Please show rating changes in replay vault

I'll recap some of the arguments for the league system because the original discussion is some years old already and was mainly held between contributors, so might have missed quite some people.

One main thing is that we want to hide the intricacies of the Trueskill calculations, because they are quite complicated and not easily understandable by just looking at rating changes.
From this it becomes clear that we can't just keep the rating system next to the leagues, because then we defeat one of the main purposes of the change.

About the negative rating thing:
It happens regularly. I took the time to search for some examples and found multiple in just the recent months



Capping rating at 0 is not a good solution for this. The capping can only be done visually or you fuck up the trueskill calculations. But then if you are negative and you win or lose games you don’t see any rating change at all anymore which will look like a bug to people.

I also found a nice example for confusing point changes on a draw

There are more problems: Different point changes for people in the same team and different point changes for wins in different games. I didn't collect examples for these, but I hope you all know that these happen and that they are not easily understandable. I've repeatedly seen people complain about being treated "unfairly" by the rating system.

From discussion on discord I gathered that people have two main complaints about the league system as it currently is:

• The rating range of people in a division is too high, so they are meaningless to assess the skill level
• top players are not really sorted by rating, robbing them of a proper leaderboard.

We can improve both problems with slight changes to the system. Divisions are already assigned to a rating range. At the moment players are placed 100 rating lower than they are to provide a sense of progression when they rise to their designated division simply by playing. This has the side effect that people are more spread over divisions. We can reduce this by placing people exactly where they are supposed to be. Then a division will hold people of a bracket that is slightly smaller than 100 rating, basically giving you the same granularity as global rating does at the moment. This should be close enough.
We can also change the grandmaster division so that the score points directly reflect the rating. This way people in grandmaster are always sorted by the underlying rating.

One other advantage of the league system is that because of the seasons we have a leaderboard that isn't cluttered with people that haven't played in years. Instead you have to be playing at least three games in the current season to show up.
We could easily increase the season length to six months for example if people think active players should be visible for longer.

For the future it's planned to show the divisions in the ingame scoreboard instead of rating soon. This is already coded.
Later we can also show them in the custom lobby, but this is not yet implemented and might take a while because the lobby code is pretty nasty to work with.

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Is it possible to make League system without rating numbers before 1000 rating, and after 1000 (1500) to make/ add rating points ?
I also got used to them a lot and loved it.

I didn't read any of the previous posts in this thread. I just really want them to change it back so I can see rating changes on replays. Is this just another example of the moderators changing something for no good reason and then defending that decision with their life?...... I find it's so annoying that I can't see the rating changes anymore. To me this was a core part of The FAF experience that is now gone.

Can someone in detail explain to me what you are getting from seeing the exact rating change please? Because I frankly don't get it

It's more so the rating values at certain timepoints, tied to each individual replay. It makes it easy to track someone's progress and, for the mods among us: to detect whether and when exactly rating manipulation may have taken place (i also go through ladder replays frequently just to see how people are doing and happened to snuff out a bunch of smurf accounts myself)

You can do this without showing rating change, so people who don't understand the rating system won't complain about it. At the same time, rating enjoyers get to see rating. Win-win, no?

@blackyps

1. As Stormlantern said, it is a kind of nerd game and we got used to see our sweet green +15 or red -15 rating numbers near our names. You can call it a subjective factor, but for me it is much more interesting than only League icon and Victory / Defeat display.
2. By amount of addded rating / lost rating you can estimate team balance. I'm not sure how it works, but as far as I noticed, if you win in a team with lower rating, you get more points. So just for checking +/- ratio you may know, if there was some drama 50+ game. Also if you win stronger opponnent (you still see those raiting numbers in the game itself, you do not see Leages), you want to know, how many points you won (and sometimes how many points they lost, he he). It is fun moment, we love fun moments in FAF and I hope it will be respected enough.
3. As Sladow said, it is much more easier to track someone's progress in a short period of time. Especially in ladder. Like some month ago Person X was 1600 rating, right now he is 1800. Estimation difference between clearly understandable numbers (1600 one month ago and 1800 now ) is much more obvious for cognitive perception than difference between League icons.
4. I do not see rating manipulation as a real problem, besides all factors each player can estimate another player by his own way. And even someone gets high rating fast by manipulation, in next 1-2 games he will be easily revealed and will not harm high rated lobbies quality, because host and community can share their opinion in lobby before start and prevent it.
5. I do not know if initiator and decision making person of this change plays ladder, but as a current +/- active player I would state, that personally me and everyone with whom I spoke, who play and have interest in some competition there, we are a bit disapointed with this change. Therefore I ask to return it back.

