Doesn't that incentivize just quitting as soon as you are down? At least in the built-in scoring system here, you lose your bet.

I don't understand Ghost Rank anyway. Someone explain it? Also, how to see it.

https://sites.google.com/site/phpdiplomacytournaments/theghost-ratingslist

It's like the ELO system in chess.

It's an alternative scoring system, see here: http://tournaments.webdiplomacy.net/theghost-ratingslist - I didn't know much about it either but it seems both popular and significantly different to the score on this site. I'm trying to understand the incentives since it's so popular.

Yes, it does, tendmote. That's why I personally would like to see it altered significantly.

Chaqa ... it's simply a way to rank players without points, which can be gained and lost regardless of your opponents. Ghost rating takes many more factors than the result of the game and the pot size.

But yeah, considering how many bad positions I take over by joining games in progress I'm wondering if I'm accidentally doing someone a real favor!

You can be, though if you can salvage the position, the benefits of balancing the game for the other six players outweigh that favor.

Also losing or drawing with Tendmote has got to be terrible for your Ghost Rank, if what you get is linked to the Ghost Rank of your opponents.

I may be wrong, but each game you join of classic a player enters 1/34th of their GR points. It is then split between the players in a draw. This rewards playing against tougher opponents (and doing well) rather than playing newbies.

And I'm not sure if you gain back your GR points if you leave games.

http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3vc5pt/

Actually, goldfinger, the donators are the players of record at game end, not at join time. so the CD that gets wiped doesn't lose GR.

I'm at spot 1068. I don't know if that is good or bad. My early play here was... very bad, very bad. And I used to CD a lot. I wonder if my stats from this year are better.

393 in July

Yeah I'm at spot 3218. My "Ghost Rating" of 91 puts me below someone who's never even played!

Nice. I don't really like any numbers that try to qualify things like that. How do you qualify diplomatic skill, or luck? I'd rather be judged on a game-to-game basis than by points or some Ghost rating

It's quantifying (not qualifying, what the hell?) actual performance against expected performance, based on game results. Basically, a mashup of the Elo system and Calhamer points. It's a very effective model of skill.

It is a nice model.

It's only a model.

why does my profile not show a position, when other players profiles do?

The profile rank/position is based on your "available points". To show a position, you have to have more than 100 available. You currently at the time of my post have 1 point available.

Aah, that explains why the position did show briefly for a few weeks. I prefer to play my points, not park them.

Thanks, Alderian. :)

who cares about these secretive & esoteric "ghost ratings" ?
it's psuedo elitist nonsense

ps @ Dwaugnar
they've made me a novice Diplomat in the REAL ratings
just figured you'd like to know the good news

What are all the ranks? and what do I have to do to stop being a political sock-puppet?

@ Nudge
1 start winning games
2 start accumulating points

@ Nudge, sorry, start winning more games
you've won only one and have a win % of 1 %
that's less than Dwaugnar at 4 % wins,
that's sad

tendmote: I take over lots of positions too, often as very minor (1 or 2 SC) 'great powers', so both my Ghost-Ratings and Game stats are very skewed. I can display the correct Game stats in the "Comment" section of my profile page, but I don't care about the Ghost-Rating at all since it is so far off.

In the history of the Universe, how important is Ghost-Rating?
1) very very
2) quite very
3) not very
4) never very
5) I'm a grown up, I'm managing the situation
6) What or who is Ghost-Rating?

Yes, in hindsight i foolishly allowed myself to be pressured into draws too many times when I was in potentially winning positions.

I wont even speak to a person until I look at their Ghost Rating. Then if their rating is below 700, I pretend to speak Swahili, so they leave me alone.

My ghost rating is lower than I think it should be because I like to play in low cost games and hoard my points like a chipmunk hoards acorns. I am like the Bizarro Draugnar.

Except that points don't affect Ghost Ratng. Take any 7 players and put them oin a game with a 5 point buy in, then take those same seven players and put them in a game with a 100 point buyin. Their Ghost Rating contributions are exactly the same.

Ghost Rating in itself isn't important, but if someone's style of play suggests that they value their Ghost Rating, it might mean they're more likely to CD and hope that someone else picks up their position, which can affect your own strategy.

Interesting proposition. While this is a possibility, I don't think the top Ghost Ratings have such little respect for the game and their opponents.

