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    IMPLEMENTED - A bit more damping in the rankings

    Implemented

    With the Autumn season behind us I have now switched on the extra damping on badsquash so it is the same as for SquashLevels.

    It doesn't make much difference to most players - just a few of the faster movers - and it does smooth out some of the peaks and troughs of our 'unexpected' results. It does seem better.

    Original post

    There are a few things I've been asked recently and reasonably consistently for from the ranking system and that's:

    • More damping/less volatile ranking history
    • Treat the boxes as less significant than the league matches
    • Treat events/tournaments asmore significant than the league matches

    So I'm in the process of modfiying the ranking process so that:

    • Events and tournaments use the current damping (which gives you the first 5% change undamped and then exponentially increases the damping for anything above 5%).
    • League matches start with the above and reduce the change for both players by 25%.
    • Box matches do the same but reduce the change by 50%.

    There will some effects of this:

    • Players moving fast in the rankings will move a little more slowly now and even slower if they play mostly box matches. This doesn't change the level they're getting to - just the number of matches it takes to get there.
    • Players' ranking/level history will be less volatile
    • It's more important that you play at your level in a league match than a box match - it will take twice as many poor box games to do the same damage to your level as it does today.
    • At the end of a tournament, player levels should be much more focused on how well they played in the tournament and less impacted by the league matches or even box matches in the run up. I.e. we should be able to take a snapshot of the levels at the end of the tournmament and present that as how well everyone was playing. Still not the same as the tournament results per se - but could well be closer.
    • There's a chance that this could tip some players over the 2x out of order rule and generate new penalties. For those teams playing anywhere near level order this won't have any effect but it might catch some teams playing the rules a bit close to the wind... If this happens (and there hadn't been a penalty before) then we'll probably give them an amnesty for this specific case but, really, no-one should be anywhere near the 2x out of order threshold anyway! 2x is a lot...

    Note that the rankings are re-run from the very first matches back in 2006 every night so this change will affect *all* matches in the sysetm - not just those after the change is made.

    I plan to implement this over the weekend and will update this news item when done. It should improve things as it addresses the two requests I've had - in particular the issues with box games having too much effect on tournament ranking.

    The magic numbers: 25% and 50% are somewhat arbitrary but seem about right. I tried 50% and 75% and it just felt like it was damped too much. It's important that you get a measurable increase for each good result - that's half the fun!

    Let's see how it goes and, as ever, all feedback welcome.

      Richard.

    To view this page on badsquash: http://www.badsquash.co.uk/news.php?article=272