Visual adjustment to Threat Levels coming on Monday

The skill rating system is actually working very well at the moment, HOWEVER, we have realized that the end-user display of the data (the Threat Level Symbol - like "Bronze 1") are out of alignment, in particular since they visually show a very large number of players as Threat 1 for much too long while the system is learning the player's skill. In fact we will start changing the TL symbol much earlier in the process.

It's important to know that a player's REAL skill rating are going to be unaffected by this upcoming change, and this just alters the translation from the real system wide skill rating to the Threat Level display since the current translation skews too low to be practical (in other words, right now there is a VAST difference  between people at the very start of TL-1/Bronze-1 and at the very end of TL-1/Bronze-1. In fact the difference between start of TL-1 and end of TL-1 is greater than the distance between TL-3 and TL-11, which clearly is not an appropriate alignment to communicate how "dangerous" or "skilled" a particular player is).

In the higher threat levels the alignments are a bit more appropriate right now, and therefore will only be slightly adjusted by the upcoming change. And yes - we already have a few players (well under 0.5% at the moment) who have reached TL-30 (aka Gold 10). And they seem like the correct players in that category.

When the new threat level visual chart gets implemented Monday, everyone should see drastic jumps in their visual threat levels at that time (though - again - the underlying skill rating stays the same).

The other tweak we are working on a little longer term is modifying the matchmaking system. Because the new skill rating system produces numbers of a whole different magnitude (and accuracy), with the increased player volume they also don't translate very well into the original match making system. It works, it's just not terribly optimized for the new data, and seems to produce too many 4v3 and 2v3 and 2v4 matches at the moment for lower level players, leading to large backup call sequences. Interestingly, the skill rating gets accurately computed in the end no matter who was in the match (ie - if the match was uneven against you, but you still won - then you will clearly gain a lot from the match, in fact, losing a bad match under some conditions can make you move up in skill rating).

Therefore the other upcoming priority is to tweak how the matches are set up, especially now that we have far more information about a player's REAL skill level than we ever had before. Which is a very nice basis to start this change from. Based on this information we will be able to tweak the matchmaking to create better matches in a district at both low and higher levels.

And, there has been a lot of discussion about how we compute Skill Ratings. Without digging in to extreme detail, the basic paradigm of the new system is that at the end of a match the system takes all the ratings of the various team members, then determines a particular person's "participation" quotient in the match (if you don't participate much, you don't get much of the effect), and then the system updates players ratings in accordance whether they were EXPECTED to have wont the match or not. If one group of players were expected to have won, but still lost, then the penalty is much greater than the award they get if they were expected to have won and did win. If they were expected to lose, but still won, then they are going to get a much higher boost to their skill rating.

We will make a future dedicated post to skill ratings, and also start posting some of the data from the real live games so people can get a sense of how these matches play out and how players are shifting in skill ratings over time.

Finally - today for the past several hours we have had well over 250 registrations PER MINUTE for the game, and we expect all these new players to arrive in full force on Monday (except of course for the super-double-secret-early-invites we are doing before Monday morning - but those are of course a big secret). But Monday is also the day we will be formally reaching out to new players, so this coming week certainly should be very interesting.

Cheers!