ELO vs. TRUE SKILL

x'D what? dude, pass that around.

I'm sorry but I read like five times and I don't get it x'D

FAF isn't an inside joke (I'm not sure if that's what you thought or not.. ) it's an acronym for Forged Alliance Forever. It's the community-made unoficial lobby and matchmaking system that had more success than the official lobby for Supreme Commander both GPGnet and steam-wise. like the name says it is intended to exist forever. unlike GPGnet which was closed without warning.

FAF uses the trueskill rating system, kind of as a response to Starcraft II's obnoxious use of ELO.
I am a firm believer that ELO works for chess but that it is completely inadapted to mass units RTSes, especially when it involves MORE than two players (for which the system was designed, remember : chess, right?) and things like LOL (which leaves me befuddled.).

i dunno what you mean by alt. I use that key on my keyboard. it is also an abbreviation for "alter ego" perhaps?

SC2 does not use ELO afaik

we may need an expert here, I'm absolutely persuaded it does.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=118212

EDIT:
Whatever they do, they get pretty much 50% win/loss for all normal players out of it.
Perfect, I would say

SC2 uses a similar system to ELO but they call it MMR (match making ratting) its more dynamic than ELO and the bigger thing to note about it is that if you keep winning it accelerates your MMR gain so first game you may only get 20 then 50 then 150 ect (numbers are a guess). Which will pretty much happen until a player loses a game. This makes it possible for a player to get from bronze to masters very quickly.

That post describe the league system that is fairly different from their rating system.

Their rating system is a trueskill-like system AFAIK.

EDIT :
This thread describe their rating system, as you can see, really close if not exactly the same as trueskill
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=142211

huh ...
good to know "probably", though .... isn't this crazy? even at team liquid they don't know.

That's Blizzards closed source for you.

what do they mean by probably then?

I can't follow, probably? I am just saying that Blizzard refuses to officially tell us what they are doing.

oh.

A working system that reach a 50% W/L ratio is probably based on probabilities . And there is not a lot of different ways to achieve it.
Even Elo does the same, but in a much simple form, as it was meant to be computed by hand.

So it's fair to assume it's close to trueskill, because it's close to probabilities

It could be a exact replication of trueskill actually, but they hide it to not pay a fee to MS, or just deviate a little from the model for the same reason.

I thought fermiular was a joke. Like anti-nucks.

Yeah that makes sense about ELO not working for Chess.

Yes. An alternative character. It's kind of an MMPORPG term. Not that I play MMPORPGs...

no, that was a typo

it does work for chess. It was made for chess.

Oh.

Sorry for necro, but I want to weigh in here. I think that while trueskill is good, and preferred, there is a variant of it that is particularly good. The version used for Halo 3's ranked matches, for assigning the 0-50 ranks, was more stable than regular implementations. It required more matches played to update the rank. I think what they did was increase the period of time required for it to adjust or reduce the sigma variation or something.

At any rate, the result was that the number was far more indicative than a regular trueskill value, which usually jumps up and down after every game, giving you inconsistent rubber band matches. With the more stable system, your rank would be able to filter out the variation in your performance better and give a more "true" skill.

There is nothing that Microsoft can do better than the Open Source Community, specially regarding something related to pure math.

So, fear not. Just take the ELO system, and start developing from there, keeping it Open Source for any kind of game (not just Uber games). It will be awesome.

I don't know why the FOSS fanboy rant needed to be there. Open Source has a bad track record, which is understandable because they don't tend to get paid. ELO isn't FOSS anyway, it doesn't even come from the computing world. And in every video game it has been used it has given abysmal results.

What are you speaking about? 99% of the software that make possible for you to use your computer has likely been released under some sort of Open Source License. And if it's used, it is for very good reasons.

Perhaps I misunderstood. So, please, explain yourself.

Hopefully, you can't patent maths.
As the Trueskill paper is purely math, you are free to do your own open source implementation.

That is already done actually.