Quote from: franz on February 04, 2011, 10:45 AM

Quote from: Mablak on February 04, 2011, 09:12 AM
But it's fairly redundant to take steps to make the seasonal ratings approximate the overall ratings, at a certain point they just become the overall ratings again. If you're looking for long-term accuracy, you might as well just look at the overall ratings. And I think incorporating any historical element would be harmful to activity, because certain people will start with advantages and disadvantages, which makes the prospect of a new season seem unappealing, since the whole concept is about getting a fresh start.

the point of the system isn't to predict how seasons will end with overall ratings.. but to properly distribute points according to skill level -> the rest is up to you.  every new season still starts fresh, and there's nothing unappealing about getting rewarded the appropriate amount of points. you say certain people will start with advantages and disadvantages?  care to explain what they are?

It seems like any form of 'properly distributing points' will keep things very close to the way they currently are on TUS. Which has the noticeable problem of discouraging high level players from playing once they have a high overall rating, because it necessarily gives them the seasonal disadvantage of getting much fewer points from most players. And we just don't have enough high level players for them to stick to playing amongst themselves as MI intended.

The biggest flaw I can think of in properly distributing points based on skill level is the very fact that people start with the same number of points in a season. The idea of properly distributing points is dependent on good players already having points; if they don't, then although we know them and recognize their skill level, their skill is not accurately represented by the system. The main reason the system treats a pro player as it does is because it expects them to have excess points, and if they don't, then the exchange formula is rather... pointless, pun intended.

Even if TUS was tweaked to allow such players to gain a bit more than they do now and not be at such a disadvantage, it would still be too much of a hindrance for people like me, who would prefer to make it as high up as possible. If the most competitive players are being denied the chance to compete to their best potential, it just kills activity.

Quote from: franz on February 04, 2011, 08:10 AM

Quote from: Mablak on February 04, 2011, 06:56 AM
3. Avoiding is reduced. If you're not keen on playing a decent player because you know they're much better than their rating shows, you no longer have to be afraid of losing too many points. Standings are adjusted for you as new games are reported, giving you more points if someone you previously beat starts beating tons of players.

4. Less possible noob bashing. Franz pointed out that by simply playing a noob earlier in the season before other people do (before their points go down), you squeeze more points out of them than you deserve. Once again, standings would be adjusted as time goes on, and an early victory against a noob wouldn't give you many points in the end.

after thinking about this aspect more... all of it sounds well and good.. but this assumes that the 'good late joiners' and 'noobs' will actually play enough games to accurately reflect their skill level -> thus accurately affecting your own ranking. the problem is that it's very common for players to play just a few games in a season.. so without that historical element (overall rating) to give you proper benefit for beating a 'good late joiner' or 'noob' you still have imbalance in the system.

But it's fairly redundant to take steps to make the seasonal ratings approximate the overall ratings, at a certain point they just become the overall ratings again. If you're looking for long-term accuracy, you might as well just look at the overall ratings. And I think incorporating any historical element would be harmful to activity, because certain people will start with advantages and disadvantages, which makes the prospect of a new season seem unappealing, since the whole concept is about getting a fresh start.

And your concern about people just playing a few games is valid, but because it's so few games, I don't think it can compromise the system greatly. The system would still be highly balanced if the majority of active pros play at least say, 15 or so games. In any case, I don't feel like the best players typically go a season with only a few games; when they know they can at least do the bare minimum to make it into playoffs, they often will, at least that's been the case in NNNL.

Yeah, to elaborate, I think one of the most important changes that needs to be made to TUS is treating all matches between two opponents with equal importance; your total record against someone for the season is all that should be taken into account.

Let me attempt to list all the advantages of such a system:

1. Fairness. As it is, you could end up beating a great player 10 times and losing twice, but still losing points on the whole, if all your wins occurred when you were high-ranked and they were low. But simply put, you should always benefit when you've beaten your opponent more than they've beaten you in a season.

2. Starting late in the season doesn't give you an advantage. Right now, towards the end of the season there are players with tons of points, so if you wanted to climb the ranks with minimal effort, you could just start later in the season, getting a high rank with much less effort than many of the good players who were playing from the beginning. Simply because of the order of reporting, we've rendered games early in the season fairly useless, it's just more strategically sound to start playing later. But not everyone can do this, so the functionality of the league depends on the work of active players who decide to start early, which is quite unfair to them.

3. Avoiding is reduced. If you're not keen on playing a decent player because you know they're much better than their rating shows, you no longer have to be afraid of losing too many points. Standings are adjusted for you as new games are reported, giving you more points if someone you previously beat starts beating tons of players.

4. Less possible noob bashing. Franz pointed out that by simply playing a noob earlier in the season before other people do (before their points go down), you squeeze more points out of them than you deserve. Once again, standings would be adjusted as time goes on, and an early victory against a noob wouldn't give you many points in the end.

One objection to this system would be my claim 'you should always benefit when you've beaten your opponent more than they've beaten you in a season'. This isn't true if players are actually gaining or losing skill throughout a season, but it's fairly impossible to measure changes in skill over an extremely short time period, and I don't think any system is capable of that. The assumption we have to make here is that a player's skill level stays roughly the same over the course of a season. Though this isn't always true, it works very well for seasons of 2 or 3 months, and the benefits I've listed are well worth it.

