Spotlight

newbieA (1781) / StonyDrew (1733) ®

"undead turtled vs orcs" ~newbieA




[21/10] newbieA is the master of the universe at position 1!
[19/10] StonyDrew has rightfully claimed the ultimate spot and is ranked number 1!
[09/10] newbieA is the number one contender at 2nd place.
[09/10] vvd has fought plenty to become one of the Top 5.
[02/10] newbieA says there's only a few left to beat and enters the Top 5.

News

skill class overview added...

Next to the Ladder in the menu there's now Skill Classes. For those of you that believe just like me that a slight difference in Elo points doesn't really mean much or anything at all when comparing players who haven't played hundreds or thousands of games (and even then perhaps) the Classes overview may bring more satisfaction: It shows a ranking that's currently based on a range of 50 Elo points in relation to each class' leaders points.

It works like this: It takes the top player on the ladder and creates the first class - obviously he/she should be in it Then it asks us how close other players have to be to that player point wise, in order to be placed in the same skill class as him/her. In our case, and currently, I've set that value to 50 points, so all that are within 50 p of the #1 player on the ladder would be in the same class as him/her.

Eventually there will pop up a player that doesn't qualify into the first class together with the others. What happens? Not much: A new class - the second - is created, and that players rating is the top of his class. So, in order to qualify into the second class all other players get their elos compared with his - are they within the 50 or not? And so it continues until all ladder players have been placed in a class.

What's the use of this? Good question.

I personally felt like it would give me more info in most cases about a players skills than the conventional and detailed ladder. The classes can actually be seen as an optional way to understand the ranking, and all players within the same class can be said to have the same rank (while they will still have different ratings of course). How useful it is becomes on what kind of information you want and your perspective/understanding of skill measurement within a ladder. It has some limitations with border cases, but so do all classification systems.

The 50-range can easily be changed to whatever, but I thought it might be a good staring point and it looked like a reasonable number. Making it too low will defeat the purpose with the classes and just create a regular ladder, and if we make it too high it will tell us less about player skills as it will gather more and more different players within the same classes.

What would be really good is to get some feedback and thoughts on this so we can decide if we should keep it or not. Please mail me and share your thoughts.

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2008-07-`3 - New features available
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