I think Kestas could tell you who left, but I don't have access to that level of the DB.

Could that be implemented as as part of the game?

Sure. Is that more or less important to you than GR integration? : )

LOL, that sounds bad when you say it like that.
This would be less important to me than GR integration by a couple of light-years. I hope I don't come off as a demanding jackass. I very much tend to think of things in a systematic way, and so thinking about collecting and streamlining useful information come naturally to me.

It does seems odd that a player who gets replaced, doesn't have his GR impacted by his defeat. Is that really how it works?

I agree, not as important as integrated GR

Agreed as well, not nearly as important as ghost rating.

@Martin - Yes, that is how it works. Remember, GR isn't official and therefore, Ghostmaker doesn't have access to anyone except the final players in the game when he runs the month end GRs. Now, with integrating GR, it might be possible to take the GR from the players at the *start* of the game and put it in a "bank vault" on the game record so that replacement players either also contribute or don't risk their GR at all (my preferred method as it would encourage replacement players to help fill bad spots and keep games going).

This is an excellent point that Draugnar and Yonni have brought up. When GR is integrated, then the system could take GR from everyone at the beginning of the game (just like it does with points) and when people CDed and someone else takes over, more GR is just added (just like points).

Wouldn't this be a great feature???

Thanks Draug, I agree with your point on replacements for GR.

Yeah, don't charge replacement players GR, just points, and you *will* find people willing to help out a desperate game.

Fair enough.
Now let's get GR integrated!

who cares about gr? if people can get to their gr if they have one, then why is it an issue? it might be helpful to integrate it for those overly concerned with points, but i don't see it as an important issue.

Your opinion not withstanding, bolshoi, the community does. We have a survey posted on the forum and so far the majority would like to see it integrated and would like to see a "no GR" option for starting games as well.

It's bad enough that you are trolling the D33's thread, please don't troll this one, bolshoi. Draugnar said it very nicely. The majority of us would like to see it, and the upper echelon cares a whole lot more about GR than points.
I have to say that you are not making a very positive impression here. You are relatively new, and thus far all you have done is troll the forum, be irrationally obstinate, and make assumptions/declarative statements of which you have little knowledge about.

there's something wrong with a community that doesn't appreciate trolling. besides, i'm sure i will soon run out of interest and move on. but this is one particular case where it is not, in fact, that much of a trolling. when the games don't have resign buttons or point-and-click maps, you're all concerned about ghost ratings. i like the phrase "upper echelon" though. i should use that.

I see. Because we disvalue resign, that we want the players to stick through their games regardless of their board positions, and that we don't have a point-and-click map for you, then we shouldn't be concerned with the more important things. Gotcha.

I wouldn't worry about your GR either and really, don't be concerned with the upper echelon.
And if there is something wrong with this community and that it doesn't stand up to your nonsensical ideals, then please leave. I don't think we would much regret losing you.

The reason there is strong interest in getting the ghost ratings integerated is because GhostMaker, who previously would provide the numbers monthly, has had more important things to do now that he's in University.

By the way, I got the data dump from Kestas and now have it processed into a format I can use with the games sorted by finish time and split into monthly files. The process I wrote to parse the monthly files needs some tweaking though, but hopefully in a week or so I'll have some rough numbers to post. With a bit more polish I can then start posting monthly numbers as Ghost did before until such time as we do get it integrated.

Yay for Alderian.
Did you check the discrepancies between your calculations and TGM's?

At this point I think it is just a matter of precision. For the first month, at the top of the list, jed was coming up with 119.656898 instead of 119.6918557 which is short by 0.0349577. And at the bottom of the list, AJCrowley had 83.734471 instead of 83.66164395 which is higher by 0.07282705. Less than a tenth of a percent off.

Once I get digging into a deeper set of numbers I'll have a lot more tweaking to do to try and match what Ghost's perl script does.

Do you know how/if the error rate propagates from month to month? Take a couple of people's GR and calculate it for a few months and see if the error worsens or remains relatively stable. If it is relatively stable, then it is probably a rounding issue.

Slightly tangential, but I think being able to tell which players have left the game would be very useful. In one game I played a country went CD in gunboat, came back for one year, helped a neighboring country with supports, and then went CD again. Not being able to tell who has left the game is another avenue for cheating

zultar, the error rate depends upon the number of games. The amount you gain and lose is less. So the more games played the further off the number. One of the first month's players played in 7 of the 8 games, more than anyone else, and his number was high by ~0.1. (1 win and 6 losses means gaining a bit less in the win but losing a bit less * 6 in the losses.) So my rate of change V is slightly off from Ghosts' due to precision or rounding. I could try tweaking my V to be 2.1/35ths instead of 2/35s or something similar.

But the bottom line is that while the numbers might be slightly off, the end result is a similar rating system.

So GR is no longer published? I am so confused about all of this.

Aldy, you are doing this in java, right? You may want to use a more precise math api than the default, because there has been issues with the default API in the past.

Also, I've always been told that players that leave a game have no way of really knowing in the db... I think it's pretty much a lost cause.

Something happened in a game recently that got my blood boiling that is related. High pot, high GR game that was moving towards a 3-way (I was the 4th guy and eliminated last). However, russia, who CD'ed near the end, had a unit in warsaw that was right on the draw line. Fortunately, the last 3 worked it out (because 1 was an SC away from a solo) so that russia was eliminated from the draw, but it brought up an issue I can see happening... someone sneaking in on a draw and getting a major GR boost for no work, whatsoever...

@Alderian, if a more precise "api" whatever that is could be used easily, it would make sense to do that. I don't know if the V is the issue if a more precise calculation could be used. I have wondered why we use 2/35 instead of just a straight 5%. Moreover, does anyone know what happens when you play more than 20 games in a month? How does GR work then? From what I understand, everything is calculated at the end of the month, so your GR input is 2/35 of your overall.

Does anyone know?

i don't think taking out a resign button "disvalues" resigning. to be honest, these decent people you're thinking of that aren't resigning now would continue not to resign with a button. wouldn't you agree? so it has no effect on the number of resignations. actually it encourages resigning. cause with a button resigning is final. but without one you can skip a couple turns thinking of resigning but retain the right to still come back. so it encourages resignations, if anything.

i just picked those as a couple examples, but there are plenty more improvements that could be made that i'm sure are much more important than ghost rating inclusion. there are thousands of people on this site, so to have no votes on it, but just go by what an "upper echelon" clique thinks is right is kind of bs. this project accepts donations and acts like it's all about freedom, so maybe that's a little disingenuous.

API = Application Programmers Interface. It's a library of classes and methods that make developing software not only easier, but more reliable in that the same call will always return the same result and you don't have to continually reinvent the wheel. What sets good versions of programming environments apart from abd ones is in how extensive a set of APIs they have. .Net 4 is superior to .Net 1.1 just as Java JDK 1.7 is superior to JDK 1.1 because boht have more reliable and more expansive API libraries.

@bolshoi - This is a privately owned site create by Kestas. Hold your tongue and be more civil towards the site and the community. You are one player here. You paid nothing for the priviledge of being here while some of us have actually contributed *money* to the site and have a nice little badge after the (D) to show that we are invested in seeing this site improve.

So either quit yer bitchin' or go the fuck away, fucktard.