Thanks Pardon you're the best!!!!!

I've gotten so viral it's gotten on MDL..

Fuck yeah!

Ranking Update! (7/29)

Top 10

• 1. Master of the Dead: ~1841
  
• 2. Buns157: ~1774
  
• 3. Timinator: ~1760
  
• 4. timon92: ~1751
  
• 5. Wini: ~1732
  
• 6. Pardon: ~1717
  
• 7. Njord: ~1696
  
• 8. AwesomeGuy: ~1666
  
• 9. Edge: ~1661
  
• 10. SuperGamerz: ~1653
  

Noteworthy Observations

• https://19818-presscdn-pagely.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/53a/02/c48f0b534b8b2b33-e1497544894925.jpg ....SuperGamerz...the floor is not top 10....congrats!
  
• Kezzo, damn almost triple digits in rating rise :(
  

Rating Changes

• SuperGamerz rises 53 points to 10th place with a score of ~1653
  
• Kezzo rises an incredible 97 points to 11th place with a score of ~1648
  
• krunx rises 40 points to 13th place with a score of ~1626
  
• Nynwhen rises 61 points to 16th place with a score of ~1587
  
• Dumbledore would be proud...the power of 'Love' rises 45 points to 26th place with a score of ~1530
  
• SloppyFatGinger rises 43 points to 36th place with a rating of ~1493
  
  https://youtu.be/iGAMbNKcN1U?t=97 : representation of you guys kicking around everyone else - colorized
  

Noteworthy Games

• https://www.warlight.net/MultiPlayer?GameID=13875593 - Arkanton defeats Buns (French Brawl)
  

If you count just 3 days before the last update, I was 1518.

When I left the ladder-
20th of May	1447
When I debuted again-
19th of July	1518
Since then-
20th of July	1571
21st of July	1572
22nd of July	1586
23rd of July	1600
24th of July	1602
25th of July 	1600
26th of July	1628
27th of July	1643
28th of July	1641
29th of July	1653

So I have technically risen 135 points in 10 days.

My rating is slightly overinflated due to the boot win vs Midazolam.

I expect to drop a bit soon enough (level of competition I am facing is increasingly higher), but I am gonna cherish this point for the time being :P

Thanks again MotD for this CLOT. It's been a good tool for learning and confidence boosting.

MDL will be down for a few hours as I'm working on a new feature today.

MDL is back up again. I'll write a post shortly to explain the latest changes.

For some time now, I've been getting complaints that the MDL rating system is too harsh, and ratings drop too much on the back of expired wins. However, ratings do not rise on the back of expired losses. I will briefly explain the previous system, it's flaws and what this current change is all about.

Old System:

• Games expire after 5 months.
  
• At any given date, the CLOT gets all games with finish date >= (today - 5 months). All games prior to this are considered as expired.
  
• All of these games are used to compute the Elo rating for every player from scratch(using the standard Elo algorithm). Due to this approach, the set of games used to compute Elo is always changing, which leaves players with high ratings very susceptible to rating changes on the back of expired games. Case in point - myself during my long winning streak(I couldn't sustain my rating, let alone improve on it). Another recent example is timon, who was falling quite a bit without new finished games.

The Elo rating system doesn't handle game expiration very well and is generally considered a continuous rating system. We've all seen RTL where players come back after a year or two with very high ratings and hog the top spots on the ladder without justifying it with their recent results. The game expiration component on MDL was one of the ways I chose to deal with this problem. By making games expire, I ensured that any player with a high rating had to justify it with current results. This wasn't an ideal solution, but it was the only one I could think of when I first created MDL.

Over time, I've observed the rating system on MDL and learned more about such systems. Recently, I had a long chat with Math Wolf about MDL's rating system, and we came up with a slightly different rating system. I'm calling it the MWElo rating system as it's mainly Math Wolf's idea.

MWElo System:

• Games will never expire in this system.
  
• The underlying principle of any rating system is that it needs enough data to be able to accurately estimate a player's skill level. So we need to provide incentives to be active on MDL.
  
