State of the V:EKN - October 2013

Lönkka wrote:

fredsct wrote:

You record who the opponents are in a game or tournament and take their ratings into account.

So if you play against players with lowratings you get zero/low points? But if everyone starts off with 0 rating points how will anyone make progress...

I've been pointedly trying to avoid discussing alternatives just because it diverts the subject of the thread but, since you asked, this has all been thought about by Arpad Elo when he created his chess ranking system. The answer is that you start each person off with a standard positive number, say, 3000. When any two players meet, the winner of the contest receives a sum of points from the loser (so it's a zero-sum system, so jhattara is wrong to say "more activity means higher ratings" except in regard to aberrations from new players' initial ratings) based on the inverse of the difference between their prior rankings. So the winner always gets something for winning - albeit only very little if his rating was a lot higher than the loser's. Since VtES is a multiplayer game, there needs to be a system to collapse a multiplayer game result down into a series of individual head-to-head results but that's fairly easily done. It has a number of flaws and warts which people which people (especially in VEKN - since we're all geeks here! B-) ) will talk endlessly about. None of them are so fatal you couldn't program the system and get something out but Ben's probably right to very suspicious of how meaningful the number would be.

There was once such a system used by VEKN but it didn't work well because:

1) At the time, VEKN had no method of processing ratings with missing reports and then reprocessing them once a missing report arrives later on (to which Amenophobis refers in this thread). With modern technology, it really shouldn't be a problem. (I think saving the intermediate ratings calculations derived after every single report would be necessary aspect of the system, saving recalculation time at the cost of a little disk space.)

2) An arbitrary coefficient used in the system caused ratings to bounce up and down horribly, making the resulting rating totally meaningless. Your rating was essentially based only on your last few games. It was a totally fixable problem. Whether the resulting ratings would ever be that meaningful, however, is another matter.

Fred

Right-ho, thanks for the info!


Anyways, AFAIK, the biggest problem in your neck of woods (US of A) is the fact that Princes don't submit their Archons. It doesn't matter how crappy or nice a system we have, or would have, for ratings if the Archons aren't submitted.

I think that submitting one will take up around half a minute or so. Digging up player VEKN numbers will probably take, like two, three minutes...

EDIT: Players (everywhere in the world), put pressure on your Princes on this! Let the Man know what you think of slow uploading! Power to the people!

Lönkka wrote:

Anyways, AFAIK, the biggest problem in your neck of woods (US of A) is the fact that Princes don't submit their Archons. It doesn't matter how crappy or nice a system we have, or would have, for ratings if the Archons aren't submitted.uploading!

I disagree. The biggist problem in our neck of the woods is that VEKN rankings hinge on the number of events attended - which may very well be a huge part of the disincentive to bother sending them in. It may be a far easier issue to grasp in our part of the world because:

1) The smaller population densities means that enthusiastic players are starved for tournaments because other concentrations of players are far less often within reasonable driving distance.

2) The smaller population densisities frequently mean that insufficient play happens to be worth following the game at all - so even in places that have enough players to create tournamentss, organizations frequently collapse anyway for lack of interest due to (in a frustrating circular chain) lack of play. This is why other concentrations of player don't exist within reasonable driving distance: the kind of small towns and rural hamlets within driving distance of Phoenix simply aren't going to support them.

This is a general problem with collectible card games, especially multiplayer cardgames like VtES that require a minimum of players to make a decent game. A board game you can buy and just stick in your closet and pull out whenever you can get enough players - even if it's many years after you bought the game. But CCGs require ongoing investments and if you have no one to play, you stop making the investment yourself - thus exacerbating the problem in your area. That's why you very seldom hear from VtES groups in the middle of nowhere.

It's also why I'm so antagonistic to the VEKN point system that tends to reward attendance at events. IMHO, we just don't need yet another incentive system that in some way rewards people who are lucky enough to already live in the relatively dense areas - much though I understand that it also rewards skill. From my perspective, it's yet another circular chain of causation that tends to discourage tournament play in the areas where tournament play is already very challenging to arrange.

Fred

fredsct wrote:

The biggist problem in our neck of the woods is that VEKN rankings hinge on the number of events attended - which may very well be a huge part of the disincentive to bother sending them in.

I wouldnät say the ratings hinge on number of events attended.

Ratings take into account the top 8 scores from the past 18 months.
If spread evenly, that would be a tournament every 10 weeks.
Naturally if you play in more events the better chance you have of getting better ratings.

But it does me little good if I play in at least 17 tournaments annually since I'm a crappy player and won't usuallys core that well. So attending a multitude of events does me little good since the top 8 will not give me that great rating points anyways.


We seem to see the system from different angles; apples and oranges if you will...

Lönkka wrote:

I wouldnät say the ratings hinge on number of events attended.
...
We seem to see the system from different angles; apples and oranges if you will...

I think you're refusing to concede the obvious. Of course ratings hinge on number of events attended: if you attend zero events, you will score zero points.

I've been very careful not to say skill doesn't matter to VEKN point system because that isn't true. In the end, both things matter. Trouble is, in order to rate skill, one of the two doesn't belong there.