Home Advantage, part 2

Recently, I've been playing around with trying to intorduce compensation for home advatage into my rating system.  I'd used past results to estimate that I needed to adjust the ratings of the home team by +41 to calculate the probabilities fairly, based on the overall difference between the win/loss record of sides at home and away.  But when I tested different adjustments to see which one gave made the ratings as predictive as possible, I found the answer was a relatively massive +74.  I don't quite understand that one yet.

Then, with the new adjustment in place, I re-tested to find the optimum k-factor. This also went up - from 32 to 43.  So, the ratings become more predictive if you let them consider home advantage, but also if you make them more sensitive to recent results.

And with this system in place, the ratings look as follows, with India already back in 1st position:

India         177    
South Africa  175   
Australia     161    
Sri Lanka     156   
England       149    
New Zealand   134    
Pakistan       81   
West Indies     7    
Bangladesh    -93    
Zimbabwe     -279    
Ireland      -319    
Afghanistan  -351

That's enough adjusmtent for now; let's see how things change in the ratings going forward.