• To achieve that, this system uses the concept of an activity bonus. It awards an activity bonus of k/8 = 4 points(k-factor = 32 on MDL) for each finished game. This bonus is awarded to both the winner and the loser at game completion.
  
• The activity bonus is capped at a max of 80 points. This ensures that if you can guarantee a certain level of activity, you will receive most of the possible activity points. It also prevents someone who is very active from getting too many activity points.
  
• Every day, the total activity bonus points for every player will decay by 2%. This decay ensures that a player must remain active in order to keep their activity points. 34 days of complete inactivity(0 games finished) will halve your activity bonus [(1-0.02) ^34 ~= 0.5]
  
• The displayed rating on MDL is the sum of the true Elo rating of a player and their activity bonus(similar to the seasonal ladder). The Elo rating is used to determine player match-ups. This ensures that players of equal skill level are more likely to be matched up. However, the ranks are computed using the displayed rating.
  
• This system also introduces an additional component which will converge your Elo rating towards 1500 if you have been inactive for too long. The criteria* is that if you haven't finished a game in the last 50 days, your rating will converge towards 1500 by 1 point every day after the 50th day. For ex - If my rating is 1800, and I've been inactive for 80 days, my rating starts decreasing(if rating was <1500, it increases) by 1 every day after the 51st day. So by the 80th day, my rating would be 1800-30 = 1770. Over time, if I go completely inactive,I will converge to 1500.

This system is in preview. We will evaluate its performance over the next week and decide if we want to keep it, adjust it or switch back to the old system. I would like to thank Math Wolf for spending a lot of time and coming up with this system. I've compiled a list of the old/new rating for every player on MDL which can be found here - https://goo.gl/X1gJEn

I will post a change-log in my next post. Keep in mind that this may system may contain some bugs which I will fix as soon as I find them. The change touches a large portion of MDL's code-base. If you notice any issues with other MDL features, please let me know.


*(current criteria is if you haven't finished a game in the last 5 months.. This will be changed to finish a game in last 50 days at a later date).

Edited 7/31/2017 04:28:19

Changes

• Add activity bonus component to the rating system.
  
• Decay activity bonus by 2% every day.
  
• Decay Elo rating every day if player is deemed inactive
  
• Database changes to support the new rating system
  
• Perform incremental Elo updates instead of considering all games on every run. The previous Elo rating and the recently finished games are used to compute the new Elo score.
  
• Remove Unexpired games table on MDL.
  
• Remove Least Vetoed templates table on MDL.
  
• Update the following pages to reflect the new rating system.
  
  • Rating distribution graph on the MDL Stats page.
    
  • Weekly Report page.
    
  • All players page
    
  • Clan page - Show Most Games table instead of the Unexpired Games table
    
  • Template page
    
  • Show DisplayedRating, EloRating and Activity bonus on the player page
    
    

Annoyed personally because I was planning on re-joining the ladder after my games expired but now I feel highly agitated since in the past I joined MDL and surrendered all games when leaving.. Should I get penalised for inconsistency possibly so... Though I feel I'm more consistent handling my games without surrendering like a bitch as I'm actually completing my 2v2 and 3v3 Ladder games and commiting reasonably fast and feel it's unfair that my past is going to possibly hold me back.

I'm still grateful for the "improvements" though regardless if I personally agree/disagree but wanted to say this.

Annoyed personally because I was planning on re-joining the ladder after my games expired but now I feel highly agitated since in the past I joined MDL and surrendered all games when leaving.. Should I get penalised for inconsistency possibly so... Though I feel I'm more consistent handling my games without surrendering like a bitch as I'm actually completing my 2v2 and 3v3 Ladder games and commiting reasonably fast and feel it's unfair that my past is going to possibly hold me back.

Your past is not "holding you back". You currently have an Elo Rating of 1554. How you got to that rating has no bearing on your future. All that matters is that your rating stands at 1554. This is not like the standard WL ladders which use BayesElo(past results continue to impact you in BayesElo). You could get to 1554 via 3-0 or get to 1554 via a 25-22 record. As far as this rating system is concerned, it's all the same.

If you were to let your games "expire" in the old system, you would have to work harder to get to the rating you're aiming for. I would recommend reading how the standard Elo rating system works.

