Glicko rating makes good player disappear

@tommerrall949     It is very obvious that you are right.  

@Babyagun   You have a really bad habit of argueing against people who bring prefectly valid points.

Seriously man,   you need  to do something about that.

At the moment, when I play teams,   1600 players are about just as good as I am,  and was about as good as  Gremu  or  Lincher2000,  both of whom are on the leaderboard.   I with Gremu, I could beat Rezacs  with Gremu perhaps once out of 4.

This is non-sens.  The situation Tommerrall949is describing is obviously a real issue. No amount of wishful thinking will make it go away.  Good players have stopped playing team mode.  It's BAD for the game.

Ratings need to go back to the previous way they were calculated, or ratings need to be reseted.  Or some other solution that I dont see.

But something needs to be done...

> At the moment, when I play teams,   1600 players are about just as good as I am,  and was about as good as  Gremu  or  Lincher2000

The main word here is was. It is a well known fact that players lose their skills if don't play for long time. Do you think you are an exception?

> Good players have stopped playing team mode.

Again, it is just your opinion. Can you show the stats? (What players, how many, how long, the reason they don't play.)

> Ratings need to go back to the previous way they were calculated,

We discussed it already. There is no reason to change it now.

In September we will release a new version where FFA rating will be divided by 2 (not 3) and Top players (both FFA and Teams) will need to play 3 games in 2 weeks (not 1 game) to stay on the leaderboard. Enough changes for now.

Later we can reconsider it, but there is no reason to roll back to ELO from Glicko.

> or ratings need to be reseted.  

It is not an option at all. You didn't play for many months. Other players played hundreds and thousands of games. A reset means they just lost their time.

> You have a really bad habit of argueing against people who bring prefectly valid points. Seriously man,   you need  to do something about that.

1. Don't make it personal.
2. Support your opinions with facts (not just emotions and wishes) and they will be considered as serious.

> @tommerrall949 It is very obvious that you are right.

This phrase can be replaced with "@tommerrall949 +1". Because "very obvious" is not an argument.

> The situation Tommerrall949is describing is obviously a real issue.

Look at this:

He was 2109 ELO on 07/08/2018
4 days ago he was 2111 Glicko after 173 games played with new rating system.
Now he is 2037 Glicko after 269 games.

Is this a real issue?

I show numbers to prove my opinion. And ask you to do the same.

@BabYagun Good players have stopped playing teams mode though. You can't deny it. A great example is *****. He had 3 accounts (yes, 3) all of which were in the top 20 (his best account was #3) and he didn't team with himself even once to get there. And guess what? He's gone.

Also, you're misunderstanding what @Ne2willdo was saying when he said "1600 players are about just as good as I am,  and was about as good as  Gremu  or  Lincher2000". He means that 1600 players are of the same ability as Gremu, yet have the same rating as himself. (Although I think it's a bit of an exaggeration)

> Good players have stopped playing teams mode though.

Look at the number of games played by these Top Teams players from 7th of August:

> Good players have stopped playing teams mode though. You can't deny it. A great example is *****.
> He had 3 accounts (yes, 3) all of which were in the top 20

This player is a cheater and all his accounts are banned. (I removed his name from your post, because it is against chess.com rules to shame players.) Please note, that a player may be banned for cheating in classic chess, 4 Player Chess and other chess variants. Even if he didn't cheat in 4PC Teams (as you say), he could cheat in other chess variants. I cannot divulge the details of individual user cases.

I believe people don't quite understand how the Glicko rating system works. I think it's good to be aware of the following.

Similar to the Elo system, Glicko has a "K-factor" — although not called that way — which determines the maximum amount of points you can gain or lose per game. The difference is that for Elo this factor is fixed (e.g. 30), whereas for Glicko this "K-factor" depends on your ratings deviation (RD). If your deviation is high, your "K-factor" will be higher. So, if you don't want to lose a lot of points you should play more, such that your RD goes down. If you play less because you are afraid to lose points, your RD will increase and you will lose even more points.

Consider the game that was mentioned in the other thread. @tommerrall949 and @caiusmersa lost 40.9 and 37.9 points (with RDs 86 and 83) and their opponents gained 25.5 and 23.8 points (with RDs 68 and 66). Had the RDs been the other way around, then @tommerrall949 and @caiusmersa would have only lost around 25 points and their opponents would have gained around 40 points.

To give an indication of how RD changes the K-factor (approximate values):

• if RD = 90, then K = 45
• if RD = 80, then K = 36
• if RD = 70, then K = 28
• if RD = 60, then K = 20
• if RD = 50, then K = 14

Conclusion: play more, not less

@Babyagun  I quit chess entirely for almost a year and when I came back I  had not lost any skills. I'm still about 2100 in blitz.  Or if I lost any,  it came back very quickly.

I'm still just as good as anyone in FFA also.   It looks like I am #4 out of the actual active players. So yeah, I guess  I'm either an exception,   or maybe,  just maybe,  you don'T know what youre talking about?

@Tommerrall     Yes I know it's a bit of an exxageration.  But you get the idea.

The problem is,  let's say hikaru comes and starts playing 4PC team.   How many games will he have to play against 1600 opponents  ( about the maximum you can set the rating range to get a match within 10 minutes...) in order to reach a rating that represents his relative skills?  

