It has been mentioned that the scoring system it being tweaked in the new patch. I would offer this comment. At present, there is too much movement between players of close rank. I played a game against the #4 player when i was #3. He lost and moved down to #8 while i moved up to #2. It would seem to me that the system does not give as much weight to the position of each player as it should because there is no way someone should drop 4 slots just by loseing a game to the player 1 step above. I would think that there should be minimal movement, both up and down when 2 very closely ranked players play. Also, should not the score be based on the rank of the players at the start of the game, not the rank they have when the game ends. as it does now.

The system used is mysterious to me, but I have seen great conversatin' about it in the past. I think it requires much formulaic cypherin'.
Reminds me of my days at KU in Calculyngus...and my professor: Jose Jimenez...who was once an astronaut.

Hi,

Please have a look there, message #3
http://www.massiveassault.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4211
Not all the points deal with scoring (but also with trial players and players with less than 15 games, whose score is unreliable).

Glicko is not as mysterious as it... sounds?!

About the point from Storm440: too much movement. Well, just read quickly the white paper from Glickman (*), and you'll see that a period should exist for calculations, and NOT calculating the score at each game. This, undoubtly, will smooth the score change. Silly example: 4 games {W,L,W,W}; instead of having for score {up, down, up, up} you'll have a smooth one {up}. The more game you play within a period, the more accurate your score would be: you can guess it by yourself, although it is also written in Glicko's explanations.

Well, if you still need this "real-time score" with its up&down, here's a suggestion: just add a "average score" which would be the average of all your previous "real-time scores" from the whole previous week/month. This new "average score" should be more accurate, isn't it? Anyway, I personally would find this solution weird since Glicko IS smoothing changes IF you take a period.

Olivier

(* A link could be find there: http://www.massiveassault.com/clans/nwo/allratings2.php where you'll find another way to smooth drastically the score change: individual score by planet (score which moves a lot, as here in MAN2(?)), and then an average score for whole planets (score moves less, since you divide the theorical Glicko's delta/move by the numbers of planets).