Player Tracker

[Gaillimh]

One of the interesting comments that comes up again and again on the forums is something like 'But remember how good that player was at the beginning of season?' or, but while he may have had 5 starts, he has only played for a total of an hour or, the ratings given by that journalist are so clearly biased etc.

As a result, the munster fans squad has taken the time over the summer to develop a Munsterfans player tracker which will track all players in the squad over the course of the season, counting up points scored, minutes played and subjective ratings of their performance over the course of the season. Each member of Munsterfans will be able to rate a player's performance from 1 to 10, with each result having a specific meaning. We'll borrow the Green and Gold Rugby (http://www.greenandgoldrugby.com/wal...layer-ratings/) rating descriptions for now until we develop our own, more colloquial version:

10 – A legendary performance to go down in the history books
9 – Outstanding performance: Man of the match shoo-in
8 – Excellent all-round game
7 – Good game with a few sparkles
6 – Solid performance
5 – Average – ho hum
4 – Below par
3 – Had a bad game
2 – Tell your story walking pal
1 – A complete joke

After each game, you can give each player a rating, and these ratings will all be averaged together to create an aggregate munster-fans community rating for each player. In addition to these, we have a panel of 'experts' who will also rate players, and their ratings will be tracked separately.

The rating system is now ready for beta testing and feedback at this URL:

http://www.munsterfans.com/rater

That link will bring you to 4 tabs:

1) Top rated players: The aim of this tab is to show a list of the currently top rated players from 1 to 15. To have their rating count towards this tab, they need to have started the match in that position. It aims to show the players with the highest average rating over the course of the season.

2) Matches: This is a list of fixtures up to christmas, and is where you will go to enter your rating for players in a specific fixture.

3) Positions: This provides a graphical view of how all player ratings in a specific position have fluctuated over the course of a season. Currently there isn't enough data available to have meaningful information here, so it currently generates random graph data. Once we are three matches into the season, this will switch to 'live' data.

4) Players: This is a list of all players who have played any minutes for Munster this season, how many minutes played, points scored etc. Each column is 'sortable' by clicking on the column header, so you can sort by minutes played or whatever.

I hope that this will prove to be interesting and useful over the course of this season and future seasons, please bear in mind that it is in beta so there are likely to be teething problems and bugs discovered as we start using it. Please post bug reports, comments and suggestions in the forums, and I'll work my way through them when I get a chance (this won't be for a couple of weeks due to heading off on holiday!).

The data that we collect with this will be used to drive additional widgets in the future such as 'Players to watch' (ratings have increased week on week for a period of time) etc.

Enjoy!

[Waterfordlad]

Sounds good. Can we backdate it to matches from years ago??

[munstershane]

Can we put our ratings in now?

I'm trying to enter my ratings for the Edinburgh match but can't find a submit button.

[Captain Average]

Nice addition to the site. Well done.

[ed7890]

Can we put our ratings in now?

I'm trying to enter my ratings for the Edinburgh match but can't find a submit button.

That threw me for a while too, but you dont need to submit it. Whenever you update a value, it gets recorded on the backend. If you leave the page and go back your ratings should be still there.

[munstershane]

That threw me for a while too, but you dont need to submit it. Whenever you update a value, it gets recorded on the backend. If you leave the page and go back your ratings should be still there.

Can see that now. Thanks.

Who are on the panel of 'experts'?

[McCloud]

Can see that now. Thanks.

Who are on the panel of 'experts'?

Hook & Francis

[munstershane]

Hook & Francis

Excellent! I expect to see a fine disparity between ours and their ratings. Tell me did you manage to get the two of them into a room together?

[Gaillimh]

They are hiding behind pseudonyms and don't know about our evil plan. Shhhhhhhhh!

[Colliniho]

Why is Archer showing up as the loosehead for the Edinburgh game?

[MMCorkman]

Poor Wian will get ratings for the Edinburgh game anyway... Very good stuff. Great idea and well done to all involved.

[i_like_cake]

Just saw this thread.... This is a lovely addition to the site.... Who ever thought of it, take a bow....
Munsterfans.com, onwards and upwards... (like our team hopefully).....

