I'm curious about something else:
On Nov 27, I was level 26;
on Nov 28 I was level 25;
and today, Nov 30, I am level 24.
I would have assumed this was because my old games are going away, but my # of eligible games is the same at 129, and I have not logged into Isotropic or played a game since the new leaderboard. What gives? Why do people's rank slip even when the number of their eligible games stays the same?
If your rank is based only on the last 30 days, your 'strength of schedule' has got to be changing. Because if you count your games for the change they bear on you based on how strong your opponents were ranked when you played them, then that carries the information of how they were ranked then into your rating, which is information from before that 30 day period.
And yeah, I know that that doesn't really make sense.
Yeah, that probably makes sense. Presumably what happened is that theory played no games between 27 October and 30 October, so the number of eligible games wouldn't have changed. But the ratings of the people against whom he played would now have also changed... and I guess would have changed at the time he had played them?
It seems like the new system is basically setting everyone to 25 +- 25, then running through the past thirty days of logs and parsing forward from there. I trued to type the following in just a couple of sentences, and realized English
doesn't have the verb tenses to deal with it, because it's basically time travel. Let me try this way:
On 27 Nov, rankings were calculated based on 27 Oct to 26 Nov. Theory played no games in the first four of those days, but other players did. At the time theory played his first games, those players had ranks, presumably better than 25+-25, based on games they played between 27 Oct and 30 Oct.
On 30 Nov, rankings were calculated based on 30 Oct to 29 Nov. The first players theory played now, instead, were all 25+-25, so theory's rank increased less for those first games.
----
In other words, if I play 100 games today and then do nothing for 30 days, during that time my ranking will regress to the mean (25+-25) based entirely on the rankings of other players shifting as the time window used to determine peoples' rankings changes.
In other other words, this is a bad time travel novel plot. A computer program is erasing things in the past, which is causing changes in the present. All we need is an intrepid team of time travellers (I'm imaging theory as the scientist, rrenaud as the grizzled space marine, guided as the hardened veteran, myself as the redshirt who dies in a spacetime anomaly, and of course Sam Rockwell as the Plucky Comic Relief) to destroy the computer--at some point in the past, before it starts erasing said past. Or something like that.