This isn’t a whine about fighting the same opponents over and over again, rather I wanted to share something that I found interesting after looking at the server scores over at the millenium.org website.
Specifically, while I don’t know the ins and outs of the Glicko scoring system, what is obvious to me is that each tier is a zero sum game, if you add up the scores of the three servers that participated in a week long match at the beginning and then at the end of the match you will find that they should be the same or very close to it (for the purposes of this post the minor differences that sometimes crop up are not significant).
Another “property” of the tiered setup is that all the points flow upward. Because each match is a zero sum game, any time a server goes up a tier, the point difference between it and the server that replaces it permanently leaves that tier. The points can only be replaced by a server from a lower tier bringing more points in. What this leads to is overabundance of points in tier 1 since no points ever leave that tier and a lack of points in the bottom tier.
Just for fun I added up the NA tier 1 points for all the weeks that millenium.org had information for. I only added whole numbers so the totals vary slightly.
2/23 = 6480
2/16 = 6479
2/9 = 6480
2/2 = 6480 SoR entered T1
1/26 = 6388
1/19 = 6387
1/12 = 6387 BG entered T1
1/5 = 6371
12/29 = 6372
12/22 = 6372
12/15 = 6372
12/8 = 6372
12/1 = 6371
11/24 = 6371
11/17 = 6368 SoS entered T1
11/10 = 6355
11/3 = 6355
10/27 = 6360 BG entered T1
10/20 = 6345 IoJ entered T1
10/13 = 6275 SBI entered T1
10/6 = 6251 ET entered T1
9/29 = 6234
I didn’t bother doing the same for T8, because who cares about that hole, right? j/k Over time this will lead to stagnation in the top and bottom tiers. For top tier every time a new server brings more points into that tier it makes it that much more difficult for another server to break into T1. Simply because with so many points to go around the amount of effort needed to maintain a high score in T1 is significantly less than T2. On the other hand it makes it that much more difficult to escape the bottom tier, we are already seeing it now. With SF being unable to escape that pit despite dominating for weeks. They simply can’t get enough rating points from ET and FC since they have so little to begin with, like squeezing blood from a rock.
Now, one way to fix this problem is by resetting the scores, but I think that solution is worse than the problem it would be trying to fix. Rather, I think what would fix this is transferring points from T1 to T8. For example, decide on some arbitrary number, like 100 points and if the gaps between T1-T2 and T7-T8 equal or exceed this number at the same time for say two weeks or more, then you could simply reduce the ratings of T1 servers by that amount and raise the ratings of T8 servers by an equal amount. This would preserve the relative rankings of the servers, but would provide an extra boost of points at the bottom of the ladder to allow for upward movement of those servers that were prevented from doing so due to the lack of points in their tier.
