Is OPR an accurate measurement system?

[BrennanB]

Originally Posted by Caleb Sykes

I am aware that there are people who praise OPR much more than is justified. However, for every time I hear "OPR is the best thing ever," I hear twice as many things like "we were ranked 12th and didn't make elims, every other team must have horrible scouts because we clearly deserved that spot" or "I can't believe they picked the 40th ranked team as the second overall pick, I hope they know what they are doing." This tells me that far too many people don't realize just how badly the rankings generally reflect ability.

How many times have one of the first two picks at a regional been a sub 40/very low ranked team? I bet you couldn't find 5 examples in the last 10 years of that happening.

Sure lots of people do the "We were ranked high but didn't get picked" card, which yes it's true. However people don't use rankings to the same degree as OPR numbers for global comparison. People (several examples even today within the last few hours) on chief compare teams based on OPR values that didn't attend the same event. People never say "I was rank 5 at xxx regional you were rank 6 at yyyy regional, I must be better" However that happens with OPR all the time.

Secondly it's all good and fine to complain about things, but when you don't present a better solution to the problem what is the point? The problem with OPR is some people consider it as the law, and don't understand at all where it comes from or how it is calculated or what it's limitations are. The solution is to use it as a guidline, and watch the actual matches before you go around making conclusions.

So your problem is the ranking system isn't good enough to your satisfaction, and your solution is...?

That's all just things to think about the two differences between rankings and OPR and why people are more vocal about OPR. There isn't a solution to the rankings problem (aside from playing an infinite number of matches) that will properly sort the teams based on ability. There may be a better solution, but nothing will be perfect.