I like to go through the replay vault and pick replays where everyone is in a certain range but this doesn't allow for that. I don't typically watch a replay with a whole bunch of pro players that have the odd Joe in there I'd rather watch a fully pro match instead for study purposes.

There's an old saying in the trades, "if it ain't broke don't fix it" there seems to be too much of that with moderators in my opinion.

Rating is imo simply more concrete as opposed to the more vague league system.

When i play chess it activates my neurons when i see a big green number cause that means im playing well

@dorset said in Please show rating changes in replay vault:

Is this just another example of the moderators changing something for no good reason and then defending that decision with their life?

Moderation team had no input on this decision

My man vindex finished the school of grimplex i see

I strongly deprecate hiding rating changes. I don't mind the league system. I even like it. But please don't hide rating. They are not in conflict with each other.
There are some reasons:

1. Showing ratings and rating changes makes me easier to track and review my progress. For example, if one night someone plays several games and reviews his games before sleeping, he can easily know his rating before each game and how many points he won or lost.
2. Trueskill rating system is accurate and well defined, and it has been used for a long time. However, is our league system accurate? Do you have any relevant papers? What I see is, in each division, each player's score is an integer ranging from 0 to 10, so its precision is worse than ratings, because ratings can have more different values. What's more, when we win a game or lose a game, does this system take our opponents' ratings into account? If not, it will become inaccurate if I am always matched with players with lower ratings (or higher ratings) for several games.
3. Hiding details never solves any problems. If someone has questions about rating changes so we hide rating changes, is the problem solved? No! Therefore, I can't understand why you hide rating changes and show division at the same time. They are not in conflict with each other. We can show both of them.

Anything that makes this game more similar to Overwatch in any way is bad

Reminds me of Youtube getting rid of the dislike counter.

FAF board of directors and shareholders should focus on fixing connection issues and important things like that instead of changing things that don't need changing.

League system never proclaimed itself to be “more accurate” and there is zero point to a paper on said matter because it isn’t a tool for matchmaking. It’s a tool to enable more progression because the whole goal of trueskill is a 50% win rate, that’s it. Divisions can enable people having progression even at a 50% win rate.

There is also basically nothing in trueskill about it proclaiming to be a great leaderboard tool. That is a much wider term than a matchmaking algorithm and divisions enable that wider definition to be tinkered with without ruining the matchmaking experience.

@ftxcommando

1. Do you think "a tool for matchmaking" and "a great leaderboard tool" are two different things? If so, why not show both of them for each replay? It's very useful, not redundant.
2. Do you think "a great leaderboard tool" has lower requirements for accuracy? Is it expected to be fun instead of accurate? In fact, I don't mind it. Fun is great, but we need a value to evaluate and track our progress. I want to know how much progress I have made compared to myself seven days ago, and how much contribution does each game have on the evaluation results. Therefore, showing ratings and rating changes is really essential.
3. In addition, there is another example to show that it is useful. When I review my replays, I usually pay more attention to the games that I lost to players with ratings much lower than me. However, if we only show divisions and hide ratings, I won't know that. If a replay shows that I lost to a player in the same division, what can I know? Maybe I was at the top of the division and he was at the bottom of the same division, or it could be completely the opposite. In short, we can't know how much is the gap between two players if we are only told they are in the same division or adjacent divisions.
4. Therefore, showing rating changes is always beneficial because we can know more information. The rating system has been used for many years, and it is far more than just a matching system. If we hide its details and make it only a matching system, making it not available for tracking our progress or knowing whether a game loss is expected or so on, that will be a completely wrong decision and retrogress

Thank you for giving some detailed reasons. I can't address all individually at this point in time, but I still want to give some clarifications and explanations.

