Wait you consider rats a junk card? You guys do know that rats is Donald x vaccarino s favorite card right? Do you really want to call it junk? 😂.
Yeah. Here's some more context to it being Donald X.'s favorite card:
Rats is my favorite Dominion card. Now you know that about me. You give your kingdom a rat problem. Sure, you get rid of some garbage, but now you've got Rats, and they don't get rid of themselves. Isn't the solution worse than the problem?
The point of Rats is that it replaces your junk cards with other junk cards, specifically ones that cost $4 and give you +1 card when trashed. You'd much rather Apprentice a Rats than a Copper, for example. But if you don't have any way of getting rid of the Rats, they're literally just junk cards — after you have trashed your 10 starting cards, every Rats you play will trash a good card, which means you have to stop playing them, which means you have 10 cards you can't play instead of the 10 cards that did at least a little bit of something. Gaining more junk cards to feed the Rats isn't a good idea either, because the Rats are handsize-decreasing cantrips.
The not-immediately-obvious thing about draw in Dominion is that +1 card is not actually drawing cards. If you have five cards in hand and one action, and you play a card with +1 card +1 action, you still have five cards in hand and one action, so unless the card also did something else, nothing changed. This is relevant to both Rats and Storyteller. In order to meaningfully draw cards, you have to end up with a larger handsize than you started with, and this doesn't happen when you play a Rats or play a Storyteller with just Copper. (Playing Coppers with Storyteller is still useful, if a bit weak for $5, because it lets you sift through the Coppers in your deck, but deliberately having Coppers
so that you get to sift through them with Storyteller is not.)
Thanks awaculus for clarifying that. Although I’m still not sure on how all that works. I just wished it was more like leveling up in a video game, where you can lose your level. So if I’m 0.44 what’s the highest you can go and the Lowest you can go.
It is a pretty complicated system and I don't understand the details either, but the big picture is easy enough to understand. The point is to measure your skill level relative to the average player, so being able to lose points when you lose games necessarily has to be a part of it, otherwise people who play the most would have the most points even if they're not the best players.
You're -0.44, not 0.44 (or were on June 1 2019 — you're -1.63 now but that estimation could be inaccurate because you haven't played a lot of games recently). You start at 0 and you go up when you win games and down when you lose, and how much it changes by depends on what the skill difference is between you and the opponent and in which direction. I don't think there is a hard limit for how high or low you can go, but currently f_____t_ is the only player with a µ above 3 (theirs is 3.197) and probably the lowest µs are somewhat lower than -3 because it's easier to be way worse than average than it is to be way better than average.
So the µ is the system's best estimate for your skill level relative to the average, but it's just an estimate. Then there is also a φ which is always positive and measures how much uncertainty there is in the estimate — it generally goes down the more you play, and increases every day if you don't — and the system is 95% confident your skill level is somewhere between µ-2φ and µ+2φ. This is why the main rating on the site is based on µ-2φ, because even though you are probably better than that, it's almost sure you're
at least that good. And the µ-2φ value is multiplied by 7.5 and then 50 is added to it to make it a bigger number, which makes it nicer to look at, which is why the average displayed rating is probably more like 45–50 than -0.5–0. But as a result of this, two people at the same skill level will have different ratings based on how much they play, so just the µ is a better estimate of skill. You can find out people's µ values if you look them up on the leaderboard and click them, or more easily by private messaging DomBot on Discord if you're there.