In a regular ladder game yesterday, it showed my global rating on the scoreboard (SSB v6), I've never seen that before
Is there a way to initialize trueskill with values other than zero? I understand the system doesn't like it if you go in and just tweak the numbers. It wants to learn from actual matches. But can't you programatically make fake matches in order to generate ratings? For example: if you have 1000 players to add to TMM, have the system "match" them up at random for 2v2s and decide who wins these fake games based on global/ladder rating. Make let's say 10-20 fake games each and use that info to build initial 2v2 ratings. (More fake games should give more accurate initial ratings but less deviation so it will be slower to correct the ratings.) The number of fake games per player might be based on the number of real games they have. If they are close to zero rating anyway or they have fewer than 50 real games in the last year, don't put them into any "fake" games because it's fine for them to start with zero.
If we are going to have more and more ratings systems (3v3, 4v4, seton's, special events, etc.) it would make sense to start most of them with ratings other than zero. Maybe a special event "race to the top" starting at zero makes sense. But for a Seton's rating, you could invent the fake matches with data from actual ranked seton's 4v4 games from each player's history.