The new ELO-based ranking system

MrRoboto

@gamerman01 said in Proposal for a new, ELO-based, ranking system:

It’s hard to get it right with a new player.

Dawg just defeated donutgold and with ELO, got a lot of points. No matter what donutgold goes on to do, Dawg has the points

Right now, games against complete newcomers might be over- or underrated.
These are just momentary snapshots though. Yes, dawg received a lot of points for winning against a player who was probably overrated at 1500. But it won’t take long before he is back to his old rating.

Same would happen if you lose against a 1500 newcomer, who is actually a top gamer in disguise. At that exact moment, you’ll unfairly lose too many points, but the system will bring you back to where you belong reasonably fast.

HOWEVER:
I realize this is an issue on some people’s mind. And there is a simple solution for that. As I said, we can always tweak the math to serve our needs. I just didn’t implement a failsafe against this, because personally I didn’t deem it necessary - but I might be wrong and gamerman has vastly more experience with this community and he seems to think this could be an issue.

I can easily tweak the formula so that games against newcomers give only 50% of the usual points. Or 30%. Or whatever.
What value do you think makes sense?
For how long should a newcomer have that “newcomer” status for opponents?

gamerman01

@MrRoboto said in Proposal for a new, ELO-based, ranking system:

Right now, games against complete newcomers might be over- or underrated.
These are just momentary snapshots though. Yes, dawg received a lot of points for winning against a player who was probably overrated at 1500. But it won’t take long before he is back to his old rating.

Ah, right, very true for someone who keeps on playing

Same would happen if you lose against a 1500 newcomer, who is actually a top gamer in disguise. At that exact moment, you’ll unfairly lose too many points, but the system will bring you back to where you belong reasonably fast.

Yes, assuming I keep on playing

HOWEVER:
I realize this is an issue on some people’s mind. And there is a simple solution for that. As I said, we can always tweak the math to serve our needs. I just didn’t implement a failsafe against this, because personally I didn’t deem it necessary - but I might be wrong and gamerman has vastly more experience with this community and he seems to think this could be an issue.

It would be if someone is trying to maximize their points and looks for opponents with 0 to just a couple games done, but I’m not too worried about that.

The (somewhat minor) concern is more for entering playoffs. If 6 remains the minimum for qualifying (BM), then conceivably someone could inflate their score by playing several or all of their games against the unknowns (newcomers).

I can easily tweak the formula so that games against newcomers give only 50% of the usual points. Or 30%. Or whatever.
What value do you think makes sense?
For how long should a newcomer have that “newcomer” status for opponents?

Shoot… probably no adjustment after thinking a few seconds. Because none of us want to discourage someone getting going in the league. If they’re worth full credit as a win over a 1500, that’s OK because there actually is a little incentive to feast on their 1500. This factor of making it easier and not harder for a newcomer to get games overpowers the concerns above.

No change!

Thanks!

MrRoboto

And some clarification on the ranking itself.
Here is the current one for Balanced Mod:

You can see the legend on the right hand side. This should explain every colour, besides white.
White means a player is active but has not yet completed the necessary amount of games to qualify for the yearly playoffs.
Maybe I’ll add an explanation for white or just colour code it differently. It’s important to me that everyone should understand it without needing an explanation. So I might have to improve the UI here.

The rank in the very first column is relevant for the playoffs!

So if you check out the sheet you’ll see that Sovietishcat occupies the last (8th) spot, with @elche missing it at #9.
However, @Sovietishcat will drop out when some of the white lines above him complete 6 games this year, which seems very likely: @Pejon_88 , @GeneralDisarray , @Booper and @BombsAway all have 5 already (although they could also drop below Sovietishcat)

MrRoboto

@gamerman01 said in Proposal for a new, ELO-based, ranking system:

If 6 remains the minimum for qualifying (BM), then conceivably someone could inflate their score by playing several or all of their games against the unknowns (newcomers).

True, but those players would also take a risk: After all, the newcomer could be a secret god in disguise and then they would lose a lot of points against a 1500.

It’s far from a sure way to game the system and I also doubt that we have players who choose their opponents this strategically to maximize their ranking

gamerman01

@MrRoboto Have been meaning to say something about the white, and I’ll go ahead and say it on the board -

I really prefer the colors on everyone who’s “active” so the tier for each is clear. The white is difficult to distinguish from the grey.

