How does glicko work?

[PaperBaG]

Hey I was idle for a couple days and I noticed my Rating went down about 30 or so without me playing a game. Then when i had a chance to play a game against a lower ranked opponent after i won it dropped even further. I am just wondering why it's dropping win or loss or if i don't play at all?

The strange thing is I noticed at the 2 random points this has occurred, on the skill rating graph my "glicko" just drops to 0....

https://www.dawnofwar.info/esl/player/10180623

I have checked others and there is never this just sudden drop in skill rating etc. I have checked players who have gone idle, players who tend to win most of their games vs newer players and others who show no trends and there is nothing like this were skill rating drops to 0 and returns to 30-50 points lower than it was before.

Just wondering what's going on

[Dark Riku]

You can find a small glicko description on the info page or you can go to the wiki page for more indept details
Your rating seems normal to me. Don't expect the system to be completely instant. Give it a little bit of time.

[Lichtbringer]

It definitly shouldn't drop when you win. I don't see a drop to 0 in your Graph.
Not sure whats going on, but when I was confused by the Skillrating it was because I thought the Numbers displayed at certain points meant something different.

Here is the link from the ESL site http://www.glicko.net/glicko/glicko.pdf .

[Myrdal]

Hey I was idle for a couple days and I noticed my Rating went down about 30 or so without me playing a game. Then when i had a chance to play a game against a lower ranked opponent after i won it dropped even further. I am just wondering why it's dropping win or loss or if i don't play at all?

This is what happened to your rating from being idle:

1847 ± 43 -> 1840 ± 43 (LOSS)
idle...
1840 ± 60 -> 1843 ± 59 (WIN)

Last game before idle period your glicko was 1840, RD = 43. After idle period glicko is unchanged but RD has increased by 17 points. This is as it should be, a higher RD means higher uncertainty of a player's skill and being inactive will increase that uncertainty. If you were idle for 209 days, your RD would have gone up to 350 and your displayed rating on ESL 1840 - 2*350 = 1140. Just to give an example of extended inactivity affects your rating.

The strange thing is I noticed at the 2 random points this has occurred, on the skill rating graph my "glicko" just drops to 0....

https://www.dawnofwar.info/esl/player/10180623

I have checked others and there is never this just sudden drop in skill rating etc. I have checked players who have gone idle, players who tend to win most of their games vs newer players and others who show no trends and there is nothing like this were skill rating drops to 0 and returns to 30-50 points lower than it was before.

Just wondering what's going on

At least in one of your games a winner couldn't be determined for whatever reason (perhaps an unexpected exit) so the game was simply skipped and values left at default 0. They don't change your rating so you can simply ignore them.

[PaperBaG]

Why did I lose 30 pts for beating someone?

[Myrdal]

Give me the match id/url where you think you lost points.

[PaperBaG]

https://www.dawnofwar.info/esl/match/16946755

I beat this guy who btw is in the top20 and i still lose 20 pts? lol i mine as well lose everygame since its costing me less points :/ ?

[Lichtbringer]

https://www.dawnofwar.info/esl/match/16946755

I beat this guy who btw is in the top20 and i still lose 20 pts? lol i mine as well lose everygame since its costing me less points :/ ?

From that card it looks like you gained 13 points.

Btw, thanks Hakon or Lulgrim for adding that it shows the point change, just noticed it!


Oh wait, Paperbag I think I see what you mean. At march 10 it shows that you have a Reliability rating of 55, then 2 day later after that it shows it as 69?
Do you maybe mean that? See attached picture.

There is also this match where you gained 0 points. https://www.dawnofwar.info/esl/match/16448668
Which is as expected because your opponent had a very high RD rating which means he is unreliable and he was 620 points lower than you which should mean that you get almost nothing for beating him.

[PaperBaG]

my skill rating or w.e it is called was around ~1760 and i've played these two games and now its at ~1700...i did lose to tex and i think cyris but beat that dude who was top 20 along with a couple wins against lower ranked people...idk im just a bit confused how im losing points for winning games

[Lichtbringer]

my skill rating or w.e it is called was around ~1760 and i've played these two games and now its at ~1700...i did lose to tex and i think cyris but beat that dude who was top 20 along with a couple wins against lower ranked people...idk im just a bit confused how im losing points for winning games

Oh ok. If you mean with winning games that you win 10 loose 2, then that is intended^^

Basically the explanation about the 0 points game. You can't get higher by beating way worse ranked players (and I am not saying you want easy points. You clearly deserve your spot.)

You can also see that this works in your favor as well.
When you beat a good opponent you get more points (vs Victario you got 13), but when you lose against someone ranked higher then you, you only lose a low amount of points, for example in the game against Dark Riku you only lost 3 points. Losing against Tex lost you only 7 points.

On the other hand, when losing against players that are ranked lower than you, you will lose more points and gain less for beating them. Playing players higher ranked than you will give you more points when winning, and will cost you less points when losing.

EDIT: I understand that it is sometimes frustrating. Thats why games like League of Legends have these calculations in the Background, and in the foreground they have a system where you get higher by winning many games.
On the other hand this causes confusion:
"Why am I Gold Rank 1/1000 and I don't get promoted to Platin? My Friend was rank 150/1000 and got promoted to Platin!"

