Erroneous league assignment

[Kamikaze28]

(07-26-2012 11:44 PM)GreatGonzales Wrote:  I think your concerns would be sufficiently mitigated by merely keeping the precise ELO score of every player confidential, much in the same way Outwitters does not communicate everyone's rank. Very simple.

Since the rating system of Outwitters is a black box, arguing over the inner workings of said black box is kind of pointless, since everybody involved (except the devs) is guessing.

(07-26-2012 11:44 PM)GreatGonzales Wrote:  The problem you describe with playing multiple games at once, eh, I don't think that's a big deal. If ELO is secret, then there is no way to abuse the system. It will all even out in the end, and people will be placed as they should. That's the whole point of the leagues, right? That people are matched with players of similar skill level? I cannot think of a better way to do this this than ELO.

ELO is not the best system there is, if you want to dig deeper into this matter, I recommend the Wikipedia article which gives details on how it is not perfect (warning: there are statistics and mathematics involved).

ELO might be the system which is most easily understood by interested people and the most widely spread rating system for exactly that reason but it is 52 years old - and improvements have been made since then.
As much as I enjoy simple and elegant solutions which are easily understood and explained - good rating systems resist simplicity, they become more complex over time.
At some point in this complexity-increase there comes a point where explaining it to people without the necessary knowledge in statistics or mathematics becomes quite a challenge thus foregoing any explanation and just declaring the system a black box is the rational way to go.

Until this point, the most common complaint on these forums about the current system is, that it's not going fast enough for some players - which I can sympathize with. But given enough games, I have not heard anyone being matched properly. The main discussion revolves around the question of "how many games is enough games?".