There seems to be some misunderstandings how the division system works. It is not used for matchmaking at all. Matchmaking happens based on rating.
The leage system does take opponnent's ratings into account, just indirectly. Every division has a rating range associated with it and people get placed accordingly. Now if it were to happen that the rating increased but not your winrate (for example because you got matched with higher rated players on average), then at some point your rating is higher than the range of the division you are in. You will then get extra points for each win until you are promoted to the division you are supposed to be in. Similar for the case that your rating drops. This way divisions always correlate with a certain rating range, so they can be used as a rough skill estimate.

the problem with trueskill rating

You gaining 12 points after a win doesn't mean that your skill improved by 12 points.
Your level of play varies from day to day. It depends on how well you slept, how exhausted you are from the day, what your current mood is, etc. When play against someone with 1120 rating that doesn't necessarily mean that that person is a harder opponent for you than the 1070 rated guy in the next game, even though he has higher rating.
1120 is just on average better than 1070. For a single game they are too close to make a definite call. In lower ratings this is exacerbated by the fact that people might be good at some aspects of the game (air, small micro maps) and bad at others. So depending on the map they might vastly over- or underperform relative to their rating.
Trueskill is still accurate on average but frequently people read too much into it, because they don't understand the limitations of the system.

This is no surprise because we don't even show rating as what it is. In reality it is always a gaussian distribution. Instead of displaying rating as a single number it would be closer to reality to show it as a range like 1120-1610. And I am not exagerating the range. This literally the range of established players where it's 99,7% (+- 3 sigma) certain that the real rating is in this interval. The size of this interval should show you that thoughts like "but this player has 40 more rating" are pretty meaningless in reality.

Using the lower end of this range to establish a leaderboard is a completely arbitrary decision but necessary if you want to use rating as a leaderboard because you need comparable numbers. You can't as easily compare different gaussian distributions.

So no, showing rating changes the way we did before is not as beneficial as you think because it carries less information than you think it does.

I hope that I could show with my post that divisions give a good enough estimation of skill while getting rid of the noise that is prone to overinterpretations.

additional examples why we need to hide rating

With the league system we can do adjustments that we can't with just the rating system. For example we can place people lower than they should be on purpose, so will be dragged up by the bonus points simply by playing. That is the enhanced progression FtX is talking about. The downside of this is that the rating spread in a single division increases. Now, it seems that people value it more to have a gauge of skill of players, so I made preparations to disable this soon, so in the future you should only see people of similar rating in a particular division.

We also can adjust things like 1v1 rating being lower for the same skill. We can't easily foresee the consequences of changes to the rating system. On the other hand it is trivially easy and it won't have side-effects to change the rating range that divisions are associated with. This way we can bring different matchmaking queues more in line with each other.

Both these adjustments make it necessary to hide the underlying rating to really make it work

To add one point onto what BlackYps wrote (I wrote a big post that got eaten by a forum error and lost motivation) there isn’t really a problem with having trueskill as a variable on some player info tab that people can see go up and down for themselves. Likewise, it could potentially have usage as a website leaderboard to assist with tournaments. But having it casually adjacent to leagues in the UX will make leagues pretty pointless because there is already a huge community culture around utilizing rating. People will keep using what they have used and new players will continue to get inoculated to care about their trueskill and not their league. Trueskill is a probability heuristic that we only really need to refer to in cases of seriously granular concerns. For example, tournament seeding. Whether a dude is 1230 or 1248 is irrelevant in some singular game.

Well guys,
I see that we speak about completely different things,
We tell you, that we enjoyed to see +green numbers in a replay vault.
You tell us about better estimation of a certain player skill level. This thread is not about proper estimation of a player skill.
It is about replay vault display that we were enjoying to see.

Also I do not mind if your better sleep, better rest and your good family relationship motivates you to get more global rating kappa.
Like improve your real life to be worth to get better in FAF man haha.

Did you even understand what I wrote?
If you don't properly engage with what I write I see no reason to further engage with what you write