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[Stealth Tomato]

I haven't played a single "I should win 19 out of 20" opponent on Goko so far, and it surprises me you think they exist in abundance.

Have you ever accidentally played a career Lv10 or so on Iso? They're horrendous. They make repeated elementary mistakes on fairly straightforward boards, to the point where even bad boards are easy wins (because they try for things that lose consistently to Big Money). I could probably win 80-90% against them playing five-card kingdoms.

[Fabian]

"Have you ever accidentally played a career Lv10 or so on Iso?"

I played 5k or 6k games or something, and no, no I can't say that I have.

[Stealth Tomato]

"Have you ever accidentally played a career Lv10 or so on Iso?"

I played 5k or 6k games or something, and no, no I can't say that I have.

Fair enough. I had a few encounters due to screwing up automatch settings and the not-displaying-level bug (I looked up their level after accepting) and a bunch more when Google authentication was down so I created a Yahoo alternate. Suffice to say that until about Lv15 the players are not remotely competent. 20 is around the point where they start to play relatively well on uncomplicated boards.

[Fabian]

ST,

See that just blows my mind. All I ever did was play level ~30+ players, except when I played my lvl 25 RL friend, who was somehow better than any sub 35 player. How he was level 25 while being very very competent while a level 20 player is apparentely close to incompetent to the point of 95% winrates is very strange to me. Then again I guess we just had different isotropic experiences.

[dondon151]

I'm not even sure that a 94% winrate is possible against a L10 player if you go second. Just the likelihood of bad luck could set you back.

[Fabian]

I'm 100.0% convinced it's not, fwiw.

[ftl]

There were a bunch of ways to perpetually end up level 10-20 on iso. One is to play a lot of games but be bad at it.

The other is simply not to play much. If you only play a few games a week online, you'll never get above level 10-20 no matter how good you are.

[Polk5440]

my thesis defense is on may 16th

GOOD LUCK! (Do you want to brag and share a link to your paper? I might even read it.)

[Kirian]

I'm 100.0% convinced it's not, fwiw.

Indeed.  That level 10 player would have to play significantly worse than BM+X most of the time, and still an inferior strategy can win from the first seat, though it takes good luck.

It might be possible to achieve 75% win rate over a level 10 player.

[Jiriki]

I was hovering at 35 before Iso went down and have now cleared 6K playing 2-3 games a day +/-1K. I would say the quality of competition over 5K on goko is closer to the 20s on Iso than 30+. Seems like some combo of the serious Iso players didn't all move over, figuring out DA (I feel like I've been way ahead of my opponents on average using these cards), and that the ratings haven't had the time to stabilize like on Iso.

[meandering mercury]

my thesis defense is on may 16th

GOOD LUCK! (Do you want to brag and share a link to your paper? I might even read it.)

My thesis defense is in 90 minutes!!

Why am I lurking these forums again?!

(and good luck for your defense too)

[synpax]

I think I was in the low teens on Iso but have been on a 20+ game winning streak on Goko and am at 5200+ on the pro board now. A few close games. I'm not sure what the equivalency is, and I never look at my opponents score/rank before we begin the game.

I'd like to think I'm getting better. I was new to Dominion as Iso was shutting down. And on ISo, I was in the habit of watching videos and browsing 9gag while I played. At least now I pause the videos long enough to figure out a strategy.

[ragingduckd]

I'm no expert on the math (and I'd be grateful is someone who is would point me in the right direction), but...

It seems to me that ELO is inappropriate for games of chance.  ELO models win rates as
    P(player 1 wins) = P(x1>x2),
where x1 and x2 are Gaussians random variables with means r1 and r2 representing the ratings of the two players.  IMO, a more appropriate model for Dominion is something like
    P(player 1 wins) = 10% + 80%*P(x1>x2),
the same model, but with a 10% chance of automatic victory for each player.  That 10% represents the odds of opening Mountebank-Chapel, or getting all the prizes in a tourney game, or winning the Duchy split in a Duke game, etc.

In my experience, the ELO/Goko expectation that a 2000-pt difference match go 5-1 in favor of the higher rated player just isn't realistic.  The weaker player wins much more often than the rating system expects.  Consequently, weak players improve their ratings by playing against stronger players and strong players benefit by limiting their opponents to other strong players.

If this assessment is correct, then opponent selection may have a major effect on Goko ratings.  A 5500 player who plays mostly with 4000-ish players might actually be just a skilled as a 6000 player only plays against the top 25.

