A newbie is started off with some nominal rating; I forget the number, but let's say it's 800. Most likely that newbie is going to lose his first matches, and s

A newbie is started off with some nominal rating; I forget the number, but let's say it's 800. Most likely that newbie is going to lose his first matches, and some proportion of those newbies will get frustrated and quit That seems like a simple problem to fix. When somebody quits, just subtract 800 points from the remaining ranked players, scaled accordingly such that their relative win probabilities remain the same. Of course, the other issue is if the number of active players increases over time. In that case, it's not so easy to fix unless you start scaling down the number of starting points given to new players. Perhaps a better thing to do would be to construct a model of the rating inflation over time and use that to correct for historical comparisons. It's still not particularly meaningful though, because you have no way to measure actual skill inflation.