Quote from: Rok on February 02, 2011, 01:13 AM

Quote from: HHC on February 01, 2011, 12:23 PM
In your opinion both players should gain/lose 0 points and stay at 1050, because this is the expected result.

Yes, IF the actual result of games is the same as expected result, then rating change is exactly 0. If a player played according to his skill/rating, then his actual skill didn't change. Sounds logical?

Quote from: HHC on February 01, 2011, 12:23 PM
In my opinion both players' real skill level is 900. When they play a draw against each other they 'confirm' that they are equally good, namely '900'-good and not the 1050 that happens to be their season rating. Thus, it doesn't seem illogical to me, that both players drop a little in season rating (to resemble more closely their real skill-level of 900).

It is illogical. Season rating shows us how well a person did IN A GIVEN SEASON. Overall rating is supposed to show player's skill in the long run, over multiple seasons, over his entire league 'career'. These are two different things, don't you think? So why do you want player's seasonal rating to DROP DOWN when he is doing like expected?

I repeat again, if you do better than expected, your rating should rise. If you do worse, your rating should drop down. If you do as expected, it should stay the same. I hope you now understand why I have problems with your proposal.

I think all of your plans for changes come from the idea that seasonal rating should eventually approach overall rating. Did I get you right? But as I said, seasonal rating (why shouldn't even call it rating in the first place, but rather "performance", "score, or smth) should show us how players perform in a given season, not show the skill, that's what we have overall rating for.

I agree that seasonal ratings should be kept completely, 100% separate from overall ratings. If overall rating is used at all in the calculation of seasonal rating, then seasonal rating loses its importance, and becomes something more like quarterly performance. And this would again impact activity, which is about the highest concern we should have for a league.

If, as franz implies, assigning more importance to seasonal ratings diminishes the importance of overall ratings, then so be it; it's still a boon for activity and competition. Overall ratings will still be useful to look at, for those who want to look at them.

Quote from: Rok on February 02, 2011, 01:13 AM

Quote from: HHC on February 01, 2011, 12:23 PM
The essence of zero-sum is that the sum of points gained by winner and loser is zero. This is not a necessity IMO.

Think again what is rating supposed to show you - the skill. So after a series of games, say 10, the result is as expected (according to player's ratings), for example 8-2. The result tells us that both players played ok, according to their skill, so the sum of rating changes is 0. If it wouldn't be, the ratings would change whereas we said players performed as expected. Don't you think this distorts the picture a bit?

I think a zero-sum system isn't ideal, for worms at least. It seems like your problem is that non-zero-sum systems wouldn't be quite as objective, which is slightly true, right now you can have a good feel for a player's skill if you know they're at 1800, or 1600, or 1400. However, as a counter example, table tennis ratings are wonderfully accurate and employ a non-zero-sum system, as shown here: http://www.ratingscentral.com/HowItWorks.php. And I always understand almost exactly how good a table tennis player is just by their rating there. This system allows young unranked prodigies to gain say, 400 points for beating a high-ranked player, without that player going down too dramatically.

And over at NNNL, although everyone's points inflate as the season goes on, top players end up with roughly the same upper limit on their seasonal rating. You can definitely create non-zero-sum systems that yield ratings that correspond to intuition.

Standard Dell:

It's served me well most of my worming career. Everything else I've tried just doesn't hold up, I think it's mainly just a matter of being used to the arrows (no keylock of course).

Okay then... are you available monday or tuesday around 20 GMT next week Crash?

For something that might actually be on topic... I'm pretty disappointed seeing how having a high overall standing lowers your seasonal standing, I no longer have any motivation to play TEL since I can't win a season or even come close. I don't understand why there aren't two rating calculations per game, one for overall and one for seasonal.

If the intention is for higher players to only play amongst themselves... even if we had enough players to make that work, there would be far too much trading off of points, all the good players would still be off the radar in terms of seasonal ratings. It seems like this system just encourages good players to get high up and then stop playing.

Oh yeah Shy, if you're gonna write him back, hold off for a day and I'll write him something for you to add in. I guess I forgot some key details when I gave him my address >_>

Me and daina both won each game in which we got the first turn, went 3-2 for me, ggs. Crash, are you able to play Monday or Tuesday around 20 GMT?

Okay let's try

Oi Daina, can we play Monday or Tuesday, any time past 20 GMT?

Oh thanks guys. I thought I was pretty accurate saying there was a 50% chance, because the skunk would certainly jump at the end of the little branch. It's mainly a question of whether it would immediately turn when jumping onto the slope, or bounce off and continue walking left, but since the bubbles did barely reach the highest worm, maybe 20% is closer.

Quote from: Komito on December 23, 2010, 12:11 PM
Yeah but Mablak will get bored of TEL soon enough lol, ask anyone who knows him well, he always goes through phases like this, he'll probably even admit it himself

Actually I still find TEL interesting, I've never been that bored of elites. But I have been bored of ropers for years, just because the skill level can only get so high. I'd much rather just warm when I'm in the mood to rope.

So, were you thinking of just having one rating system that would work for TUS and ONL? I think the ONL system is an improvement, largely because it doesn't matter what order you report in or when you played your games. And that's a huge problem, because in TUS, games at the end of the season matter much more than ones at the beginning. And it encourages avoiding good players who simply haven't played many games yet.

I think having that feature is crucial, though there are other ideas that are important for an all-round league, like scheme balance. This would be a good time to work on ratings in general.

Dario hasn't reported yet, so I think you can just delete it, and we'll report in order later