I know you’ll think of a different way to show a player hasn’t finished 6 yet. Ready, set, Go!

farmboy

@MrRoboto I’m not worried that it will fail to capture the exceptional case. Its just that I’d like the system to ensure that players (new or otherwise) make the playoffs in a given year based on their performance in that year with little influence from games played in prior years. Another example would be if players starting a year with a 1500 ELO, a 1800 ELO and a 2100 ELO all have the same record in that year, I expect we are often going to still see a difference in their ELO at the end even though the lower ranked players have closed some of the gap. With enough games, that difference should more or less disappear but I’m worried that it will be more than the 6 games needed for entry into the playoffs.

But again, happy to give it a try and see how it works. And I do really like this ELO for a bunch of other reasons that your work has illustrated.

pacifiersboard

@gamerman01 @MrRoboto

I don’t know the term in English but you can include “Zahlenformat (?) in die bedingte Formatierung” so that in cells (of the column with players’ names) that are colored white they also display something like “less than three games so far” behind the name

MrRoboto

@pacifiersboard said in Proposal for a new, ELO-based, ranking system:

@gamerman01 @MrRoboto

I don’t know the term in English but you can include “Zahlenformat (?) in die bedingte Formatierung” so that in cells (of the column with players’ names) that are colored white they also display something like “less than three games so far” behind the name

Are you sure? Maybe Excel can do that, but I don’t see that option in Google Sheets…

MrRoboto

How do you like it this way?

That way everyone can see the lifetime-ranking and also the playoff-spot

farmboy

I still can’t access the spreadsheet directly and use things like the search and filter function, or put new data in directly. I can just see it as another page in chrome (so no google sheets interface either) and nothing tells me that I don’t have permission or that it is read only. I’ve tried going into google sheets and then loading the page but can’t find it.

Two questions. If others are able to access it, how? If others aren’t, is there something that @MrRoboto needs to do to open up access.

I usually use office, not google for documents and spreadsheets, so might just not be familiar enough.

MrRoboto

Maybe try this link:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Larckt6iOuBZtZ-AVzDPv-HEofZJdeN8ptXXotun0Og/edit?usp=sharing

farmboy

@MrRoboto that does work! Thanks!

gamerman01

@MrRoboto said in Proposal for a new, ELO-based, ranking system:

How do you like it this way?

That way everyone can see the lifetime-ranking and also the playoff-spot

Yes, perfect, tier colors across and also formulaed rankings for 6+ games. I said ready, set, go because I had confidence you would make the solution quickly! 💯

AndrewAAGamer

@MrRoboto
Why are the ELO ranking levels different for the different versions? Is that intentional based on some mathematical spread?

MrRoboto

I was playing around with the exact numbers and apparently didn’t settle on the same number across different versions.

Tiers have no actual meaning and are just a visual cue.
And they add motivation, I think.

I will discuss final numbers with gamerman later, probably after entering more of the historical results.

Huge thanks btw to @mr_stucifer and @farmboy who provided all of the data before 2023.
As of right now, we have everything from 01-01-2019 until now!

airwalker

@MrRoboto Mr. Roboto, this is excellent work! It’s actually quite perfect timing, I created my own spreadsheet a few days ago for Revised players on TripleA. The one thing I can’t seem to wrap my head around is setting an ELO and then updating it without creating a circular reference. If you could help this I would be eternally grateful! My spreadsheet is here: https://bit.ly/revisedstats

Thanks!

gamerman01

The dwarves are digging deep, all the way to 9/30/17 so far…

Watch as the life-time ELO rankings take shape…
Or wait until all is entered and edit checks done

gamerman01

@airwalker

I just saw that your post was queued for approval, and approved it

airwalker

@gamerman01 Thank you

oysteilo

From the first page:

“A win by the current #1 against the current last place will award only meager 4 points for the winner and -2 for the loser.
However, the last player would receive a whopping 136 for a win and #1 would suffer -87 for that loss!”

Maybe this has been adressed before and. I am just curious why this is fair.

In chess, the winner and the loser gain/lose the same number of points whereas here the winner always gain more than the loser lose. Why is it this way? This means that everyones rating will increase over time given the number of players are constant? How is this fair to new players?

I am sure I am missing something!

The new ELO-based ranking system

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