[Hugged Rugger]

Cant access on phone but when presenting findings Can I suggest taking a 90 percentile of the results as well? So if there's 100 voters on a player, order them by score and knock the bottom and top 5 off the list. While its not a perfect approach it does tend to remove Anomolies and overly biased votes and can be interesting as a comparison to overall vote.

[Colliniho]

Cant access on phone but when presenting findings Can I suggest taking a 90 percentile of the results as well? So if there's 100 voters on a player, order them by score and knock the bottom and top 5 off the list. While its not a perfect approach it does tend to remove Anomolies and overly biased votes and can be interesting as a comparison to overall vote.

Very very good idea and without getting too geeky or overthinking the whole process, that's very sharp statistically

[i_like_cake]

No it's not....... ( for online loonies) ... I'll not say much.. MrsMcG will kill me.....

[ozoyo]

Cant access on phone but when presenting findings Can I suggest taking a 90 percentile of the results as well? So if there's 100 voters on a player, order them by score and knock the bottom and top 5 off the list. While its not a perfect approach it does tend to remove Anomolies and overly biased votes and can be interesting as a comparison to overall vote.

It is an interesting suggestion and my first impression was that we should go for it.
However I am wondering what happens if the biased votes are only going one way, negative or positive. then we might be knocking valid ratings. In the case it goes both ways, then the average rating naturally cancels negative and positive extremes.
Once again, we'll have to expect people to be reasonable and keep an eye just in case.

[Evil Omer]

Once again, we'll have to expect people to be reasonable and keep an eye just in case.

Good luck with that

[Valencia]

From last nights game. Every step, run, tackle etc being recorded. Definitely no hiding places in modern rugby (Niall Francis would be appalled

[munstershane]

Munster v Benetton Treviso - 14. Doug Howlett is missing from the players ratings.

Edited to add: Just went back in and he's there now. Strange!

[Hugh Jardon]

Munster v Benetton Treviso - 14. Doug Howlett is missing from the players ratings.

Edited to add: Just went back in and he's there now. Strange!

Was because he's off the chart!

[FORWARD....]

Excellent stuff. Well done to whoever came up with this

And get rid of the blind Hook & Franno experts who have Dougie on 6

And we seem to have lost Cawlin for the Treviso match-no number 7 listed

[mr chips]

Excellent stuff. Well done to whoever came up with this

And get rid of the blind Hook & Franno experts who have Dougie on 6

And we seem to have lost Cawlin for the Treviso match-no number 7 listed

Not me, I gave him a 9 ...

[Hugged Rugger]

I'm more used to larger data sets I suppose. Probably would only work where there's enough votes to work. Keep an eye anyway it can produce some interesting results as you could see if a particular Persons vote is always getting eliminated. Is voting anonymous?

[Hugged Rugger]

I suppose in this case those other votes can also help balance red tinted glasses and may be genuine just not popular

[FORWARD....]

How are the overall players on p1 ranked? It doesn't seem to be by score, expert or fans or alphabetical? Also, there seems to be an issue with players disappearing from the match listing?

[lahinch_lass]

The players listed for the Treviso game are a wee bit all over the shop ..
O'Dea is listed for #1, neither of the starting props are listed. also Dougall is missing for #7

It's a nice idea but I'd suggest limiting the updating of all the player selections, time on pitch & scoring to the mod's & maybe a few other reliable types, just leave the ratings field accessible to everyone.
For instance some genius has tagged Keatley as scoring 6 tries against Edinburgh

[Evil Omer]

I suppose in this case those other votes can also help balance red tinted glasses and may be genuine just not popular

could be interesting to see where perception and support kick in, for example some players may never get a low mark regardless of performance

[munstershane]

the graphs are confusing and I'm not sure if they are accurate either.

[McCloud]

the graphs are confusing and I'm not sure if they are accurate either.

No they are not accurate at the moment as there is not enough data / games played for them to make sense. Remember this is a beta version and it will have a few issues that will be addressed.

[munstershane]

I understand McCloud.

I play a Beta version of an on-line game where new stuff that might be used in the main game is trialed. At times bugs that have seemed obvious to us have been missed by the developers and then when the new version has gone live the bugs are there in the game. So I have got used to flagging everything odd, strange or broken that I see on Beta versions.