Ladder needs some form of decay

@FtXCommando Completely agree with the need for a one-time hard rating reset, especially given what you had said. I suspected that because a lot of rating was locked away in old inactive accounts that the curve was shifted so far to the left, and it seems a hard reset is the only real solution to that particular problem. Also, it seems like the new division system is the best opportunity to actually do a hard reset.

@Tagada My understanding is that your underlying rating will be unchanged and you will just have some minimum amount of activity to get your visual rank to match your underlying rating. If you play some minimum amount of games during that month there is no reason that one 1.8k guy with 60h should seed higher than you.

on the faf promotional discord I did have a look at the ladder rating distribution over time. And found it did decay in the fist couple of years quite a bit and after that has stabilized somewhat. Trueskillrating in itself has a tendency do deflate with new, unexperienced players joining the pool. That is in my opinion the most probable explanation for the avrg µ droping about 200 points from 2016 to 2017. But there have also been some shinanigans with the trueskill parameters in that time. The plot shows µ:

The problem with rating decay is that you add an additional mechanism for rating deflation. I have to agree that a hardreset wouldn't be that bad since trueskill is one of the fastest converging rating systems out there. At least according to the white paper that microsoft released.

The league system will solve this problem without the need to touch trueskill. The trueskill value will remain the same but you will not have it displayed anywhere. Instead you have your league and points displayed which will reset every season.

There's actual game balance value in increasing people's search range when they haven't been seen on the relevant ladder for a while in a while - that person could be improving in custom games or be afk and now be 300 points worse than they were. If you're well over 2k you would only really have to search once to avoid this and keep your rating and crush whatever 1800 you can find.

Seems very related, but what's the plan with ladder divisions/the general vision for ladder? Feel like dumping that all in one spot on the forums (along with things like TMM's future plans) would be helpful - can't find much from searching. Don't have to have timeframes, but letting people know what the plan is and what needs to be done (perhaps prodding people to help who can) might be good.

Most stuff was on the old forum in the TMM thread by me and the divisions thread by BlackYps. Maybe one day I'll have motivation to transfer stuff here but currently I don't.

What needs to be done:
https://github.com/orgs/FAForever/projects/7

But we're quite close to a "minimum viable product" as it is and a lot of the issues left I believe are mostly QOL stuff (leaderboards, me being able to actually change pools without bothering brutus, displaying stuff)

@Askaholic said in Ladder needs some form of decay:

The league system will solve this problem without the need to touch trueskill. The trueskill value will remain the same but you will not have it displayed anywhere. Instead you have your league and points displayed which will reset every season.

Was talking about the idea of a reset with BlackYps the other day and we basically arrived at the conclusion that while the trueskill distribution on FAF is a problem, we basically incidentally have solved the problems with it without, well, actually solving it.

Mainly:
The problem of new players having 1500 mu in a distribution where the median is more like 700? We have a new linear extrapolation matchmaking process for new players where they climb UP to their actual mu after 10 or so games. This will result in a less efficient matchmaking algorithm based on the theoretical expectations of trueskill, but it'll make a better experience for new players and actually match the median user against new players earlier on.

The problem of leaderboards full of inactivity? Well, as you mentioned, the new season based division system will resolve the issue.

With those issues resolved, the reset kind of doesn't bring us anything aside from prettier graphs.

@FtXCommando said in Ladder needs some form of decay:

What needs to be done:
https://github.com/orgs/FAForever/projects/7

This is just TMM right, is there this kind of thing for the divisions? Also I just searched Blackyps posts in the old forums and couldn't find any thread he started or post he made about this, also couldn't find anything when searching for Ladder Divisions (other than a conversation you and I had about ladder more broadly in February which is somewhat outdated now and was quite vague regarding divisions) - could you point me in the right direction please?

I really do think it would be worth consolidating some of the roadmap/vision/what's in development stuff somewhere easy to find on the forums or in the client.

Yeah turns out it's mostly spread out over some general posts.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U60RylfoWdKADorXZmiXs3pq7MYn9cCXy1UMp-js4U0/edit?usp=sharing

This is the general structure.

Also don’t think it needs much help, it’s been done for a bit and mostly is waiting on tmm.

Thanks, interesting read. So if it's done and just waiting, the divisions would start getting rolled out once whatever teething problems TMM has are dealt with after implementation?

From what I know, TMM and divisions/leagues are completely separate. Neither is waiting for the other, they just both happen to have a similar expected completion date. Both of them are pretty much complete, and are facing the usual logistical delays of finding time for server updates, code reviews, testing, etc.