| |
BGonline.org Forums
It's a start
Posted By: Rich Munitz In Response To: It's a start (Chuck Bower)
Date: Friday, 19 June 2009, at 4:43 p.m.
"My main concern is that what happened on GamesGrid would spill over to this (as of now vaporous) rating system: if we "know" you as a good player you start at rating X. If we don't "know" you as a good player we rate you at Y. Eventually if we misjudged, you'll still end up where you belong, so it won't matter. "
First of all, this is different than GamesGrid. We are discussing two completely independent ratings populations - one for Open, one for Intermediate/Advanced, not one combined ratings population. If one player switches between divisions, they get a new and independent rating for the new division and they maintain both ratings simultaneously, depending where they choose to play. So there is no "what do we know about this person". EVERY new person that joins the ratings list for the first time would get exactly the same initial rating as every other person did. The only question is what should that magic initial number be? My suggestion was 1800 when joining the Open ratings population and 1650 when joining the Intermediate ratings population. My hope was that this method would produce rough comparability between the two populations so that anyone that did have two separate ratings in each population would achieve approximately similar ratings in both places.
As for GamesGrid, there is really some value to the system of "if we know you, we'll start you off with a good rating". It is not about saving some strong player they like the work of building their rating. It is about saving all of the unfortunate opponents of that player the hit on their ratings when they lose to a player with 1800 skills that has a 1500 rating. I can tell you that when I started playing there in 2007 I had asked for a rating reset. I had just won the ABT and there should have been no issue, but they never did it. So I started at 1500 and managed to raise it to nearly 2000 in about 3 months. But there were alot of dead bodies scattered about and many people took some sizable hits to their ratings as I climbed my way up.
Elo ratings are a statistical model intended to predict a probability that one player will win against another in a given match length, based only on the difference in ratings between the two players. If I recall correctly, an Elo rating difference of about 200 points represents about 1 Standard Deviation in the population. An online site like GG might have ratings spanning 1150 - 2050 which are 4.5 Standard Deviations. That's huge. I would expect that ABT player populations that are rated within divisions will be much closer in skill; I'd expect to find the Open ratings span the equivalent of less than 2 Standard deviations in the regular population, say from 1650 to 2000 (assuming the initial rating for all is 1800). So any new player no matter how skillful or unskillful will never be more than 1 SD away from their true rating. There will be less need to worry about the ratings hits or bumps they might trigger in other players.
| |
BGonline.org Forums is maintained by Stick with WebBBS 5.12.