The worst part is even if a great player like  Magnus or Hikaru were to play, they would, like anyone, need to adapt.  They would begin by loosing a couple games.  That would lower their RD.  and jthen they would need to win 1000 games  in a row to reach the 3000+ rating that they should have. 

It is clearly suboptimal

Thank you @GDII, it is a pleasure to read such informative and useful posts.

To make it even more clear: the Elo system is a special case of the Glicko system. The rating update formula is essentially the same:

R = R0 + K * (S - E)

where

R = new rating, R0 = old rating, K = max gain / loss, S = actual outcome (win 1, draw 0.5, loss 0), E = expected outcome (probability of winning, value between 0 and 1)

In the Glicko system, the K-factor and the expected outcome E are functions of the RD. However, there is a value for the RD that makes both systems identical. If the RD is approximately 73, then the K-factor will be around 30 and the rating change will be exactly the same as in the Elo system with K-factor 30.

If your RD is higher, you gain or lose more points compared to the Elo system and if it's lower, you gain or lose fewer points compared to the Elo system.

The actual problem is not the rating system, but the matchmaking and the small and uneven player pool. One thing that would certainly help is fixing the rating range selector, but even when that is fixed, the fact remains that there are simply not that many players at the top. Hence, top players do have some disadvantage, because they'll often have to play against players rated (well) below them. They don't get to play against equal opponents as often and they rarely get to play against players rated much higher than them. If the player pool would be larger, you could simply set your rating range to 2000+ and everything would be fine, but unfortunately that's not an option at the moment, because then you'll have to wait an eternity to get a match, as @Ne2willdo pointed out. I don't think there really is a solution to this problem other than getting more people to play 4-player chess.

my rating in teams is 1650+ and i keep getting good points after every game as i am winning each one against players rated well below me.... for eg. i win against two 1250 opponents, i get 6 points! but the moment you lose against them after your silly opponent does a stupid thing, your rating degrades a lot and then you are not winning 6 points after each win... its like 3 or 4 now... i suggest "'re-organising" the glicko system so that old-good players are made to feel like they are new to the game and they start to get their own desired rating points ... but the side effects of my opinion include losing a LOOOOOOT in the first game if they are paired with a noob. 

ohh... how about re-organizing the glicko for the desired players (1500+) and not ones who dont? ..like putting a pop-up on the screen the next time a person visits 4player chess... "Do you wish to continue with your current glicko system or do you want to "re-organize" the glicko system?" ...(they can do it one time only) and lets assume this has an expiration date of 15th September, after which this pop-up is deleted from the server.

Or, if there are more people willing to continue this current system, i would recommend the higher players to play more games to get their rating stable to where it should be.

@MainframeSupertasker, when we implemented Glicko system (07-Aug-2018), we set the same deviation for all players. Now you played 16 Teams games and your dev. is changed only a little. So, if you got 6 points in a game against 2 1250 opponents 2 weeks ago, you should still get the same, or, let's say, 5.9, but not 3 or 4.

Shortly we will open access to the game archive and you'll be able to find your old games and look at rating changes.

@BabYagun Actually, there may be one problem with the way the RD is updated currently:

This is an issue for higher rated players, especially now that few of them are playing. Uneven matches with large rating gaps occur very frequently, which causes the RD of the higher rated players to remain artificially high or even increase, despite actively playing. That means the amount of points they risk to lose also remains high. (Of course, the amount of points to gain is also higher, but against opponents rated well below you that's perhaps the difference between 0.1 or 0.2, which is nothing.)

Have, for example, a look at the last games I played with @gremu. We got matched up against 1100-1300s several games in a row and my RD increased from 78 to 82.

The difference between an RD of 80+ and 65 is quite significant:

• RD = 80+, K = 36+
• RD = 65, K = 24

So, simply because higher rated players frequently have to play uneven matches, they risk to lose 12+ points more than they normally would, if they could play against equal opponents most of the time.

@GDII Agreed. My deviation should be low by now after having played over 300 games in 3 weeks. However it's still above 80 because I keep getting matched up against bad players.

I played my first teams game in 1.5 months. Glicko is probably fine, but how demoralizing it is to win 0.2 points and know that once I lose it will cost 50. I don't really have time to play much in the next 3 weeks, but after that, I might return. How does the number of games change the deviation factor? 

Perhaps make the rating system pinned in the forum, so that it is perfectly clear, and why not have it explained in the help section in-game? Adding a rating calculator would be fun too, to understand hands-on how it really works.

Glicko

Glicko-2

A pinned topic about the rating system already exists: https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/how-the-rating-system-works

@GDII, please copy/paste your posts about Glicko to that topic too, please.

> Glicko is probably fine, but how demoralizing it is to win 0.2 points and know that once I lose it will cost 50.

I understand you. But please look at these games of GM Hikaru Nakamura:

As you can see, he won a game against a 2424 player, but his rating is 3045, as it was before the game. So, he also got like +0.2. (The difference of their ratings is 621.)

This is your game:

You played against 1600+ players with a 1800+ teammate, so the difference is 1000+.

Please notice that you got +0.2 when your lower rated teammate got +0.1. Looks strange, at the first look. This is because it was your first game and your rating is unstable. Your teammate played 1020 games already, so ... Glicko is sure his rating is stable.