🕸📝Fergus Duniho wrote on Wed, Apr 25, 2018 11:18 PM UTC:
I was wondering along the lines of do we want a Game Courier rating system that rewards players for trying out a greater number of chess variants with presets.
Such a ratings system would be more complicated and work differently than the current one. The present system can work for a single game or for a set of games, but when it does work with a set of games, it treats them all as though they were the same game.
However, conversely this could well 'punish' players who choose to specialize in playing only a small number of chess variants, perhaps for their whole Game Courier 'playing career'.
Yes, that would be the result. Presently, someone who specializes in a small set of games, such as Francis Fahys, can gain a high general GCR by doing well in those games.
in any case it seems, if I'm understanding right, the current GC rating system may 'punish' the winner of a given game between 2 particular players who have already played each other many times, by not awarding what might otherwise be a lot of rating points for winning the given game in question.
Game Courier ratings are not calculated on a game-by-game basis. For each pair of players, all the games played between them factor into the calculation simultaenously. Also, it is not designed to "award" points to players. It works very differently than Elo, and if you begin with Elo as your model for how a ratings system works, you could get some wrong ideas about how GCR works. GCR works through a trial-and-error method of adjusting ratings between two players to better match the ratings that would accurately predict the outcome of the games played between them. The number of games played between two players affects the size of this adjustment. Given the same outcome, a smaller adjustment is made when they have played few games together, and a larger adjustment is made when they have played several games together.
Getting back to your suggestion, one thought I'm having is to put greater trust in results that come from playing the same game and to put less trust in results that come from playing different games together. More trust would result in a greater adjustment, while less trust would result in a smaller adjustment. The rationale behind this is that results for the same game are more predictive of relative playing ability, whereas results from different games are more independent of each other. But it is not clear that this would reward playing many variants. If someone played only a few games, the greater adjustments would lead to more extreme scores. This would reward people who do well in the few variants they play, though it would punish people who do poorly in those games. However, if someone played a wide variety of variants, smaller adjustments would keep his rating from rising as fast if he is doing well, and they would keep it from sinking as fast if he is not doing well. So, while this change would not unilaterally reward players of many variants over players of fewer variants, it would decrease the cost of losing in multiple variants.
Such a ratings system would be more complicated and work differently than the current one. The present system can work for a single game or for a set of games, but when it does work with a set of games, it treats them all as though they were the same game.
Yes, that would be the result. Presently, someone who specializes in a small set of games, such as Francis Fahys, can gain a high general GCR by doing well in those games.
Game Courier ratings are not calculated on a game-by-game basis. For each pair of players, all the games played between them factor into the calculation simultaenously. Also, it is not designed to "award" points to players. It works very differently than Elo, and if you begin with Elo as your model for how a ratings system works, you could get some wrong ideas about how GCR works. GCR works through a trial-and-error method of adjusting ratings between two players to better match the ratings that would accurately predict the outcome of the games played between them. The number of games played between two players affects the size of this adjustment. Given the same outcome, a smaller adjustment is made when they have played few games together, and a larger adjustment is made when they have played several games together.
Getting back to your suggestion, one thought I'm having is to put greater trust in results that come from playing the same game and to put less trust in results that come from playing different games together. More trust would result in a greater adjustment, while less trust would result in a smaller adjustment. The rationale behind this is that results for the same game are more predictive of relative playing ability, whereas results from different games are more independent of each other. But it is not clear that this would reward playing many variants. If someone played only a few games, the greater adjustments would lead to more extreme scores. This would reward people who do well in the few variants they play, though it would punish people who do poorly in those games. However, if someone played a wide variety of variants, smaller adjustments would keep his rating from rising as fast if he is doing well, and they would keep it from sinking as fast if he is not doing well. So, while this change would not unilaterally reward players of many variants over players of fewer variants, it would decrease the cost of losing in multiple variants.