Dissatisfaction with the Goko ratings, as well as (and quite frankly, more importantly than) my own personal interest in artificially putting myself at the top of anything I feel like artificially putting myself at the top of has led to me developing my own system, which I am here calling the gman314 system. It works for games with any number of players, and I feel no obligation to keep separate ratings anyway, as under this rating system the game is pretty much the same with any number of players!
I'm not going to divulge all the particular formulae, at least yet. But if at some point such formulae exist, I'll totally divulge them. I may want to patent the system, but really, who would patent a system based on assigning random numbers to people. Having said that, I'm doing a ton of stuff, that's super groundbreaking from the conceptual level: I'm rating players on how closely their strategy matches the strategy that I would use. So I will explain the basic tenets of the system here. I will definitely not show you how to figure out your expected win% in any matchup, since my system doesn't tell you anything at all about that.
Also, feel free to ask me whatever questions about thing you don't understand (i.e. Why did my this number do this after that happened? Or why is this a bigger difference than that?)
There are three numbers you're going to see that are associated with each player.
ID - this is an integer that lets me identify you in the system. It has no statistical significance, and doesn't even really help at all. It just lets me continue parodying WW's system and makes this system look more scientific than it really is.
Rating- this is the big important number to look at. After every game, I will re-evaluate your rating. If you followed my approach for the board, your rating will go up; if you didn't it will go down. How MUCH it moves is dependent on a few different things. One is how close to me you've performed in the past (which is based on your rating). The more like me you typically play, the fewer points you can gain, and the more you can lose, and vice versa. Exactly how much your rating actually moves is dependent on the my whim. If I'm feeling in an enginey mood, engines will make your rating go up more than normal, and BM will make your rating go up less than normal. (Assuming, in either case, that your approach was similar to mine).
Uncertainty - this is a completely random and useless number. It tells us absolutely nothing. *It is not a standard deviation* It changes a lot. First, every time I change your rating, I give you a new random and likely irrational number as an uncertainty. Second, like your rating, it depends on my whim. Since each game gives us more information, playing a game will *generally* make the uncertainty decrease. However, depending on the kind of mood I'm in, it may do whatever the heck I want it to do. Also, it's DEFFINITELY possible for you to get arbitrarily large uncertainties this way.
Now some notes on the actual numbers you're going to see. Your rating for each game will be somewhere between 0 and 100, depending on what arbitrary percentage I assign to you based on how well your strategy matches mine. Then, your overall rating will be an average of your ratings for every rated game, with weightings favoring games which I feel are particularly awesome. Obviously, my rating will be 100% with an uncertainty of 0% because clearly I will do exactly what I would do in any given game.
Win% = I_have_no_clue, where _ is basically just a space, but this way it's a single variable. Of course, this "formula" was only included to further parody the gman314 rating system.
As you can see, only my whim has any significance.
Please note that right now, there is no systemic first player advantage. When playing any given game, I could end up with either player, so clearly I could adopt any strategy I choose from any seat.
I should note that the system has never had a practical test - this will be the first. But really, it's not going to change based on this.
Anyway, here's what I would like for you guys to do:
Sign up for the system. I will give you an ID. Every day (I will try to do this in the mornings), I will update the rating list with the games from the previous day. What that means I need from you guys is the results. In order for this to work in a way that doesn't make me pull my remaining hair out of my head, I am going to need it formatted particularly:
ID1 ID2 Log
Where ID1 and ID2 are the IDs of the players in whatever order you feel like putting them in. Log is a link to the game log so that I can see your approaches and the board.
Please note the spaces between the 3 quantities here. They are absolutely non-essential. You can totally lack these spaces, and you can definitely have other spaces, EXCEPT that that might mix up your IDs for me.
The easiest way I think to do this will be to put the results in a Google Doc Spreadsheet. I'll set one of these up, and when you sign up, I can PM you the link to it.
PLEASE ALSO NOTE THAT THE ORDERING OF GAMES DOESN'T MATTER AT ALL
I may have some busy days where I can't input the ratings right away, but it doesn't really matter, because this rating doesn't tell you anything.
Also, you can probably expect about a day's worth of lag between signing up and being 'active', i.e. having your name appear in the list and me getting the google doc stuff to you.
This rating system is a complete joke and satire of the WW system. It means absolutely nothing.
