ELO vs. TRUE SKILL

"Dude! Too soon..." ...say the people that I can already hear from a mile away.

But I say nay! this is EXACTLY the time to decide these things as they may be set in stone forever. and an unofficial ladder is already in place. Soon UBER will have to pump out it's own... what will they go with?

If you search true skill in google this will be your third result.

ELO rates teams inefficiently TRUE SKILL respects teamwork as a skill.
also I would like to point out my wish to also have a ladder for certain mods for wich uber (or the community by majority vote) has validated the balance. Hence once into PA, you
would have a list of different ladders to play on and playing mods would be extra motivating since you would get your points from them too.

person B says : "I'm very well ranked on the stock mix ladder (mix for 1 v 1; 6 v 6 ; 2 v 2 v 2 v 2 v 2 v 2 ...ect) but I'm also very good at the whatsawhosie mod. Oh I wish that it was also ranked sooo much!! I could play this mod without feeling like I'm wasting time (yes time is of the essence for a gamer, no I will not accept criticism)!"

-"fear not!", says tatsu,"did you know that there is a ladder candidate section in PA?"

person B replies : "Oh golly-gee no I didn't! Does that mean I can vote up a mod listed there to be reviewed and validated by Uber for balance, this way if it passes validation it becomes one of the ladder options and I can show everybody how good I am on that mod compared to everyone else???"

tatsu : "Yes it does ! run along now, person B, be free"

vote! debate!

TrueSkill is patented,[3] and the name is trademarked, so therefore it is limited to Microsoft projects and commercial projects that obtain a license to use the algorithm.

TROLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

But seriously now, skill ranking systems aren't hard to do.

well it's perfectly legal to write your own skill system using the same math, let's say trueskill as an idea.

If microsoft patents water, will you pay them every time you take a gulp of anything containing water? will you pay them for the 60% water your body is composed of?

Its high time I check my *** see if I haven't been iron-branded with "property of microsoft" it could have happened and I wouldn't have noticed.

just WOW. I freakin hate the way things are going nowadays. Now a simple math algorithm can be property?

Anyhow it's been done before and it can be done again. the math from this algorithm can be extracted and used anew. so consider that it'll be called "UBER SKILL" (which sounds great to me!) and share the same principles without twisting murcrusurfffft's nipples too hard.

While Math itself is not patentable (but implementation of said math can be), reverse engineering trueskill (as it is not fully published), would be dangerous. Even if Uber was in the right, microsoft can throw so much money at the litigation that it would be cheaper to use something else or just license it from microsoft.

Or to just... You know, build your own. That **** involves normal curves and things, yo.

Damn I am rusty on my statistical mathematics. My math teacher explained normal curves about as well as a butcher would explain integrated circuitry.

Isn't there a pretty nice documentation about trueskill? Maybe not into the last detail, but definitely enough to use as a basis of your own system. Using their own documentation to write something of your own is probably not a problem. Just don't call it trueskill

Just had a quick squiz at the Trueskill wikipedia page. I think someone needs to set up a new account on something that uses it, and record everything stat change for a few months. Throw it through a regression algorithm (Excel might have one).

You just gotta change the name to something similar. Dollar stores up here sell "goldfish" crackers, called "sea creatures" TrueSkill = VerifiedExpertise? (thesarus.com ftw!) Or just 1337 that biznatch: "7|2\/35|<!11"

:lol:

Uber has a similar system to Trueskill in SMNC/MNC (With Xbox MNC using Trueskill) though the population was far too low for them to really refine it's algorithm.

By the way, the poll makes no sense.
Math-wise, Elo is trueskill made for a time when you don't have computer to help you do the math, and so is over-simplified.

It would be like a poll for FPS with "control : mouse or keyboard only?"

?

http://www.moserware.com/2010/03/comput ... skill.html
There is a PHP and C# implementation there, and I've done a python one (https://bitbucket.org/thepilot/python-trueskill) and a partial LUA one (in FAF codebase).

Did you just blindly implement the given code?

I want to know the maths. Curves and factor graphs aren't useful.

Check the links I gave you.

The math are inside the paper (and the code), also there nothing really fancy about it, it's really a basic application of gaussian curves, like elo is a crude approximation of the same thing.

The only think that it bring is the factor graph and the skill chain, it's also described in the paper.

The paper is available here :
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/trueskill/
(ie http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/6795 ... 6_0688.pdf)
And a "decoded" version here (because the original publication is split into several PDF) :
http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1083 ... eSkill.pdf

I know it's possible to patent such thing in USA, but it's not legal in Europe.

ie. I'm using a hair grooming tool for maya that is using a algo for computing coordinates from a local axis for a curve, that is patented by another similar plugin.

It's not a US company, and that plugin can be sold everywhere in the world, but not the USA.

Hopefully the general direction is to invalidate such patent in USA too instead of making it valid in Europe

1. TrueSkill is not perfect.

2. ELO is not perfect.

So let's not pretend it's a clear-cut choice, aye?

Your later posts make me wonder why you said this. This is a silly thing to say

I made one, it's simple, but it works.

They aren't that hard to do, as it boils down to some somewhat-simple analytic math.

Thanks Zep,

I just hope Uber will make a good skill rating algorithm. and steer clear from elo that plagues games

Sure, you can make a rating system that works. But it isn't necessarily going to be complex, nor is performance of the rating system going to work over a largely-disparate range of player skills (which is how games like SC2 attempt to mitigate this issue with leagues, thus separating out the overall rating into lots of subsections).

In my experience, there has not been a single player rating system in any game that I have ever played that is perfect, mainly because a player rating system does not effectively rate the complicated nuances of player skill. The largest examples of this (in my experience) are:

1. Starcraft 2.
2. Most MOBAs (I think the ELO system LoL has implemented is better than the others, IIRC - I say this as a long-term HoN player).
3. Dawn of War 2 (while using TS through GfWL and while using an ELO equivalent through Steamworks).

I can (and have) written an XML parser that just about vaguely works. That doesn't mean you should use it over something like JAXB or a more traditional parser - and I am not insulting your skill here - even if I got it wholly working in a way that suited me, it still wouldn't necessarily work for someone elses' game (I'm writing an XML-driven save system, though I shelved the XML parser for the time being and moved to JSON using Google's GSON library. Much easier ).

If it means anything Eka (from the Uber team) has already expressed his dislike of ELO as a player rating system. So take that for what it's worth?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98P-gu_vMRc

ELO indeed.