The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Something I'd like to see is a ranking system for online play. It would be similar to the way chess matches are ranked, where every new player starts at a rating of 1000 and goes up or down based on games won and opponent skill. Tournament wins would also count a great deal toward your ranking.

Of course you have the option to play a practice game, but a ranked game can also be played if both players agree to it before hand. After a ranked game is played, the results, including point deficit and who won will be given to an admin of some sort (probably Shiver or Elvish Pillager), who will then decide by how much the player's rank goes up or down.

We can keep a tabulation of players' ranks in a locked forum topic, and maybe have a couple grandmasters or something.

Cedric did something of this nature back when he was running the tournaments. I don't have a problem with score keeping, but there's enough Star Control on my plate as it is. If someone else wants to do their own ranking, I'd be more than happy to help them.

Sounds like fun, but I have a feeling it would encourage abusive tactics.

Ranking systems are useful for having a way to know someone's play skill without playing them. The UQM melee community is so small that this is kind of useless. Shiver already keeps track of how good everyone is, anyway.

The idea has merit, and I think that system you suggest is perhaps the best one. Of course it depends a bit on everyone playing ball and not dumping usernames that have lost more than the owner would like.

Also, I don’t think we’re ready for this yet.

I diligently kept melee results in a spreadsheet for quite a while. The only ranking system I used was that of percent of games won. Not necessarily the best, although it seemed a fair reflection of skills levels.

This was a lot of work, and took up much head space. It really needs to be an automated system. I while back I had grand designs of building a net melee meeting place that might be able to manage such a thing. Novus was interested in helping but I did not have the time to make it happen.

That’s another topic though: a user friendly melee forum

I’m not sure we have the numbers to justify such a tool right now.

Saving meep-eep some time by pointing out the Elo rating system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system)

Oh boy, I just got sad sad flashbacks about my childhood chess club score.

I never really managed to understand the math behind that system, so if someone is up to keeping up those stats, go ahead. Would be good to have way more players, though...

you and EP are both right. It is a bit too early/not enough people are interested in playing for it to be very useful. I've always found myself asking about the results of tournaments, even though I never have time to play anymore either. I was thinking of its usefulness based on this idea, or the fact that each game would count toward an on-going total, like a tournament that doesn't end. The problem is that at this point certain players would simply clean up, and the rankings might be extremely lopsided.

This would be an interesting program to implement, and I'm guessing it wouldn't be that hard either.  The Wikipedia page on the ELO system had a simple formula for tabulating the points per game, which would be cool to try out in theory.

Heh. I was thinking that, yes. There's bound to be some ready-to-use Elo ratings program, where you just have to tell it who won against whom.