EDIT 2: These systems can get especially annoying at the highest level. I remember the WoW Arena. A Top 10 team, had to either play another top 10 team to get any more points, or win against 20 high rank Teams to get something like 1 point. On the other hand if they lost ONE game against a high (but not toprank team) they would loose 30 points . And because most of the time those other top10 teams are not available through the matchmaking it can seem bonkers.
For you this means playing ranked against way lower players is a bad Idea. You won't gain anything if you win, but if you Troll or go easy and lose it will cost you a lot of points.

EDIT 3^^: Another example is Starcraft 2( league copied it from them). On the front end you have the system with Bronze Silver Gold Platin Diamond and Master. Everyone of these has 100 ranks. (And exists in parallel many times because there are way more than 100 players.)
So basically you get packed together with another 100 random people. Then for winning you get points. The more you win the more points you get the higher ranked in those 100 you get. There is even a bonus pointpool that refreshes daily, so more playing = more points.
BUT, if you get to Rank1 that doesn't mean you get from Silver to Gold. And if you get Rank 100 that doesn't mean you get Bronze.

What actually decides when you get from Silver up to Gold or down to Bronze is the hidden Elo rating (which is like Glicko). There is a way to see how you do: By looking at the opponents you get matched up against. If you suddenly notice you get Goldrank enemys (while being in Silver) you are on a good way. If you beat those Goldrank players 50% of the time you can expect to be in Gold yourself soon. But with the 100 --> 1 Ranks it has almost nothing to do^^

[PaperBaG]

I don't think u quite understand what im trying to point out, i understand that playing lower or newer ranked players will not give me as many points as a higher skilled/ranked person and if i lose to someone like that i lose a ton of points i understand that. What i am confused about is u keep saying "I gained 13 points by beating that guy" but no i've lost over 50, i was at 1760 and now at 1710 or something....how is that possible after just winning games?

I appreciate the effort your putting forth to explain this though...but my frustration is how do i lose 20 points when i win games v someone in the top 20?

[Lichtbringer]

No problem, maybe something is wrong with the backend. We will have to wait for Hakon to look into that game. I can't see exactly where you were before that game for example.

I just love thinking about this stuff^^

[Dark Riku]

hakon already explained why you lost points. It's for being idle.

You do not lose points when winning a game.
Your deviation changes though. There is a difference between your Glicko rating and your shown rating on the ladder.
Show rating points = Clicko points - 2xRD. Did you check out the wiki yet and the explanation on the Elite Site?

[PaperBaG]

i understand you lose points for being idle but I lost over 50 points for being idle 2 days? Im sorry i think something is up and i only ask that someone look into this since ive seen people lose points for being idle but never as much as i have

[Myrdal]

RD seems to increase too fast still, will look into. I've corrected the current values and I changed displayed rating to glicko - 1.5*rd. I think this is preferable to reducing RD growth because that will lead to a stagnant ladder. But perhaps it's time to reset the whole thing.

[Lulgrim]

The fundamental issue here is that Glicko is not a league system, but a skill rating system. In other words, it answers to the questions ‘what is this player’s skill as a number’ and ‘what is the probability of X winning against Y’ but it doesn’t exactly answer ‘what should be this player’s position on a leaderboard this week’. Using rating minus RD is a practical application of the ‘raw’ statistical data – and even an application suggested by the creator of Glicko, so not completely pulled out of the ass – but that is not the original purpose of the calculations. It’s a lot more practical and human-readable to list this modified rating than just dumping the raw ratings randomly and letting people figure it out, but it’s a rough approximation and will remain imperfect.

So the issue of trying to use Glicko to create a dynamic (volatile) league where positions keep shuffling is somewhat counter to the concept of a skill rating based on statistics. From the standpoint of Glicko, the calculations are specifically trying to nail down a player’s skill to get a numeric skill representation and making win probability estimates possible. So from here the reason for the leaderboard not shuffling is that the lower players can’t challenge the top players. In other words, the positions are not supposed to shuffle to begin with.

What is happening at the moment is that the Glicko parameters are being tweaked to increase the effect of idle periods, so that RD would increase more, the modified rating would decrease more, and hence player positions would shuffle more. Especially to change the, idk, top 3–5, which is pretty static. I have my doubts about this, though, as it sort of runs counter to the baseline idea of the system. Glicko is using the data to drive down RDs and we are using parameters to increase them. For Glicko, it’s just that data has shown the top players are better than the bottom players, so they belong to the top, it has no reason for shuffling them.

Basically, when I started the old manually run ladder on the old website, I was just looking to skill rate people so you could look at their profile and say, ‘Oh, he’s a 1750 player,’ or whatever. Whether the leaderboard would be dynamic or exciting never crossed my mind, and Glicko probably just doesn’t answer that sort of need to begin with.

[PaperBaG]

hmmm now here's a random wierd one as well

https://www.dawnofwar.info/esl/player/10180623

It says player ranking 8 (at the time of this post) but on the ladder itself it's got me in at 12....which one is correct lol?

[Lulgrim]

Iirc hakon changed the RD modifier (for ordering the leaderboard) from 2 to 1.5 so I guess the function to check an individual player's position wasn't updated… In other words, the board would be "correct" and the profile page incorrect.