Best posts made by farmboy

@gamerman01 right move. I did contemplate it and thought if you had a great roll round 1 I would revisit.

@MrRoboto so I just opened the spreadsheets. That is very impressive. I won’t have time to help now but didn’t realize you had already done so much work.

@MrRoboto if the k factor is considered over lifetime (and is too sensitive) an issue might be that players that are strong now, but weaker in the past will have their past games weigh down their current ELO. If I’m right on that, instead of it being a factor in one’s first games, can it be more sensitive in one’s most recent games? That might allow new players to move up more quickly without penalizing players that have been around for a while.

@oysteilo this also might be because results are still being put in. I see him having an overall ranking based on 11 games and an OOB ranking based on 4 games. And 0 games with BM or PTV. So I suspect there is either a clerical error or 7 games (all wins so that would push up his ELO) that were counted in overall that have yet to be counted elsewhere.

I think PPG worked quite well for our purposes. It produced standings that we could use yearly for the playoffs and it accommodated players playing as few as 6 games (or less) and (in a few rare cases) more than 30. PPG does over time reduce the impact of new games, but with only the occasional exception, no one played so many games in a year that winning a couple of games against strong opponents wouldn’t be meaningful for your final ranking. The final standings were fairly consistent with how people played. Although I know I don’t fully understand some of the concerns raised, it did seem to me that there was a misunderstanding around how rankings were determined. No one’s ranking was ever tied to one game. It was either tier 3 (if they were new and had played less than 3 games), their previous year’s ranking (if not new), or, once they had played at least 3 games, their average PPG.

I’m being won over to ELO, not because I think it will do a better job of those things in a given year, but because I now like the idea of lifetime rankings. And I’m enjoying seeing all this data that is coming with the transition.

For playoffs, we can try it and see how it goes. I continue to have concerns though. I understand that if someone new wins 8 games in a row their ranking may jump into the top 8 or if someone normally strong loses a bunch of games, they will drop down. But I still think given the small number of games played in a year we may find that things get more locked in. Players that don’t quite do that well might still have done well enough in a year to join the playoffs (but may still end up on the outside). And I don’t expect top players to ever do that badly.

And I expect that as we go back in time, we are going to see a few players ELO moved into the low-mid 2000s. I understand that ELO growth slows as players move up, but between 2018-2020, JDOW wins 34 and loses 1, Adam wins 55 and loses 5, and AD wins 88 and loses 24. Maybe I don’t fully appreciate how an ELO will accommodate that data (and minimize its impact), but I suspect it will make catching those players close to unreachable in the short term.

We also might find with the numbers that are interested, and the number of players that move on each year, that newer players aren’t trapped on the outside so we may not need to over think it.
But one option, if there are issues, is to use ELO to determine one’s ranking (and one’s tier), but PPG in a year is still used to determine playoffs (where the points per game would be tied to the tier produced by the ELO ranking). If the sheet is automated, maybe that doesn’t complicate it too much.

@MrRoboto that does work! Thanks!

@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.

I appreciate how sneaky you are in setting this up. Your units often look like they are spread out and isolated, but then can all reach the same place. That is, for example, a lot of British units that can reach the Caucasus.

@gamerman01 thanks! I figured it would be okay but don’t want to assume.

Remember how you smoked me a year ago with axis? I’ve been trying to play axis much more carefully than I often do (keeping to one game and slowing it down a bit). And I think I still lucked out here that the first Bryansk battle went as well as it did.

@gamerman01 A lot of my success has been with allies. Of course a lot of the skill transfers to the other side. But I think when I played you before (or ghostglider -I lost badly to him with axis around the same time), I felt like I needed to get some practice with the axis.

I thought in those games, because I was out of practice, that I ended up playing in too much of a scripted way, and then tried to hit every target. As a result, I got stuck before I got Bryansk and so effectively lost the games early.

I’ve been trying to apply those lessons here. I made a point of making sure I could get the position I think Germany needs to get (mainly getting through Bryansk) and then still ended up relying on a bit of dice luck.

@gamerman01 If I could have won more quickly, I would have tried. But I do try to play low risk where possible and you haven’t given me ( as far as I can tell) any openings that I could have some confidence I could steal the victory with. So have been playing to get a strong economic position, and keep the US/UK on the outside.

@gamerman01 I don’t remember the specific comment but I thought it might have been a reference to something like that.

@MrRoboto thanks for the response and explanation.

One point to clarify. I’m not worried that an ELO will prevent people from entering the playoffs. But I am worried that trying to score over the longer term will. As long as the scoring for the playoffs is primarily determined by one’s play in a given year, than it should be fine with or without an ELO.

I certainly don’t have a great understanding of the math that goes into this, but if the issue is that the rules will produce different results depending on the order of the calculations than can one solution be simply being consistent in the order of the calculations?

I do think given the small and variable number of games most of us play (and that we don’t play everyone else), we are always going to find that the rankings won’t quite match up with reality, but it has always seemed to me that we are pretty close. And that is good enough for me. But I’m certainly open to trying alternatives.

@AndrewAAGamer welcome to BM Andrew!

I think you will find it plays fairly similarly to OOB. You’ve likely seen this elsewhere but I’ll highlight a couple of the key differences to track when you are axis.

1. Both sides (but the allies especially) have other national objective bonuses that you don’t get in OOB. It means areas of the board that you normally might be able to ignore have now become more important to contest.

2)The China guerilla rules slow Japan a little as you cannot keep inland Chinese territories empty of land units (not including AA). If they are empty they spawn a new Chinese inf.

3. The Vichy rules mean that if you take France and Normandy and leave Southern France untouched (and no other allied power lands a unit there), most of the French territories (and their land units) become axis friendly neutral (and the 93 fleet will defend against allied movement into that sea zone so can function as a blocker). In the short run, this tends to favour axis because those units and territories can more easily absorbed by the axis and Italy especially. In the long run, it can favour allies, because as pro axis territories they can now be captured by the allies.

4. One can now do amphibious landings with the marine unit even if they don’t have a transport. Cruisers and Battleships can carry one each .

5. when capitals are taken, they can only be looted for their income once.

@gamerman01 no worries. Take your time. I’ve been pretty busy too. And enjoy the snooker!

@gamerman01 My Dad bought a used one when I was a kid. Snooker as well, although I tended to play 8 ball. But I recall that some of my other games ended up on there too.

I imagine a snooker table is a great place to set up an axis and allies game :)

@gamerman01 no worries. And we’ve got two weeks. It’s possible we might get another 3-4 rounds done in that time and things might be clearer in this game.

@gamerman01 not positive but you might need to redo