As the Wiki link I posted shows, there can still be deflation even in this situation, because more points are not injected into the system when players get better over time - the average for new players stays at 2000 even though new players are much better now than then. This may very well be more significant than the retirement effect. But it's true that it's hard to say exactly how much the system is inflated/deflated.

The Wiki article does not demonstrate that because it does not take into account that an old star who rises to 2200 may fall back to 2000 and therefore have ALL of his points recycled into the system. For players like Ra and Casy, that is very close to being reality.

Furthermore, there is constant addition of new blood. Most of the progamers who actively participate in leagues today are post-LYH (Boxer) era and the few exceptions, players like ChRh, Yellow and Reach, are below 2000 in 1v1 rating.

Most of today's progamers are post-LYY (Nada) era even.

The fact that Boxer's ELO peak is so low despite his incredible success (AND streakiness -- something which the ELO system favors) is itself proof of inflation since nobody else from that era had an ELO close to his. I doubt anyone other than Boxer surpassed 2200 until Nada came along. By then new blood had come along and things began to change. Players from the LYH era lost momentum against the LYY era stars such as Ra and Xellos and Chojja -- some of whom had longevity compared to the LYH era stars.

It's not until the post-LYY era that ELO ratings really started to level out. At that point, enough of the game had been invented so that old stars could remain near the top for quite some time.

Also, a system that accurately measures SC skill SHOULD feature some bias. The question is not whether or not it should be biased, but in what areas it should be biased and how much. The reasons for this are 1. the maps themselves are inherantly biased, so winning as T on a T favoring map is less impressive than winning as T on a map bad for T -- but it should also be taken into considertaion that a player may specialize on a map that other players of his race are bad at like Anytime on Nemesis or Flash on Katrina, and 2. SL games are given higher priority than PL games and should therefore count for more. Particularly, a player still alive in SL who faces a player no longer alive in SL is at a disadvantage in that the PL-only player may fine tune builds for the maps his team wants him to work on and then use them on the SL player in PL, but the SL player is better off saving creative builds for SL.

Anyway, I think we can agree that there is no 100% satisfying way to rate players.

IzzyCraft

United States4487 Posts

July 10 2008 18:13 GMT

#63

I'm sure someone said this or something but elo has special conditions depending on who doing it im sure kespa has something special they use and so does tlpd for chess at lest i believe it was
//Players below 2100 -> K factor of 32 used
//Players between 2100 and 2400 -> K factor of 24 used
//Players above 2400 -> K factor of 16 used

Also cuz your using a fixed k there is no inflation you worry about inflation because when someone with a score less then 2100 wins over a guy with over 2100 different k give different results although the playing may get +32 to his score the high score player only gets -24 as his max and thus inflation

But then again i think the currently chess league has a like k= bleh until a certain amount of games

Also im amazing you could do all that considering your elo calculations had to be time accurate to get proper ratings.

Anyways what did you use to do all this excell?

oneofthem

Cayman Islands24199 Posts

July 10 2008 18:46 GMT

#64

question, what's the formula for the 'big bang' points. everyone starts out evenly at a certain number?

gravity

Australia2330 Posts

July 11 2008 02:32 GMT

#65

On July 11 2008 03:07 Mortality wrote:

Show nested quote +

I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say. Sure, players retiring with an elo of less than 2000 does cause inflation, but the averages I posted earlier (1955 average for retired vs 2015 average for active) show that this isn't a huge effect. On the other hand, deflation (in the sense of a certain fixed rating representing higher and higher skill as time progresses) occurs because on average, Starcraft players keep getting better, but the average number of points available barely increases. Boxer started with 2000 points and so does a new player, but a new player would kick 1999 Boxer's ass very easily, which means that the new player should actually have a rating of 2300+. This easily overwhelms the retirement effect that you're talking about, so that the system is likely actually significantly deflated in terms of absolute skill measurement. Basically, there aren't enough points to go round to represent the greater average skill of modern players compared to old ones.

It might be better to do things like chess and use a provisional rating for new players instead of a fixed 2000 rating, but that would make the calculation more complicated

. I might look it up and try to implement such a system if it doesn't seem too bad, to see what the effect on the results is.

gravity

Australia2330 Posts

July 11 2008 02:34 GMT

#66

On July 11 2008 03:46 oneofthem wrote:
question, what's the formula for the 'big bang' points. everyone starts out evenly at a certain number?

Yes, in this version of the system everyone starts at 2000.

gravity

Australia2330 Posts

July 11 2008 02:36 GMT

#67

On July 11 2008 03:13 IzzyCraft wrote:
Anyways what did you use to do all this excell?

I used a Ruby script. First I downloaded the relevant parts of TLPD as HTML files with wget and cleaned up the results with a HTML-Text converter to make them easier to parse.