Measuring Potential, Necessary Handicaps and Skill at Brawl

A couple of days ago I went public with my system that I developed for Brawl. I have expanded upon the system and it will calculate:

1) Brawl Playing Ability combined with fighting skills (items and no items)

2) Forecasted Potential

3) Necessary Handicaps

1) The system was originally designed to be an analysis tool for me to measure how I stacked up against others on campus. I also knew that there were good players on campus, but I wanted to assign a number to their abilities based on a scale we all know- the CPUs difficulty. The system works by taking a player's kills over his falls, times the level of the reference times divided by Dean's number, which for a level 9 is 1.037. I take my level in samples and weekly to plot a graph of how I am doing.

2) From this I can clearly see if I am playing for better or worse that week. I can calculate an "average" level and I can also have excel predict my maximum potential. Arbitrarily you can get as good as anyone with loads of practice- so if we were to say that me having no match against someone 7 levels hire than me is false, then we can say that this potential is the measure of difficulty it will take you to train to become a better player. In short, over a long period of time there are players with a natural "knack" for the game. They can play, and they can play well.

3) Knowing that I would face my roommate often, he is going to kick my rear end to kingdom come (and I fight on a level 9!). Instead of him inflating his score by facing weak opponents- we are going to make it harder for him. Set up a manual handicap according to level difference and now the game becomes a challenge for him. We can also set auto-handicaps and let the system do it based on our past couple of games, if we play more than one.

Data and numbers are great- they tell you a lot of things if you are honest with yourself. I have reached a lot of conclusions based on this system:

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• Using items is an inflator: It will naturally give you a higher level as the circumstance arises.


• People have a natural tendency to pick up this game and become really good, or struggle to get better. This is the combat potential.


• Over time a person's level will even out on the graph, determining a true level.


• Honesty! The system can be easily cheated, but you're only fooling yourself.


• Handicaps allow the weaker players to face the stronger ones on even playing terms. I'm powerful, but I still need a handicap! (I am a level 9 fighting a level 16!)


• Brawl uses a lot of the same math as my system does to calculate auto-handicaps.

I am all for having fun with the game and this system is in place to tell me everything I want to know- however I don't want it used any other way. This experiment was enjoyable for me because I was able to assign a number to an ability that otherwise would not have any significane. If people want to use this to see who really is the best around then that is great, but egos are VERY quick to inflate heads. .