Live Chess Stats: A Painful Dilemna...

Ratings are just numbers, I think we should start everyone with a clean slate. After playing for more than 4 months now, i am ready for my numbers to erase, if it does I will not play any rated games anymore, this way my rating will remain at 1200, no one will no how good ot bad I am, & if they play me they know it will be just for the fun of playing chess. 

ERIK, A SUGGESTION to consider, Please ~!? ... About Ratings, it would help us know what to think, if we know whether it will go ELO and be using a decent "Provisional" stage with the 400+ points for win, or 400- for loss. Or will it still be GLICKO, And have to start at 1200 again, if restarted ??

Myself I would truly hate to have to start at 1200 again and work up a few points at a time (because everyone would be low rated then; no highrated to win from). IF it were to start over again, Why not use the 1400 or 1500 start point that is considered AVERAGE in USCF for instance?   ~OR~

If there is no Provisional Method to use, how about just letting us start using our rating from USCF/ FIDE/ elsewhere online blitz/ Or even ICCF ?  Wouldn't it give a better, quicker approximation then than having everyone restart at 1200? I would like to see an adjustment like that.

Was wondering about the idea you mention to round Down to the 100 !? In view of the D/C problem, etc, wouldnt it work better to Round Upwards? Maybe like +500 points (would put me at parity with my ELO on other blitz sites )

Best Regards, Craig AC ... What ever is done, I am game to try it~! But may be getting too Old to work up 900 pts from 1200 again !?! 

Anyway, REALLY loking forward to see what y'all come up with . . .

That has an easy answer: the average level here is a lot lower than the average level of USCF rated players.

There's this too.

I don't see a single real argument in favour of wiping the slate. "Players who have bad records due to DC's will be mad"? Why? They are mad right now, they would be happy to not DC anymore, right?

However it makes a lot of sense for people who have spent a lot of time and effort developing their records (to say absolutely nothing of the hundreds or even thousands of saved games they will lose) to be annoyed.

Also I read on this site that chess.com NEVER deletes games. Obviously mass deletion of games would contradict that statement pretty severely.

Interesting question. However, modeling the process used by the USCF for estimating ratings of players for which no performance data is available would take the following form (from The USCF Rating System by Glickman and Doan, June 4, 2009):

a) If age were known,

Rating = 50 x Age (from age 3 through 26), or 1300 otherwise,

b) If age were not known,

Rating = 750

The first of these specifications would be problematic because chess.com does NOT know the ages of its members. The 2nd specification (everybody at 750) would clearly anger - in my guess - nearly every current member using Live Chess inasmuch as the average rating would drop 400 rating points, at least initially.

Clearly setting the starting rating at 1400 to 1500 is likely to misrepresent the pool mean by several hundred points (current Blitz average is 1154 based on the play of > 200,000 players), and ordinarily Internet ratings are slightly inflated relative to federation ratings by the few measures that exist.

(Personal opinion below, and does not necessarily represent the views of chess.com management or anyone else with authority or insight.)

What we have here is an issue for which no single solution will make everyone happy and for which giving everyone what they wanted is either a business or technical nightmare or an impossibility. But, the good thing about Glicko is that it responds better to ratings uncertainty than many other systems might.  Simply breaking free of the annoying points-lost-through-disconnection will generate a great deal of good will towards any missing features I might note regarding the resetting of ratings.

wipe the slate clean for all players, livechess was (is) in beta, so you should reset the ratings with a stable new version, and then the new ratings will be more acurate and wont include 100's of disconnect wins/losses. I think this is the fairest way.

Why not keep all the records? The ratings will adjust over time, and the new more stable d/c free will eventually have limited effect on your rating over time... I really don't see the point to wiping anything clean... the whole point is to improve your game here, not to have the highest rating... and while these two sound like they're the same thing, they definitely mutually exclusive.. 

