Frequently Asked Questions
| Q | What's an official bout? |
| A |
For a bout to be considered official (to Flat Track Stats), it has to fulfill the following requirements. Only official bouts affect a team's rankings.
Requirements for official status:
- Both teams playing have to be from WFTDA sanctioned leagues.
- Both teams have to be their league's official inter-league/all-star/travel teams (not local/regional/intra-league teams).
- The bout's date has to be after both league's official WFTDA join date.
We also track bouts played by WFTDA travel teams that may not fulfill the above requirements. These are marked as unofficial bouts and do not affect rankings. They fall into one of the following Unofficial Categories:
- Mixed Bout: A bout between a travel team and a B-team/local team. If either team's parent league is not represented on FTS, we do not track this bout.
- Not Yet WFTDA: If one or both teams were not WFTDA sanctioned on the day of the bout, but on a later date became official.
- Other: There may be other reasons for a bout being unofficial (archaic or non-sanctioned ruleset, mini-bouts, etc), but they are rare enough that we take them on a case by case basis.
The final possibility of a bout type is one between two local teams. We are not currently tracking these.
|
|
| Q | Does the Home/Visitor status of a bout affect rankings? |
| A | No, we're reporting if a bout was played at home or away, but it does not currently affect rankings in any way. Update: We're looking into this and intend on factoring Home/Visitor status in non-tournament bouts in the future. |
|
| Q | When are rankings, statistics, bouts, etc... updated? |
| A | Everything on this site is dynamically generated from bout data. When a new bout is added, anything and everything related to those teams is instantly re-calculated. So how often is that? Generally it's Sunday night after all the weekend's bouts have been played. |
|
| Q | What is "Low Participation"? My team has played a couple bouts. Why are we ranked separately? |
| A | Teams that have played only one or two bouts are put in a separate ranking pool below the real rankings. One or two bouts isn't enough to get a decent read on performance, so we feel that comparison to teams with several bouts isn't relevant. We do want these teams to be ranked in some way, so we rank them separately until they fulfill the participation requirement of three bouts. See also the Low Participation in the algorithm docs. |
|
| Q | How do you handle B-Teams? |
| A | B-Teams are travelling all-star teams that are not it's primary travel team.
For 2008, WFTDA is requiring a league's primary travel team to be explicitly defined at the beginning of the season, and will only be counting these team's bouts. We will have the same requirements for 2008 - a bout played by a B-Team will be counted only unofficially as a Mixed Bout |
|