[DStu]

I don't think it's so easy.  There is no automatic win in Dominion, someone who has never played this game will not win 100% of the games against you when they open 5/2 vs 4/3 on a Mountebank/Chapel board.  They probably will even lose most of the games.

How much variance a kingdom has depends on the board, but I don't really see a good way on how to get this into a model.  It also depends on the player skills, e.g. say Horse Traders/Duke is dominant on a board without other support, that's more or less a 50/50+first player advantage if both players know the strategy, but if not the board might be much more complicated.

[ragingduckd]

I don't think it's so easy.  There is no automatic win in Dominion, someone who has never played this game will not win 100% of the games against you when they open 5/2 vs 4/3 on a Mountebank/Chapel board.  They probably will even lose most of the games.

I agree.  That sort of formula couldn't apply for all ratings differences.  If a 10% adjustment were appropriate for a 1500-pt difference, then you'd need a smaller one for a 3000-pt difference.  But that's clumsy and inelegant, and I'm not seriously proposing it as a modification of Elo... it's just an example of how using Elo for Dominion might generate a bias in favor of the lower-rated player.

Personally, I find it impossible to break even against anyone more than 1500 points lower than me.  I've also jumped about 300 points since I changed my match criteria from 5000+ to 5500+.  But maybe that's just noise, or maybe it's the variance in the quality of my play that's higher than Goko's rating system expects.

How much variance a kingdom has depends on the board, but I don't really see a good way on how to get this into a model.  It also depends on the player skills, e.g. say Horse Traders/Duke is dominant on a board without other support, that's more or less a 50/50+first player advantage if both players know the strategy, but if not the board might be much more complicated.

Actually, I really like this idea.  I doubt you could map kingdoms to variances, but modifying Elo so that the variance is drawn from some random distribution might capture the key difference between a game like chess and a game like Dominion.  It feels like it might even be mathematically tractable.

I'm less confident about modifying the variance based on the players' skill, but maybe that could work too.

[SCSN]

or winning the Duchy split in a Duke game, etc.

With all the curses in your deck...

[Stealth Tomato]

I don't think it's so easy.  There is no automatic win in Dominion, someone who has never played this game will not win 100% of the games against you when they open 5/2 vs 4/3 on a Mountebank/Chapel board.  They probably will even lose most of the games.

I agree.  That sort of formula couldn't apply for all ratings differences.  If a 10% adjustment were appropriate for a 1500-pt difference, then you'd need a smaller one for a 3000-pt difference.  But that's clumsy and inelegant, and I'm not seriously proposing it as a modification of Elo... it's just an example of how using Elo for Dominion might generate a bias in favor of the lower-rated player.

Personally, I find it impossible to break even against anyone more than 1500 points lower than me.  I've also jumped about 300 points since I changed my match criteria from 5000+ to 5500+.  But maybe that's just noise, or maybe it's the variance in the quality of my play that's higher than Goko's rating system expects.

Remember, 300 points is ~3 levels on Iso, which is a perfectly normal fluctuation over time.

I think the overall point that luck isn't sufficiently accounted for is valid though. Although I think that comes out more in matches with closely-ranked opponents than dramatically superior/inferior ones. I can beat a Lv3000 9 times out of 10 regardless of board. On a substantial proportion of boards, I'm flipping coins against anyone 5500+, where maybe one of us can eke out a 10-20% edge with strong play but 2/3 of games will be determined by pure chance.

[WanderingWinder]

I'm going to make a few miscellaneous factual points. First of all, I don't know of any implementation of the Elo system currently that uses a normal distribution. Elo's original formulation did, though it can actually use *any* curve for the Win Expectancy. And all the big ones now (so far as I'm aware) are using the Logistic curve.
Secondly, Goko doesn't use Elo. Further, we don't know *what* their underlying WE curve is.

Okay, opinions. Goko's system would be much much better if it were the Elo system (with a reasonable choice of K value and underlying WE curve) - of this I am pretty confident. Well, okay, it's really more to do with the choice of WE curve as well as their updating procedure. But I am pretty sure their curve - if they're even using one, which I'm not totally sure they are - is DREADFUL, much worse than a Gaussian would be. And actually, if you look at what they are saying, they have to pervert their system to not allow WE of over 100%/less than 0% in some games, which is prima facie quite bad.