Edited 7/31/2017 04:43:29

I don't have a understanding of how rating systems work and maybe it was naive to make such a comment above however most probably don't know either and I just based my logic off 1v1 ladder which is also Elo? Bit confusing tbh.

Would you mind linking a source for someone noob to understand how the Elo rating system works and maybe put it on the MDL of some sorts cause education of how the rating system works would be good? Instead of me and maybe others assuming it has similarities like 1v1 ladder for expiration assuming they are roughly the same... because that's the only rating system they are exposed to.. sorta?

Edited 7/31/2017 04:35:56

There is a link under FAQs > Ranking.
https://metinmediamath.wordpress.com/2013/11/27/how-to-calculate-the-elo-rating-including-example/

EDIT : You can also use this site to calculate the effect of an individual game. Just remember to use k=32.
http://www.3dkingdoms.com/chess/elo.htm

Edited 8/1/2017 04:42:58

If all that matters is that your current rating is 1554, and that rating was computed from past events, then doesn't this mean that the past actually does matter?

Of course, your results determine your Elo rating. But the point I was trying to make was that how you get to a rating is irrelevant to your future. i.e, 10-0 can have the same effect as 20-10 if it meant that both those records yield the same rating(depending on your opponents).

This is not what you see on regular WL ladders(BayesElo). Losses bog you down there. So people usually make runs and wait for losses to expire to achieve "higher ratings/rank". Platinum was sort of hinting at that, which is something he doesn't need to worry about on this ladder because it doesn't work that way here.

Great change, MotD. I really like, that you talked to an expert like MathWolf and improved the rating system.

Hey I lost 8 ranks with this new system! Replace it immediately back with the old one that rewarded snail players like me!
/end{trolling}

I'm very happy MotD contacted me to discuss this! Overall, I think this is an improvement (obviously), although small bugs and kinks may need to be ironed out over time.

About "expiration" in general: the technical argument goes that games either "expire immediately" or "expire at infinity". Once a game is counted into the rating, it will never be used again. This makes sense as the rating is updated with the game when it happens. All systems using expiring games update the rating using games that finished several months in the past, which, if you think about it, doesn't make all that much sense.
This is also what MotD means above when he says that "how you get to a rating is irrelevant to your future." Once the game is counted and you have the new rating, the game won't be used again. How the rating was obtained is irrelevant when the next game comes along (which isn't the case in BayesELO).

The actual impact of a game on the rating will slowly decrease over time. (i.e. what would the rating be without this game?) Every new game against an opponent of similar skill has theoretically a larger impact than every previous game because it applies a change on the updated ranking. This can be practically tested immediately if you'd flip the order of a win and a loss against oppenents rated exactly the same: win, then lose gives a lower rating that lose, then win. (Sidenote: ELO actually rewards delaying wins rather than delaying losses, which is a great feature I think!)
This is an advantage over TrueSkill (used in RT ladder), where the impact of early games can be large and linger for quite a while, not even taking matchmaking into consideration.

Experts generally agree that the three main drawbacks (outside some technical issues) of ELO are
(1) rewarding inactivity
(2) the (subjective) choice of a K-factor
(3) the relative importance matchmaking

For MDL, the main problem was (1), which we tried to fix with the activity bonus. As currently implemented, this bonus is similar to a time-varying Poisson process (count data, here "counting" recent games). Additionally, convergence towards 1500 seems generally appropriate for long absence as there is no guarantee the rating is still correct.

I think (2) is less relevant for MDL. The subjective choice here simply means how much fluctuation MotD (or the players) want. A little more fluctuation is good and adds excitement for these kinds of competition, so a high K seems suitable. If the idea would be to have a rigorous ranking where you need many games to move substantially, a lower K would be needed.

From what I experienced myself, the matchmaking at MDL is automatic and quite good, which makes gaming the system (choosing one's opponents) more difficult and (3) irrelevant.

Great uppdate motd, and great job Mat wolf aswell, and also a very good comment by you above! Im exited for the future of MDL! This is a well needed update and its amazing!

