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TrueSkill (as tuned for some Halo games?) has the unfortunate property of player ratings becoming essentially immutable after a player plays a large number of g

TrueSkill (as tuned for some Halo games?) has the unfortunate property of player ratings becoming essentially immutable after a player plays a large number of games. This is alright as long as you can guarantee players won't get better or worse at your game over time. Elo-like systems and the TopCoder rating system do more to allow for players changing dramatically in skill level over time. TFA doesn't mention how victory works in Terra Mystica. Can all players win? Can 2 out of 5 players win? Who knows. Edit: It looks like TM is a point-scoring game? So you are rated in 1v1 matches against each other player based on how many points you got. Can you tie? Edit again: Yes, you can tie, but it's unusual enough to not matter much. Good thing this isn't chess! I'd be interested in seeing these systems generalized to a game like Shadow Hunters, where there are 2 teams with shared win conditions, some other 1-person sides with their own win conditions, and winning doesn't necessarily mean other people lose. One asymmetric board game site gives each player a separate rating for each side. So you can be 2500 with Zane but 1500 with Troq in Yomi or something. This works pretty well for games with a small number of sides, like 14 or 20 or 70. It becomes pretty useless if you try to generalize it to a game with 10^3572835 sides like Hearthstone though...

LoSboccacc 11y ago
that's why some play with a second account when they want to 'just play'
jsnell 11y ago
So it's definitely true that players will have different skill levels with different factions. But even with 20 factions I'd be worried about getting enough data on for individual player/faction combinations to converge to the real values. That's especially true if the game doesn't allow a player to specialize in just a couple of factions, but realistically will be playing 10+ different ones. Maybe the thing to do would be to have three components instead of the current two; generic player skill, faction power, and faction-specific player skill. One thing I do is track how much games with each faction contributed to each player's rating. But that's just for amusement value, there's no feedback from these faction breakdowns to the ratings as a whole.
- anonymoushn 11y ago
  That is a concern if the game forces you to play a lot of sides. In Yomi you can pick your side, so most people play just one or two, and the people who play a ton of sides also play the game a lot. In Terra Mystica you need a minimum of 5 to get pack the side-picking part of the game I guess. Shadow Hunters would have a worse version of this problem, since your side is assigned at random out of 20 possible sides.
seivan 11y ago
Awesome! I've been looking for something like this. The only issue I have now is my laziness to trust the client. Because although a board/card-game could be calculated on a server. Turn based Games where "a move" takes several user inputs and display actions on the screen can't use a server to calculate stuff. The roundtrip would kill the joy. E.g move several characters while engaging with the enemy. I haven't come across any good reading material on how to properly deal with that so you don't fully trust a client.

LoSboccacc 11y ago

that's why some play with a second account when they want to 'just play'

jsnell 11y ago

So it's definitely true that players will have different skill levels with different factions. But even with 20 factions I'd be worried about getting enough data on for individual player/faction combinations to converge to the real values. That's especially true if the game doesn't allow a player to specialize in just a couple of factions, but realistically will be playing 10+ different ones. Maybe the thing to do would be to have three components instead of the current two; generic player skill, faction power, and faction-specific player skill. One thing I do is track how much games with each faction contributed to each player's rating. But that's just for amusement value, there's no feedback from these faction breakdowns to the ratings as a whole.

anonymoushn 11y ago
That is a concern if the game forces you to play a lot of sides. In Yomi you can pick your side, so most people play just one or two, and the people who play a ton of sides also play the game a lot. In Terra Mystica you need a minimum of 5 to get pack the side-picking part of the game I guess. Shadow Hunters would have a worse version of this problem, since your side is assigned at random out of 20 possible sides.

seivan 11y ago

Awesome! I've been looking for something like this. The only issue I have now is my laziness to trust the client. Because although a board/card-game could be calculated on a server. Turn based Games where "a move" takes several user inputs and display actions on the screen can't use a server to calculate stuff. The roundtrip would kill the joy. E.g move several characters while engaging with the enemy. I haven't come across any good reading material on how to properly deal with that so you don't fully trust a client.