Okay, the 10% sure win but-then-change-that-based-on-how-big-a-rating-gap-there-is is really wanting a different curve. Which is fine, of course, though finding exactly which one is best is EXTREMELY tricky.

You also probably don't want to have automatic cut-offs like that. Let the win% float from 0 to 100, just have a good enough system that (if it's unreasonable to expect a 99% winrate) makes it very difficult for a 99% win-rate to emerge. Which actually isn't all that hard to do, though again, finding the best curve is incredibly difficult.

[ragingduckd]

And actually, if you look at what they are saying, they have to pervert their system to not allow WE of over 100%/less than 0% in some games, which is prima facie quite bad.

Yikes, that sounds awful.  Okay, I just found the Goko wiki entry and the Funsockets Q&A, but they don't really say anything useful about their system, except that it's a TrueSkill variant.  Can you link me to where they talk about perverting their system?

Okay, the 10% sure win but-then-change-that-based-on-how-big-a-rating-gap-there-is is really wanting a different curve. Which is fine, of course, though finding exactly which one is best is EXTREMELY tricky.

Ah.  That makes sense.  Ok, so there's no reason that Elo with a non-Gaussian WE has to have the bias I'm thinking about.

[SCSN]

And actually, if you look at what they are saying, they have to pervert their system to not allow WE of over 100%/less than 0% in some games, which is prima facie quite bad.

Yikes, that sounds awful.  Okay, I just found the Goko wiki entry and the Funsockets Q&A, but they don't really say anything useful about their system, except that it's a TrueSkill variant.  Can you link me to where they talk about perverting their system?

https://getsatisfaction.com/goko/topics/summary_of_rating_calculations#reply_11914215

Specifically:

That said, we no longer allow you to lose points by winning. Instead, we're perverting the rating system a little to prevent this, only because it upsets players who have a hard time believing it's the best thing to happen in order to model their ability.

Personally, I find it impossible to break even against anyone more than 1500 points lower than me.  I've also jumped about 300 points since I changed my match criteria from 5000+ to 5500+.

Interesting. I still play anyone >5000, but I'm gonna try this out for a bit. My guess though is that Goko expects me to win 65-75% against 5000-5500's, which doesn't sound terribly unreasonable?

Does any of you have the slightest idea as to how rating points are awarded, btw? I sometimes get 7 from beating a 5800, and other times 26 from winning against a 5200. There's certainly a correlation between level difference and points gained/lost, but there's also a ton of inexplicable variation.

[ragingduckd]

I was around 5.6k until I decide to get to the top,

I like this quote a lot. 

[Blueswan]

At what rating would you say that a player stops sucking? [...]

With no bots, I would guess about 5000 pro[...]

Getting sooo close to not sucking. 



Except that this is just from playing bots, so I guess it doesn't really count.

I wanted to post this, since I'm sure I'm gonna f*** up the next game.

[Blueswan]

Oh my. Amazingly I did not f*** it up. Infact, I'd say that Lord Bottington just got his ass handed to him. Oh well, won't bother you with this anymore, I reached my goal for now. Now if they could only fix the lagging so I could start playing real humans.

[Davio]

Okay, I eventually cracked the 6k mark on the pro leaderboard myself, my addiction won over my annoyance I guess.

And I have to be honest, it wasn't at all that hard and it didn't take that many games, so I don't know what to make of it. It seems like I'm better at pro games than casual games oddly enough.

I found the level of play overall to be pretty okay, but not spectacular, like how 30-ish was back on Iso. But then again I played mostly against 5k's and not so much against 6k's. I suspect 6k is comparable to Iso's 40 and Rabid's 7k is comparable to Iso's 50+. It's good to see many of the known forum players high on the leaderboard though, it shows to me their rating system isn't entirely bogus.

The players I've played against seemed to have a decent understanding of the fundamentals of the game, but didn't quite know when to switch to greening mode (they kept building up for too long) or how to manipulate the end game. Quite often I've surprised my opponent with a sneaky 3-pile ending which I've been eyeing up 5 turns in advance.

Many boards are just about getting control of the game and I tend to sacrifice a lot of early momentum to get the control I want through the mid- and endgame, while my opponents just seemed to only have a short term plan while lacking a strategic game plan for the entire game. They would get a Witch and then just start playing a glorified big money type game.

[Lekkit]

I agree with Davio. A lot of the players seems like they haven't been playing multiple thousands games. I guess this is bound to change as time goes by.