I like the general idea. I really do. I'm not sure about the math aspect of it though.

Finishing a game grants 4 activity points. The points are capped at 80. From equation (1-0.02)^d=1-(4/80) you get d=2,5. That means that to get full rating bonus from activity, you need to finish a game every 2.5 days on average.

As a player who plays just a few games at the time (I usually limit myself to 6 MD games total), the idea that I'll always be behind in points compared to players of same skill level who play 9 simultaneous games is a little bit off-putting. I can already tell you I'm not the only one. (I know I'm not even participating in MDL now, but I was going to join again after I leave 2v2 ladder)

Did you consider delaying that counter? Let's say you start losing activity points a week after your last game finishes. That + 2,5 would give you over 9 days to finish a game on average. You could change the point loss to 2,5% on every day after the first week to get the same result of 0.5 after 34 days.

Just my suggestions. Though I don't believe you and Math Wolf did not consider it already. So may I ask why did you decide on such a move? I agree with not promoting non-activity. But are you sure that blatantly giving more points to players who play faster is a good idea?

PS: great job with the ladder overall. We all appreciate the effort you put into this.

@Rento: I'm a snail myself, so we did carefully consider these numbers. I knew it would penalise me as well. :-)

The impact should be reasonable. To use myself as an example: I play few games at the time and slow, barely enough to remain ranked actually. Yet, at this moment, I have 25 activity points. A criterion that I proposed to MotD was that anyone putting it at least some minimum effort needs to get half the activity points (40). A total of 30 games in 5 months (you needed 20 to remain ranked) gives you (slightly more than) that. The difference between a very active player and someone who achieves this is less than 40 points, which seems to make a difference of only a few ranks.

I personally think this is correct and fair because the rating of someone who plays more is more accurate.
Someone who wins his last 10 games, but didn't play all that much during that period (and may be delaying losses), does not deserve the same activity bonus as someone who goes 20-5 during the same period. Yet, without activity bonus, they might get the same rating. For the first player, there is a much larger risk that this rating is inflated. Note that TrueSkill, used on RT, also penalises for (lower) activity and more severely than this system. From a mathematical and theoretical point of view, I don't see it as an activity bonus, but as an accuracy bonus. My first proposal to MotD was about using a variance measure to achieve this same effect, but that was not as practical.

Either how, as far as I understood, these numbers are not final yet and may be adapted based on how much activity should translate to a full activity bonus. I'm sure MotD doesn't want it to be a reason for people not to join, but at the same time it should remain an incentive to play more than just two games at a time.

I'm personally not a fan of delaying the decay. This would give an incentive to stall losses with exactly a week in between, which we definitely want to avoid!

EDIT: some more details and example added in second real paragraph.

Edited 7/31/2017 15:45:44

Well here's where we disagree: 40 or 50 points difference is a big deal if you ask me. I mean, I was never in top of that ladder, but from what I've heard you get literally a few points for every win up there. (Can I ask for confirmation MotD?)

To put things in perspective:
- finishing a game every 2,5 day gives you full 80 points
- every 3 days - 70 points (-10 points already! just half a day difference in playing speed)
- every 5 days - 40 points (40 points behind)
- every 7 days - 30 points (50 points behind!)

Does that really seem fine to you guys?

I personally think this is correct and fair because the rating of someone who plays more is more accurate.
Someone who wins his last 10 games, but didn't play all that much during that period (and may be delaying losses), does not deserve the same activity bonus as someone who goes 20-5 during the same period

I agree partly, however sometimes a person is being penalised for not finishing games because their opponents are playing ridiculously slow. Is it fair to penalise the other person who would play fast given the chance?

Currently I have 5 games ongoing. (1 just finished because I asked the other person to play faster) but 4 out of those 5 games are being played ridiculously slow by my opponents. The one that just finished today was over two weeks and the other 4 are about to be 2 weeks. That means I have not finished a single game in two weeks, not from any fault of my own, yet I am penalised for those extra points I could have had. I did talk to Motd about it and he explained it doesn't have that much impact and it will even out due to getting faster opponents another time and I'm fine with that. However I just wanted to comment on your statement where you said it was fair.