I've built up a nice collection of games in my Live Chess archives. I'm above average in each of the 3 categories. I would prefer if they were reset though. I feel I'd be much higher if the ratings were reset. I've become a much better chess player since I first registered to this site, and I know that my ratings should keep up with my current ability. I have been disconneted a few times though, and since then have decided not to play Live Chess until Live 2 comes out.

My vote is to reset the ratings. But either way is fine for me.

(Can someone please briefly explain please how the more games you play, the less drastic your rating changes?)

As you gain in rating, opponents become lower and lower rated and you don't gain as much from playing lower-rated players.

In the new one if the time runs out you could still play it to the end even if you lost on time it should be like that just to keep some interesting for instas!!

If you read Dr. Glickman's article, can deduce the correct explanation for why this occurs.

Your rating adjustment after each contest is a function of a value called Ratings Deviation (RD), something like a standard deviation. With each game you play, your RD is also adjusted. The more games played in a prescribed interval, the lower the value of RD becomes, and thus the lower the change in rating after any contest. However, the formula is far more complicated than that because your opponents' RD values help make up the adjustment to YOUR RD value, and to your rating as well.

But the short answer is that more activity by YOU lowers the adjustment to your rating by lowering your RD.

Glickman recommends a max RD of 350 for a new player and suggests that putting a floor at some value for a minimum also makes sense, therefore allow real improvement to show up in your rating.

You don't seem to care much about ratings, so I'm curious why you'd want a rating reset. Like you said, ratings are just numbers. Why would you want to reset a number that you don't care about in the first place, at the cost of deleting a huge archive of games that has taken years to accumulate? Most people asking for a reset do so because they value their rating a lot (they feel their rating is inaccurate due to the disconnects, so they want a fresh start to get a more accurate rating). But you have the opposite view as them, so why are you also advocating for a reset?

(An aside: what's the point of hiding your playing strength so no one will know how good/bad you are? Even right now, you can exclusively play unrated games and decline all rated games--you don't really have to do that only after they reset everything)

ih8sens (post #111) has a good point. It's not the ratings that matter. It's the huge archive of games. This is where you study your mistakes, monitor your progress, look for new ideas to suit your style, etc. It makes no sense to delete these games.

Sorry - I haven't read the whole thread & maybe this has already been suggested but maybe a front page poll would help your analysis of people's views (though some may not understand & their answers may be unreliable).

For what it's worth I say wipe 'em

You can reset my rating to 0 or below 0, I'm serious--I don't mind that at all. But what's the point of deleting the stored games?

I say remove past games. It doesn't matter too much to me, though, it is just a number.

I suggest compressing all the past games' files.

Frankly, Live Chess has been in beta state all this time, whether it was announced or not.  It's common practice when you GA a release to wipe out all beta stats -- I know in the WoW beta, I certainly wasn't allowed to keep my character through release, even though I'd spent a lot of time with it.  Wipe 'em.

What's your confidence level that the new Live Chess will be more stable, though?  Won't that need some time in beta as well?  Is this the best time to wipe?

The ratings and records should be erased. Give everyone ample time to save games if they want.  But it should be obvious that, if some people have low ratings and lost games due to inherent problems with Live Chess, the people with good ratings and won games, have those advantages partly due to the former group's misfortunes.  I don't see any dilemma. Ratings, etc., will eventually gravitate toward their proper levels.

Ratings will eventually gravitate to where they belong, though, whether you wipe them or not.  I still think they should be wiped too, but I think as more of a symbolic "fresh start" for live chess than for any practical reasons.

It's nothing that people weren't warned would happen.

hi Erik

yes all people here migth be rigth. yes live chess is a beta version, yes players WILL get the 'old'  rating, and they CAN download all their games, (specially them who have a membership aaaaall the games). and yes the 'new' live chess would be better.

but how?

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well, how hard is to use a live chess (beta, actual) and a 'new' live chess..???

life chess x.x!! 

and we can decide wich live chess version to use. my 'old rating' or my 'new (and better enviroment) rating'

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is there a way that from the downloaded games, chess.com can reset the lost rating (if there were a clean up)?? (to whom that have all games, not me haha)

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cheers!!