Elim formula for ladder ratings is bad and should be changed

[qan]

Jessup, no worries, I was just feeling like a broken record and my time's already spread very thin. Got a bit frustrated. Sorry for that. I get what you're saying about the min # games cutoff. We do have such a feature but I believe it's based on number of combined kills+deaths which is essentially the same thing as games, just accounts for the fact that games have different #s of deaths to scale well. It could be changed to games, but it's easier just to modify the number.

Right now minimum number of K/D to show on ladder is 150. This should probably be increased, as that means finishing with 10-10 K/D on average, you'd only need 7.5 games to ladder. If you're going 15-10, 6 games.Then you enter onto the ladder with a significant minus to rating based on confidence, but you could still put up pretty decent ratings if you play against those with high ratings, as the average rating of all players killed figures so strongly into each game's rating. I'd recommend something like 300-500 combined kills/deaths.



For decay, three things need to be decided.

1) How soon decay begins. 4th day inactive? 7th day? You can implement a light decay that starts fairly soon after a person goes inactive, or a stronger decay that kicks in after a longer period of being inactive.

2) How to decay. There are two systems: decay by a fixed amount, such as 3-5 points, or decay by a percentage of the current rating, such as 2-5%. Neither are terribly difficult to implement, and could be tested on the current offseason before going live.

3) How much to decay. How many points if a fixed amount, or what percentage if using a %.

All 3 of these variables can be played with on the Decay tab. Anyone who wants to solve this problem, please take a look, play with the numbers for 10 minutes and find what seems fair.

[Kassius]

For decay, three things need to be decided.

1) How soon decay begins. 4th day inactive? 7th day? You can implement a light decay that starts fairly soon after a person goes inactive, or a stronger decay that kicks in after a longer period of being inactive. 1st day

2) How to decay. There are two systems: decay by a fixed amount, such as 3-5 points, or decay by a percentage of the current rating, such as 2-5%. Neither are terribly difficult to implement, and could be tested on the current offseason before going live. Percentage

3) How much to decay. How many points if a fixed amount, or what percentage if using a %. 2.5%

All 3 of these variables can be played with on the Decay tab. Anyone who wants to solve this problem, please take a look, play with the numbers for 10 minutes and find what seems fair.

Above

[qan]

Hmm, that's pretty aggressive, but I put the numbers in and it could work. Anyone else have a feeling about this? Does it seem like a reasonable decay? It would mean as soon as you haven't played 24 hours your rating begins decaying, which certainly would encourage regular activity and heavily penalize ratings-sitters.

[Tiny]

Does seem a bit harsh. my thoughts..

1) How soon decay begins - 24 hours of inactivity

2) How to decay - percentage

3) How much to decay. 2% confidence daily, which means they should have to play 2 games a day after reaching full confidence to keep their rating.

note: Assuming they reached full confidence, the threshold would have to be percentage based on the amount of games they already played as opposed to just making the confidence 102 games/ 104, etc..

[qan]

Confidence decaying is an interesting idea. Right now that's based on games played, though, so it's a little more difficult from a dev standpoint. Far easier is to just knock down the adjusted rating itself by a flat percentage each day.

[Turban]

I feel adding a rating decay could severely backfire and in the worst case outright ruin elimination for many players. It puts too much of a burden on players to stay active and there are times when no games are running until it's past midnight in Europe. It's also unreasonable to expect players to log on every single day to play games.

In my opinion the current rating system is perfectly fine. We simply need more frequent ladder resets.

[qan]

That's one reason I imagined that if decay were to be implemented, it would be better to begin it after a significant delay, perhaps as much as a week (or longer?), but with a sharper drop-off.

More frequent ladder resets would be of course fine, but as we've seen, we may not be able to organize sufficiently to make that happen, so it might be best to have something in place for the inevitable, when an off-season runs as long as this one has.

[Tiny]

I feel adding a rating decay could severely backfire and in the worst case outright ruin elimination for many players. It puts too much of a burden on players to stay active and there are times when no games are running until it's past midnight in Europe. It's also unreasonable to expect players to log on every single day to play games.

In my opinion the current rating system is perfectly fine. We simply need more frequent ladder resets.

Coming from a guy who ranks and goes MIA.

[Grasps]

I feel adding a rating decay could severely backfire and in the worst case outright ruin elimination for many players. It puts too much of a burden on players to stay active and there are times when no games are running until it's past midnight in Europe. It's also unreasonable to expect players to log on every single day to play games.

In my opinion the current rating system is perfectly fine. We simply need more frequent ladder resets.

You know I love + respect you Turban and have been sippin' a lil but "COMEON mane..." Subspace is a game--not a real sport or anything like that. How hard is it really for someone to log in daily and play 1-2 elims on their freetime? It's not asking a lot in my opinion for a video game that is offering a competitive leaderboard.. I have a busy, hectic life yet along with a handful of others am one of the most active players in this zone because on my downtime I devote a little bit to Subspace so yea I feel like you are blowing what this game is and how people play it out of proportion Otherwise, hope you and yours are doing good. Take it easy my man!!

[Exalt]

I feel adding a rating decay could severely backfire and in the worst case outright ruin elimination for many players. It puts too much of a burden on players to stay active and there are times when no games are running until it's past midnight in Europe. It's also unreasonable to expect players to log on every single day to play games.

In my opinion the current rating system is perfectly fine. We simply need more frequent ladder resets.

This. I mostly only log in to play elim these days whenever there's some championship thing like ogron did, but I know I wouldn't have logged in at all if there was a 1 day decay. I'd rather keep the formula the same if that's the alternative. Even if I didn't have anything else going on in my life and nothing else to do, I'd hate to be forced to log into any game every single day. I'd be burned out extremely fast, no matter what the game was.

Besides that, I've logged in many times and couldn't find a game to begin with. I can't name how many hours I've waited for a game to begin in the past when I was active, only for that one game to be javelim when it finally did occur. If I was decaying on WBelim and after waiting hours to play, JAVelim happened instead, I'd ragequit the entire season.

[Rab]

I might play elim more if people with 250ms or 1% packetloss weren't allowed to play. The rating system doesn't matter for shit when people don't die.

[Exalt]

I might play elim more if people with 250ms or 1% packetloss weren't allowed to play. The rating system doesn't matter for shit when people don't die.

What you want is a better server then. Nothing else changes until that's upgraded, which means nothing will ever change.