I do intend to do a Christmas ratings list, however.

I'll talk to you about that idea personally Ghost, but depending how complex the algorithm is I could knock something up...

I do concur, I like bieng in the top 50 but when I invest all my cash into games and become a political puppet, that just pisses me off

Thank you, Ghostie.

Are we any closer to implementing rank icons? If so, I'll continue my work on them...

Maybe you could do an update with the ELO ratings published once a month? Like the cricket test match table perhaps.

Darwyn - are you designing the icons? Should we expect something starting from an amoeba an up the evolutionary ladder? :)

If you want any help fig, let me know, I always enjoy whipping up the odd bit of code.

yes, you start as an amoeba and end up a monkey. =D But no, I did a few samples and submitted them to the forum.phpdipomacy.net site. There was much discussion about them there and established some sort of "rules" for them...the main one being that they need to be heirarchially distinguishable.

They need some revision which I think I will now do and post within the week. You can look for them there.

This is by no means "my" project, btw...anyone is welcome to submit suggestions and/or improvements so that a final version can be agreed upon.

ELO latest - they are still touring and making records.

Hahahaha.....lol :)

To catch up with the Elo debate check out this thread:
http://forum.phpdiplomacy.net/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=77

Another totally different system has been proposed too which has more of the points system's goals in mind, but I haven't got around to looking at it much

The rank icons may be used in the next version which is very much a work in progress. I have a long, long todo list of possible features/fixes and basically whatever I can fit into the next version from the list I will

At the moment it seems like the main feature update (e.g. 0.75 the chatbox, 0.8 the adjudicator) will this time be the game listings. I'm hoping the make it much easier to search for the games you want, and make the game summaries a lot more attractive, informative and functional. So far I've done the main part of the unified game searcher and game search menu, and designed the new game listings interface

Hopefully along with that I'll be able to take care of some gripes that we've had in the last year, and smaller things like having rank icons (Darwyn's are excellent, and there are loads to choose from), but at this point I'm just ticking off todo list items as I can

A change to the points system is looking unlikely at this point though, see the link at the start for more details why

I think the vast majority of people agree with the practical rationale for keeping the points system.

I'm just intrigued by these icons. Will there be a sword? :P

Once again, you deserve an encore for all the work you put in Kestas.
Sites like this only function and prosper with love and devotion; and lots of time.


*I rattle around in my scabbard to demonstrate my approval.*

Yes the icons area great idea coz they don't mess with the dip point based economy on phpdilpomacy. having an elo based top 500 rankings page inside the help section(along side the top 100) also wont mess with the point system. looking forward to . 83

Wonder - if you want you can have the project, I wasn't sure if there'd be any takers and there is still a lot of work to put into the SVG map.

TheGhostmaker - how do you determine Elo ratings? I'm not sure how Elo can be applied to games in which more than two players participate...

Sirither, I don't remember the exact equation but could probably figure it out. The basic concept involves taking everyone's pre-game Elo rating and using it as a predictor of success in the game, with a higher rating translating to a proportionally higher expected success. The expected rating is then matched to the actual result and compared. If you do better than expected, your Elo rating goes up, if you do worse, your Elo rating goes down.

Which then brings up the question of what defines success. In chess, you may have a win, a loss, or a stalemate/draw (which counts as 1/2 win). In Diplomacy, there are many different ways a player may end a game, and those situations all need to be balanced in a way which will accurately gauge how well a player performed. To be even more precise, you could base expected performance in part on which country a player gets, bringing another variable into the equation. Also, you must have a way of generating an expected value considering all seven players rather than only two - perhaps just a comparison of the mean ratings of the other 6 players in a game?
When TheGhostmaker applied Elo ratings to this game, he must have determined solutions to these problems. I'm interested to know how this was done.

Oh, no worries, it was done, and I think the solution was much simpler than you might imagine.

The actual rate of success was determined something like this:
PPSC: Actual result = Number of SC's left/34 (Total number of SC's), 1/(number of players left) for a draw, 0 for a defeat.
WTA: Actual result = 1 for a win, 1/(number of players left) for a draw, 0 for a defeat.

Expected = Pre-game rating/(Sum of all seven players' ratings)

At least that's what I think it was. You don't need to adjust for which countries you draw because it's a random process so presumably it would even out over enough games. Not to mention that Diplomacy games are often already adjusted based on the perception of the superiority of certain countries, certain players are better with certain countries, and that a complete ranking system should rate a player's average ability to play any country.

There are dozen's of different ways to do achievement scales in Diplomacy.
Take a look at the Master Diplomacy Database for Face to FAce tournaments and the scoring systems there:
http://eurodip.nuxit.net/php/scoring/scoring.php?lang=Ang

Hmm... Edi there are a lot of dfferent scoring systems there... I didn't have much time to look through, but do you think they would work for a site of this magnitude? Most of the systems there seemed to be designed for tournament play, while here there would be no real end in sight.

Just a question, how large did the F2F and postal play community ever get? I'm thinking that online Diplomacy is the way things are headed and that we'll soon see more players online than have ever been in the hobby.

There are already more people playing on line than in Face to Face tournaments and it has been that way for sometime. 'The hobby' has long redefined to include Social Play/FtF Clubs/FtF tournaments/postal and PbEM which encompasses Judges/Hand GM's/Web site GMs/

My point on the different scoring systems for tournaments is that there are very different concepts of what is achievement in the game. There are also very different concepts as to what the relative values of achievement is. For example should you measure what has happened in the last 20 games, the last 20 months, the last 20 years?
Do you think that a persons skill level goes down at any time? His results may go down, but do you think that people can achieve a high level of skill and then lose it somehow?
What are the values of games relative to each other when they are played under different scoring backgrounds?

There have been open ended scoring/ranking systems for decades for example the NADF chess like system which was just put on deep freeze after 20 years, the North American Masterpoint system that has run for 7 or 8 years, the Downunder DAANZ ranking system that has been around for 20 years. So open ended is not a real problem.

The problems remain what are the concepts of achievement, the rankings, the relative values of results, the importance of each result to another, the effects of playing under a background of scoring vs non -scored, the relative value of playing games with a fixed time or turn limit vs open ended?

Do not expect to find an answer to these questions. They have been around for 3 generations of players and the most we can come up with is what I call the Dictatorship of the Proletariate: Those willing to do the work to compile the system AND to UPDATE it , will see their work accepted even if it is in dispute with every other system out there.

To answer a couple of the questions.

Firstly, it is pretty much as Chrispminis explained. Result values are literally just like they are currently

"there are very different concepts of what is achievement in the game."

I think that this can be remedied somewhat with the addition of medals that reflect achievement based on kills, draws or whatever...as per the "Prize Games?" thread.

btw - I'm working on those rank icons and should have something up by the end of the weekend.

So far they are turning out pretty good, I think. :)