I love wikipedia, for people that want an interesting read and want to learn how the ELO system works: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system
I will... try. This isn't super complex math, but can be tricky to understand. The formula for determining the odds are: 1/[1+10^((RatingA - RatingB)/400)] The formula for updating the rating is: RatingA = RatingA + K-Factor*(Actual Score - Expected Score) The "expected score - actual score" portion is because ELO was developed for chess, where a player's performance is usually over the course of a tournament. In our case, if the player was expected to win 67% of the time, then it'd be 1 minus 0.67 (or 0.33) times the k-factor (which effectively is the score cap), so if the k-factor was 24, you'd gain 11 rating/experience. But this is for a SPECIFIC matchup of players that yields a 67% win probability. Of course, if you lose, then the you'd lose .67 of 24, or 16 rating/experience. The k-factor is basically the "sensitivity" of the rating formula or how confident the system is in your current rating. So it normally starts high, and goes down as you accumulate games. ~ So basically, ELO takes the 2 player's ratings, and determines the "odds" of each one winning based on that. And uses that odds to determine the earnings/losses those players experience, dependent on the outcome. Remember that the goal of ELO is to rate players, and so 2 players of equal rating are going to be expected to win 50% of the time. To put it another way, if you are expected to win 60% of the time against a particular player, and you play that person 100 times and win 60 out of 100, your ratings will end up almost exactly the same at the end, because that is what the system expected. It's a performance based rating system, thus you have to ACTUALLY PERFORM BETTER to gain rating. ~ You can also play with this to get a sense of how ratings change: http://www.kosteniuk.com/EloCalc/elo.php
While ELO isn't the only rating system around, most systems use some variation on the basic principles of this, and fundamentally isn't very different.
so what you're saying is that when i beat people that i should defeat super easily, I get nothing but when I lose one game to a exotic league because the whole bg is immunity frost or frost eater i drop like a rock and don't wanna play for the rest of the day because i know that no matter what it's going down also, does this mean that consistently good people won't be top ranked because they can't get better? It sounds like people who aren't doing well then get better get higher ranks? I think there's a cap built into the system for pox that limits how much you gain and the ratios of exp gain is super bad. But, if you're making it so that it displays how much exp is gained per game, I suppose that'll fix alot of the confusion and open players up to complaining for losing 10 and gaining only 1.
I get it. So I suppose you can't compare one days loot to another. Still I think transparency and real time updates would be nice.
If you perform better than expected, you gain experience. If you perform worse than expected, you lose experience.
I get that people enjoy the feeling of gaining lots of points (which leads us into the stars and badges thing) BUT.... In a game like this, people love to flaunt their rank and enjoy the feeling of being "rated". I don't think removing rating as a whole in favor of a points system is a good move, especially since we already have DOW.
If you are actually getting better, you will. The system doesn't favor anyone really, because it's calculating things on a per game basis. Each game you have a new expected WR against everyone else. The cap is the k-factor, which I believe is 24. This is fairly standard, but remember that EVERYONE has more or less the same cap, so it really wouldn't matter if your EXP gain/loss swung more wildly, because everyone else's would too. That is our hope. Also, if there's a bug, it should surface that too.
There's nothing wrong with how the current system works, unless it is actually bugged in some way of course. I'm no coder but surely there's an easy way to make it show you how much experience you gained/lost after a match. And update your rank in real time.
I think Rating has its place, but we can certainly showcase other forms of achievements better such as: # of wins (total of achievement style, e.g. 500/1000/5000 wins lifetime) top win streaks best head to head records And other things of that nature.
Updating rank is actually not that easy because everyone's ratings are constantly changing, thus ranks are potentially changing all the time, or even as you are updating them. Showing the change per game is currently intentionally hidden, but we plan on showing it.
Awesome- step in the right direction anyway. What about updating them every hour? Instead of every 24.
We are actually considering the opposite. Updating the rankings every week instead. The idea there is so that rankings mean more, because it's the accumulated changes based on the previous week's performances. It should lead to more consistent results as players are more likely to have had sufficient sample sizes. For example, on any given day you could be a Limited player losing to an Exotic leaguer. But over the course of a week, maybe that happens once, but you perform better in other games and it evens out back to your expected overall performance for the week.
Dear god, thats going to be the end of competitive play as we know it. Theres barely enough reasons to play daily as it is (Main being just for rank updates), so if that change comes into effect then there really is no point to play regularly and ranking will just be so utterly pointless.
I just don't like the cap. Lets say one win gives 4 exp. Out of 24 per day. If someone went 6-0 based on the 4 per win, they're done. But if someone went 18-1, they wouldn't get 24/24. They'd get 20/24. There's no benefit for playing more, after a certain point it's actually bad since you actually have a chance to lose points. On a separate note, I think that DoW should have more impact on the game, since that's the only thing that people who play more get more of. Instead of being based on only time and winning or losing, maybe DoW could scale upwards for who you beat? Like beating rank 1 would give you 15-25 based on how long it was or beating a exotic would give you 3-6? The numbers can be played with but this will encourage actually beating someone harder. If you look at the DoW there's some rare leagues who have the top spot 15k to only the top in each faction is meh. Reward everyone and everyone will play. x10 gold of DoW points or something at the end so it feels like a cash in? Bonus for rank 1-5? or if you guys really wanna flesh it out, make DoW points able to buy "amber tokens" which turns a rune into that gold looking color like those recolored limits
I'm totally against this weekly update idea. People want instant gratification. I want to be rewarded for beating a higher ranked player straight away. This idea sounds absurd.
That doesn't make much sense. People currently complain about the lack of meaning in ranks, ranks not changing, not seeing experience changes, etc. The change will be two-fold: You will have real time Rating/Experience updates (this is happening regardless) Change the ranking so that you earn it throughout the week with your Rating/Experience earnings and games, and "claim" your rank ~ Are you suggesting the only reason people play is for daily ranking updates? If so, why would making it mean MORE decrease that reason?