@Draugnar I'm referring to hypothetical players, incentives, and rational choices.

That's why I said it was an interesting proposition. I was just saying that, while it might mean what you say, in practical terms, the people who care about GR, like myself, porbably care about the game and it's integrity too and will fight to the last. But there are, no doubt, people who play as you suggest and game the GR system. The only way to fix this would be to reserve GR when the game starts and redistribute it when the game ends so that take over positions get a shot at free GR.

@ Draug - True points dont count but low cost games tend to attrack less skilled players. So when I win/draw in those games, I believe the Ghost Rating takes that into account. I could be wrong as reading the forumala's for Ghost Ratings makes my little brain hurt

Your premise about low poitns games is flawed to begin with. I play low points games all the time. I play *private* games with some of the more skilled players on the site.

Maybe public games, your assertion is true, but there are many low point private games with skilled players because we want to play for the pure fun of playing and don't want our decisions altered based on "Oh my God! I have 50 gazzillion points at risk!" play.

So I can speak to exactly which low point games you refer, but making that generalization is faulty.

The only adjustment made by GR is risk versus reward on skill level as the higher skilled player contributes more to the GR pot than the lower skilled one and so has more risk for less reward. But then GR assumes he will most likely win anyhow so it reduces sandbagging.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

webdip points are meaningless, while GR is basically the Elo rating for webdip - it has all the advantages such a system have been proven to have in, say, chess, where it's used by FIDE and many national federations. It's based on a simple mathematical formula that compares your actual result to what you would be expected to do, given the strength of players in your game.

The GR formula does not take webdip points into account at all. People who think webdip points matter are hilarious. I think people care because, well, they're stupid and lazy - webdip points are right there on the profiles, and they certain LOOK like they rank people, so they must matter, whereas GR is on some obscure (???) site somewhere, so it must be an artificial, esoteric thing no one cares about.

In fact, GR is just Elo - Elo's been around and applied for decades, and has done very well at rating players. GR actually takes the skill of people into account, and adjusts precisely for the difference in GR among different players. Webdip points are, and let me be as charitable as possible, weakly correlated with skill. GR asymptotically approaches the ideal rating for a given level of skill.

Points AND GR are meaningless. The premise behind GR is that a player is trying to win. Not all play for the win.

I still wonder why so many worry about rating using either points or GR. Playing for fun is where it's at.

If you want to know how you rate, set up a 7X7 tourney with 6 people and see how you do. Repeat with a new 6 people. You'll find out how you rate and which country is your weakest and best.

Most important, have fun!

You'd have to play everyone on the site enough times to cancel out random noise in order for that to work.

GR exploits simple mathematics to get a good estimate of skill...and, damn, I think I discovered why the webdip community hates it. Simple mathematics is over their heads.

@acosmist no one is faulting the math, just considering the incentives that this particular implementation provides. If the a player is in a bad position, resigns, and someone else takes over the bad position, the loss is allocated to the second player and the first player gets a pass. so if a player cares about ghostrank, that might be a factor that motivates them to cd. i dont care about gr, just trying to understand the mind of the opponent.

the model is nice, but like any model it is susceptible to garbage in, garbage out if the inputs are not complete.

I prefer GR to points. That said, after 4 years here my GR for June is 4265 out of 4295, so I must really be playing for fun.

I didn't know that GR didn't punish you for resigning. I think that needs to change, though the problem my lie in the results database (or whatever is mined to calculate GR). Do resigns and takeovers show up there?

"GR exploits simple mathematics to get a good estimate of skill...and, damn, I think I discovered why the webdip community hates it. Simple mathematics is over their heads. "

Seems that having fun is over the heads of some. It is a GAME after all. Enjoyment. If you are looking for bragging rights then I feel sorry for you. Just sayin'

@SpeakerToAliens: No, they don't show up (I did actually develop a system to take them into account, but couldn't implement it)

Wouldn't it be possible to just subtract a player's GR if he CD's rather than having it reset to what it was at the beginning? I'm not sure how data is gathered for GR - if it's by games finished or games entered.

The only data given is the finishing position, so this isn't possible.

The data dump provided by Kestas only includes completed games, and only the players on record at the end of the game. I'm not sure whether the database includes the replaced players or not. If it did and it could be added to the dump, then perhaps the ghost ratings calculation could be adjusted.

Hi Ghostmaker. Been a long time.