and the whole field is spread over a range of 1 - 100, where 1 is awarded to the lowest score achieved and 100 for the highest score achieved.
Once that calculation has taken place the new scores that players get is mulitplied by the average number of players at all events in the Rankings. This helps spread the field out a little and awards the players that do well at very large events. Players that do well at a big event will get a minor bonus of a 1.25 multiplier added to their score, and those that go to very small events will have their multiplier limited at 0.50.
So that determines your score for that event. We then only consider the top 3 scores, so all your results are compiled, the top 3 determined, added together to produce that final score. And for those of you that have followed along closely you will have worked out the maximum ranking score a player can get is 375. The number is pretty much meaningless except for determining ranking, and helping to show that "degree of separation" between players at a ranking level. If you've followed us by now you can probably tell it's damned near impossible to reverse engineer these scores to find out your actual scores for events that haven't published them. That's if we even got them.
All of the above is (thankfully) managed by a complex spreadsheet (12 sheets just to compile results!) so as events are added the rankings will change due to the average changing. You can change ranking position without having attended any further events just by the addition of a new event. It's possibly you could even go up in rankings as more players are added.
Well... maybe... it's one system of many that could be used, but this one revolves around averages. Tournament weighting is completely independent of what anyone "thinks" an event should be, and purely on where it sits in the statistical distribution. It may even change as new events get added in.
Well, mostly because, as it's for fun, everyone (who reads the list) is interested in where they sit. If they don't even rate a mention because they haven't attended 3 events, then it'll get brushed off and never looked at again. On the other hand, if you find you rank, to your own surprise, 300th out of 372 players, then you may be encouraged to attend a second event to see how that improves your ranking.
For example the number of people who attend 3 Warhammer events stops at around 51 (of 372), two events peters out around 132. So, if it were only to include 3 event people, we'd only be picking up 13% of the people who *might* be interested. The average number of events attended is 1.5
Due to the nature of this system we rely on Tournament Organisers or the players to send in the results of events. We do our best to track them down, but sometimes it's just nigh on impossible to get hold of them. So if your missing an event then it's not going to be in the list of events on the systems pages, links can be found at the top of this page.
If you can get hold of the results for an event that isn't in the system, please send it in to me via and I will add it in if it meets the following criteria: