Moving On Up - Improving Planetary Annihilation's Ranking System

Wonderful article I hope Uber takes a close look at it

This is a very nice idea. Additional to the decay this estimates your player ranking from below!
That means that the probability of overestimating is reduced. (Overestimation happens when you get lucky and win against a strong (better rated) opponent, and your estimated rating rises above you "real" rating (this is the over estimation part). On the following games (assuming you won't get lucky again) the rating will approximate your "real" rating from above. This gives a player the feeling that he is getting worse, which isn't true, it was the estimate which was too good in the first place.
The only question is if 3 sigma isn't a bit too much.

Can I just say that, even if the ranking system never changes, it would be nice to have additional functionality in the leaderboards page? I feel like I should be able to click on the other players to see some info about their stats... how many games they've played, their win/loss ratio, etc.

You got the ladder system already, give them a break and let them fix issues that are actually important, people managed to whine out a competetive update in an unfinished and unbalanced game, what more do you want.

¨~ Chris