Avoid rating manipulations

Originally posted by RolandYoung
I'm pretty sure that to avoid manipulation, some kind of maximum is needed, either max of start and end, or max during period.

Max of start and end would be better than the present system, max overall might be a bit costly to compute.

If this was implemented a 2000 player playing 100 games who stopped playing for whaever reason would lose about 3200 points. Having a rating of -1200. When he came back it would take a lot of games to get back up and all the people he played against would be losing 32.

Originally posted by gumbie
If this was implemented a 2000 player playing 100 games who stopped playing for whaever reason would lose about 3200 points. Having a rating of -1200. When he came back it would take a lot of games to get back up and all the people he played against would be losing 32.

Your scenario is a bit exaggerated; the rating difference has to be over 700 for a 32 point rating change. Also, this would not involve manipulation on the part of the player in question; just antisocial recklessness.

However, you have made a good argument against any scheme other than the present one. It is a particularly strong rebuttal of the suggestion that started this thread, and it works pretty well against your suggestion of using averages. With averages, our rogue player would lose about 2000 rating points on the way down and about 50 1200-rated opponents on the way up would each lose around 30 points.

Originally posted by gumbie
If this was implemented a 2000 player playing 100 games who stopped playing for whaever reason would lose about 3200 points. Having a rating of -1200. When he came back it would take a lot of games to get back up and all the people he played against would be losing 32.

Perhaps we should implement a special rule that a player's rating cannot fall to less than 50% of their 30-day max (a value that RHP already generates, so requires minimal server load).

It is however a special case only seen by the crash-and-burn crew, so would have little effect on the majority of players.