General Address.. State of Ladder

The Ladder is broken ............................
Not because The Nosebreaker is not Number one but because :
When a lot of people hit Uber rank they stop playing... 10 active as of typing this!!!!!
The Nosebreaker has to listen in game vox too people go on about how awesome they are because they hit Uber rank .....most all of them have stopped playing since and it has been numerous patches since they hit uber....

Uber rank needs to degrade reguardless of inactivity or not.....
Plat should also degrade. Gold should be the average.
Elo doesnt work with such a small tiny community playing obviously.....
The Nosebreaker to this date hasnt met any one who thinks the ladder isnt broken.........
Why can The Nosebreaker only see ten players of each rank! This is not tennis. The Nosebreaker is not a tv
repair man!!!!!
marscapone is not an aduaquate substitute for bbq sauce in a hot dog.........................................


The Nosebreaker likes this post!

The nosebreaker speaks in 3rd person which confuses Corgiarmy .

I agree ranked isn't the best. But how would you fix it?

I think that the driving issue behind the ladder is that Glicko is used for both matchmaking and ranking on the ladder. It is a decent algo for matchmaking but it is a terrible choice for ladder ranking. The amount your Glicko rating changes depends on your rating deviation (RD) which shrinks as you play more games and grows in the time between games. This means that if you play a lot of games in a short time your RD becomes tiny and your Glick rating becomes locked in. This is not a bad thing for matchmaking, but it is terrible for a ladder. You should not be able to lock in your position on a ladder. It should remain always dynamic and at risk to keep you playing.

Use pa stats ladder add in decay.
Problem solved.
The community is too small to have matchmaking be anything other than two guys online they play...
The game pa is on the other side now we are past peak oil......
The Nosebreaker doesnt mind getting matched with better players he loss all the time... He has run out of tears!





The Nosebreaker likes this post

Matchmaking and ranking are orthogonal issues, how, and if, matchmaking works has nothing to do with how the ranking should work.

My point was simply that the ladder is broken because Uber is using a matchmaking algorithm for ranking.

This is a disturbing turn of events.... The Cdrkf agrees fully with The Nosebreaker.... is this the first sign of the apocalypse?

Badfucatus thinks Nosebreaker is correct...

Marscapone has nothing on bbq sauce! Uber these issues need addressing! Where do you stand on this hot dog issue?

I said this in another thread, you should not PUNISH people for not playing, you should REWARD for playing more.

I will not play again and again just to regain rank to play with people on my skill level, because of decay I have to gain Uber yet again from Gold. And do it again in another months, because I stopped playing for month, because I had another great game on PC. This is stupid, and it will only cause me to not play ever, because I would need commitment for ranked play forever.

If people play after some time, they will go down anyway if they did not learn anything in break. That is not a problem.

Here is a simple ranking algorithm that still should make for am livelier and more exciting ladder than what PA has now:

1. The ranking is based on points.
2. You earn between 0 and 20 points for each ladder match you win depending on how many points the winner and looser has. Formula: 1 / ( 1 + Exp( -4 * ( l - w) / t ) ) * 20, where l = loser's points, w = winner's points and t = ladder leader's points. Matches will on average earn the winner 10 points.
3. Loosing does not cost you points.
   
4. Everyone on the ladder looses 1% of their points every day.
   
5. Everybody gets to see everybody's points.

There are several advantages to this system over the current system:

1. The amount you earn doesn't shrink with the number of games played. This means there is no disincentive against playing a lot on the ladder.
   
2. Because you don't loose points by loosing a match there is no disincentive against highly ranked players to play. They do not risk their points.
3. The proportional decay means that if no one plays everybody's rank will stay the same.
   
4. The decay means a player has to play more to maintain your points. You have to keep running just to stay in place. Because the decay is proportional and the point gain from winning flat a player with a lot of points has to win more often to stay in place. A player with 100 points looses 1 point per day and only has to win around one match every ten days to stay in place. A player with 1000 points looses 10 points per day and has to win a match a day just to stay in place.
   
5. At the top of the ladder it gets even worse. The top ranked player can only play against players with less points than him, which means he can only earn less than 10 points per win.
   
6. Somewhat offsetting the previous point is the fact that i expect the point difference between ranks to be bigger in the upper tail of the distribution.
   
7. Because you can see your own points you always get some positive feedback when you win.
   
8. Because you can see other player's points you also get concrete goals to work toward.

The algorithm can be tweaked by changing the 20 in the formula to change the average points a win earns, or by changing the 4 in the formula the change how much the point difference between the winner and the changes the points earned from a win, or by changing the decay percentage, but even a small change in the percentage will have a huge effect on cumulative decay.

@jables You were looking for ways to liven up the ladder. Implementing the above is a good start.

I am more fan of seasons/ system like in starcraft or a chess ranking system and think that is the way to go

1. Read @Quitch's eXodus Article on the matter.
2. Do what it says.
3. Now everyone happy.

This isn't the first time this has happened BTW.

Kinda related.....
Jables has been dropping hints that something groovy/awesome is on the horizon (mid august) and the clever money is that it's ladder related. Could be wrong though, could be an epic orbital monkey lord launcher, or something to do with hot dogs...

FTFY

I've sadly seen no direct indication it is ladder related. Jables said it might short term help with activity, but long term he would be thinking about stuff like seasons. I'd say that indicates it is _not_ ladder related. Or at least not seasons.

Random other thought:
While a points driven ladder is substantial I think the matching should still be based on a pure skill based system like glicko and I would love to be able to see both rankings in separate ladders: Skill overall and seasonal points.
So you have points to fight for, but you can also see where the system positions you exactly skill wise.

It looks like the pa stats ladder now are linked to uber ranking system!! I think that is a good step in the right direction (unofficial) That means that players can get a ranking number and get a ladder to fight for. This alone actually makes me tempted to actually do 1v1 ranking (only played a couple of matches half a year ago) Spread the word folks and make the good old ladder run again!!

Edit: Not linked two ways only one, and it is only me who didn't know they got the 1v1 data from ranked if both have pa stats.

They are not linked to Ubers system. Nobody has access to Ubers internal ranking structures. If we had that we at least would have a full list of all players. But we have not.

Why did a ranked match between gandalf and qzipco do anything at the ladder then?

Because both had PA Stats enabled. The PA Stats ladder page uses 1v1 games it finds on PA Stats.
Fun fact: PA Stats also internally calculates a 1v1 ranking using ELO. It used to use that for the skill based matchmaking service it had.
All hail Matiz I guess.

out of 2136 people who played at least 1 game

Now I am disappointed but I am also curious about the rest of that list, want to post it?