Changes to Rated Matches for November 2017

[Gondorian]

As of November 1st, for Rated matches, we will be tracking your win/loss and win streaks for each of our 32 heroes. These will eventually be displayed in game and on a leaderboard, but initially they will only be tracked in the background with two exceptions:

1. You will earn a random foil for a hero for every 20 Rated matches you win with that hero. These do not need to be consecutive wins - e.g. 20 total wins with Darkclaw, regardless of hero changes or losses in between, will get you one random foil usable by Darkclaw.

2. You will be notified at the end of a Rated match if you have improved on your win-streak for a hero (minimum 5 Rated match wins in a row).

UPDATE: I've just added a way to track your wins per hero and your win-streak.



In the above example, it means I have 5 total wins with Rothem and I am currently on a win-streak of 2, with a best win-streak of 3 with Rothem.


The other main change for November is that player ratings will not be reset to zero at the start of the season, but the standard deviation part of everyone's rating equation will be increased to make the result of each subsequent match more impactful on your rating than it would have been otherwise. (Initially you will see a rating drop of about 60.)

The goal here is to get the best of both worlds compared to resetting rating at the start of every season (which gives everyone a fresh shot at "retraining" the system about what their real rating is) and not resetting (which makes pairing more appropriate from your very first game of the season).

For those familiar with the "Rating Decay" that happens if you have not played for more than 5 days and have a rating above 250, this works in exactly the same way. We will apply a "decay" to everyone. (More details on the how this Rating Decay works is in the post below.)


For clarity, the changes from October, with the Best Score Leaderboard and prizes for the Top 100 on that, are still in place.


If you have any comments or questions about the above, please reply below.

[Gondorian]

How Rating Decay works

Your rating (R) is calculated from two values: a mean (M) and a standard deviation (SD).

e.g. R = ( M-(SD x 3) ) x 10

In this example, to start at R=0, we would need the starting M to be triple the value of the starting SD.

As you play more games, the system gains more confidence in your true rating and reduces your SD, which makes it a smaller subtraction from the mean.

To effect a "decay", we just add something onto the SD to reduce confidence in your true value again, which causes a lower rating in the above calculation (because it's a bigger subtraction from the mean). By playing more, with similar win-rate, you can get it back to what it was. If you have a better win-rate, it will end up higher than what it was before the decay.

Whenever your SD is big (like in the initial games after a reset to zero), the impact on rating of each result is also big. If you've played hundreds of games, however, then your SD will be pretty small and it is then hard to change your rating much after that.

From November 1st onwards, we will increase everyone's SD by the same amount (e.g. 2) at the start of the season to cause all ratings to decay and enable your initial matches during the season (whenever they may be for you) to have a bigger impact on your calculated rating as your SD reduces again. This should go some way towards undoing any damage you might have done later in the previous season by "playing for fun" at a lower win-rate than you might if you were playing competitively.

Note: If applying decay causes anyone's rating to go below zero, we will just set it to zero.

EDIT: In case anyone is wondering, the decay that's in effect at the moment (for when you've not played in 5 days) only affects those at higher than 250 rating and does not alter the SD very much at all.

[DuaMall]

Great great news... Good job

[Kolodi]

Very good, I like these changes. Now I can play all my weird decks at the end of the season. And win streak is a cool addition too, I hope there will be much more challenges in the future.

[Offspring]

These are really good changes, and also im glad to see that BoD keeps improving the rated system and listening to the community suggestions.

And, as a fan of new challenges, I liked the idea to have now an official hero winstreak leaderboard with foil prizes.

Now Bay Fighter will finally have free time to play

Looking forward to reach 20 wins (in a row, for sure) with my Ter Adun!

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[Sleeping.Dragon]

Very nice improvements, master Gondorian

[Bayfighter]

Awesome to see Hero win streak officially become a trackable part of the game! Even though this may have happened even without my forum win streak leaderboard, I'll take partial credit and pat myself on the back! Cool to see I may have left my mark on the game, my legacy is now complete. =)

[Kolodi]

Awesome to see Hero win streak officially become a trackable part of the game! Even though this may have happened even without my forum win streak leaderboard, I'll take partial credit and pat myself on the back! Cool to see I may have left my mark on the game, my legacy is now complete. =)

Yeah, thank you very much for that. You did really great work. We can think now about some new cool challenges.

Sent from my ONE A2003 using Tapatalk

[Gondorian]

This is now live. The Best Score Leaderboard for October has been put into the Hall of Fame and we now start a fresh Best Score Leaderboard for November. Good luck, everyone!

[Gondorian]

UPDATE: I've just added a way to track your wins per hero and your win-streak.



In the above example, it means I have 5 total wins with Rothem and I am currently on a win-streak of 2, with a best win-streak of 3 with Rothem.