Rating Decay, and why we need it desperately.

[Ceneraii]

Hello everyone,

Today I'd like to talk about rating and more importantly, the need for rating decay. As it stands at the moment, once you get a high ladder rating you're going to be there more or less for life. Not only does this massively flood the top 50 and top 100 of ladder with people who never play it, but many of these players are likely nowhere near as good, relatively speaking, as they used to be. It's also harmful for the motivation of new players; past a certain point it becomes incredibly hard to get games and thus actually get higher. It also creates stupid situations like in the previous weekend where it's impossible to get 8 players from the top 50 to compete in a tournament even if there is a cash prize, so it's obvious this is hurting what little is left of FAF's competitive side (not to mention the energy and cash being poured into reviving it). Global is also affected as returning players unbalance games, oftentimes these players have played a large amount of games before, which means it takes an inordinately large amount of games before the system manages to compensate for their change in skill. While some of these points could be argued against in one way or another, I don't think it's possible to ignore the necessity of having rating decay, there is a clear reason why every competitive game has it.

Because of this I propose the following:

3 weeks until rating decay begins, each week after that: -x mean rating, +y deviation
Obviously there should be a minimum cap to where it would drop, and 1500 is generally a good number, as it would prevent flooding of average joes tourneys and the like by ex-pro's. I doubt there is much need for decay below that, but it could be implemented categorically if need be. Ideally the numbers would be chosen in such a way that a 2000 rated player will decay to 1500 in roughly a year or so. This is a relatively long timespan and that's also one of the reasons why I think this should be implemented in one form or another as soon as possible.

Others have also made the following suggestions:

(Soft) Rating reset in seasons.

Hiding inactive players.

A hard rating reset for global to compensate for inflated rating from ladder, or possibly a recalculation.

Both of these have their own positive and sometimes negative aspects, we could vote on which is better, have a decision made by a councilor or the ideas evaluated based on their merits, but by far the most important part is that something is done.

A few examples, meant to showcase the problem in effect, I could find many, many more of these, I'm sorry for mentioning names but I couldn't figure out a different way to drive the point home:

-Several players of high global rating can't keep up with their rating once they come back from long breaks. (Example games: 3857754, 2815430)

-TheRedViper at #29 (1836) in ladder is one of the best active players at the moment, deserves a much higher spot.

-(Inactive) smurfs should not take ladder spots (ex: Obfuscation, TheUnpwnable, Tugger_, STAKKER)

I hope everyone can agree with the need for a system like this, if you do then please show your support, if you don't then post your arguments and what changes you would suggest to the proposed system to account for what you think is wrong.

[Blodir]

shared #1 priority right now (along with matchmaker)

[Morax]

How about we just reset the ladder every season like many other games to avoid this and smurfs being a problem to begin with?

[speed2]

This would require also one account per player and not by pc or steam acc. Are those smurfs ready to hav just one acc.
Totally not looking at Blodir

[JaggedAppliance]

Hiding inactives from the leaderboards would be fine I think.

[Blodir]

How about we just reset the ladder every season like many other games to avoid this and smurfs being a problem to begin with?

I've never heard of a game that implemented seasons, but not rating decay

[ZLO_RD]

-Several players of high global rating can't keep up with their rating once they come back from long breaks. (Example games: 3857754, 2815430)

Those examples are indeed impressive.

But you have to keep in mind that those players gained high global rating by playing ladder, and probably almost never played teamgames before.
Maybe rating decay would partually solve problem for those examples... but extremely high global rating is result of changing rating system without resetting it, i also had 2300+ global rating as well as voodoo and after ratings were separated we both lost 200-300 points of global rating by playing teamgames.

If you would show how cptcrowbar or amorally plays ladder then it would be more correct example...

I do agree that rating decay could help with overrated rusty players, but people should not be fooled by those extremely impressive examples

[Morax]

How about we just reset the ladder every season like many other games to avoid this and smurfs being a problem to begin with?

I've never heard of a game that implemented seasons, but not rating decay

Do both, then.

There are too many people that caress their rating number like some teenage boy that first touches a woman's breast or like Golem pets his "precious" from the LOTR.

Can't be trusted... dirty dirty dirty FaFers, ALL OF YOU!

[Ceneraii]

-Several players of high global rating can't keep up with their rating once they come back from long breaks. (Example games: 3857754, 2815430)

Those examples are indeed impressive.

But you have to keep in mind that those players gained high global rating by playing ladder, and probably almost never played teamgames before.
Maybe rating decay would partually solve problem for those examples... but extremely high global rating is result of changing rating system without resetting it, i also had 2300+ global rating as well as voodoo and after ratings were separated we both lost 200-300 points of global rating by playing teamgames.

If you would show how cptcrowbar or amorally plays ladder then it would be more correct example...

I do agree that rating decay could help with overrated rusty players, but people should not be fooled by those extremely impressive examples

I would show, but they haven't played for so long you can't even find a replay, I think it exemplifies my point more than anything else. If you're bored, go search for replays of top 100 ladder players, ~25-50% is inactive.

[eskator]

Really good post about very important subject Ceneraii. GW !!!

IMO:
Global rating is really fucked up by people who got it from playing 1 vs 1 ladder. There was no reset after spliting global and 1 vs 1 ranking. Its strange and confusing to see people with like 1500 playing worse than 1000 ones. Reset of global rating would be nice even now, we need to cut off this stupid situation. Of course reset should be intelligent too, for example idea: diffirent starting points and uncertainty, to not make it all too random at start. ( certainty for being active, and rank based on last one ).

I am mostly 1 vs 1 ladder player, and i might say that there is too many stupid situations where rank differes too much from skill. I ve seen too much people with 1000 rank playing better than 1400 ones, and opposite high ranked playing below average 1000 level. Its rather exception than rule but it happens too often. Probability levels in rank system needs to be changed harder and more intelligently.

These are only ideas, but I am sure something needs to be done about those 2 subjects.