Win/Loss required for promotion: A new and different model

[gyzn]

Hey friends,
This is my first post here after lurking for a while, and playing for a few weeks now. I finished season 3 as #1 in Fluffy, and I have now reached #8 in Gifted. (Yes, a noob.)
May I offer a new angle on how league promotions work?

SUMMARY of this long post:
- Promotion is not awarded based on win/loss ratio of the last x wins/losses.
- Promotion is awarded based on win/loss ratio of only the x first games started after being considered for promotion, no matter the outcome of additional games started after these.

Here are the details:
I’ve read the relevant threads, and I think I understand the topics of hidden ranking, more points for playing stronger opponents, and the relative irrelevance of League ranking for promotion.

So far, so good. But I think there is a key point that I have not seen mentioned anywhere else, and I apologize in advance if I just didn’t see it and it is common knowledge.

All the analysis of win/loss ratio seems to really only yield one answer: The ratio needed for promotion varies widely. There are those players who had 50 wins and 1 loss and still didn’t get promoted, and others who get promoted after 5 wins and two losses. This does apparently not make any sense – and I think I found out why. The key is, the algorithm does not look at all your recent results, but only a set number of games.

I think it works as follows:
- You reach a certain point (in the hidden ranking, presumably), at which you get considered for promotion.
- The next x games that you start (not that you win/lose!) “count” and determine promotion.
- Any additional games started after that have no impact, even if you win them before the other games finish.
- Once all x games are finished, promotion happens or not.
Without further proof or reason, I think x is somewhere between 3 and 10 games.

Therefore, if one of your x promotion matches goes on forever, it can be that you’ve lost or won many other matches, but the promotion algorithm is still waiting for that one old promotion game to finish. Then, once it finishes, and it might even end in a loss, you get promoted on your results in the x matches; anything newer than that gave you points, but it didn’t influence the promotion itself.

This would explain why some who had won a ton of matches still didn’t get promoted – they still had an old outstanding game that the system waited on, and just kept starting (and winning) new games that didn’t affect promotion. And it doesn’t take that much for that to happen. Let’s say you start (and eventually finish) around 5 games per day. That is 25 games in 5 days. If there is a single slow opponent, and he takes always 2 days to move, that games could be the 26th-latest games started, and only be 3 full moves in. Meanwhile you’re winning and winning, and the system still doesn’t promote until that old result finally comes in.

How did I come up with all this?
I got promoted to Clever right when the season started, and relatively quickly reached #1 in the league ranking; I also started seeing more and more Gifted opponents, so I knew I must be up for promotion soon. Around that time, don’t ask me why, out of a hunch, I wanted to “clean out my games” and did not start any new ones. My active games slowly dwindled from 35 games to fewer and fewer. This made me realize how long some games can linger on! Most games had ended within 48 hours, but about 5-8 games were going very slow. Then, eventually just 4 games were left, and I got tired of not being able to play. I wrote down the names of those four “old games” and started a slew of new ones. And while I had a pretty decent ratio before (say 5 wins : 1 loss), it now went downhill. In my new games, I was down to maybe a 50:50 ratio, not surprising since all the previous wins gave me stronger opponents now. I thought my chances were dwindling. However, then one of those old games finally moved; I won it, and I immediately got promoted to Gifted.

To summarize:
- Promotion is not awarded based on win/loss ratio of the last x wins/losses.
- Promotion is awarded based on win/loss ratio of only the x first games started after being considered for promotion, no matter the outcome of additional games started after these.

What do you guys think?

PS: I also have several reasons why this approach would actually be a wiser choice by the game designers, but I save that for a potential follow-up post.

[[PETA] Doodat]

I think people have generally accepted this view: it's why people promote on losses or demote on wins.

[phineas94]

Because of the the varying sizes of player pools only 1v1 gives us anything approaching useable numbers to crunch in order to guess at promotion mechanics. I have never come across someone who has won 50 and lost just 1 without being promoted and the only time you get a promotion with a record of won 5 lost 2 would be in a 2v2 mode or straight after your 5 placement games. But that's just from looking at the data presented to me in the other thread.

The other problem I see with your hypothesis is that the system would have to log 2 sets of games independently and then somehow merge them back into one at some point. For example, a player in your system has filled all their x game slots but has one or two that are turning into 200+ turn games, with one or both players taking 5 days per turn, so they start filling up their y game slots. After winning, say, 30 y games with no losses they finally complete their x games with the required win/loss record for promotion. How does the system log the y games? Does it ignore them? Does it promote the player straight away to the next level thereby giving them a double promotion? Again, I've never come across a player who has stats anywhere near approaching this.

Never say never but it just doesn't seem to work. Do you have your actual full win/loss record? Not that I'm in the know but may be able to shed some light on it.