Leaderboard by elo?

There are multiple challenges when creating a rating leaderboard:

  1. Glicko ratings are relatively unstable. Even for stable players we have deviations of ~100. To try to order ratings which are within 1 deviation is far stretched. At a separation of one std the probability of ordering 2 players wrong due to incorrect ratings is about 24%. For ratings within 20 points it’s like a coin flip to be the better ranked player. The ratings of multiple players are close enough to each other that one or two games are enough to change the relative positions of two players and is therefor unstable. The linked list contains multiple players with really close ratings.

    At least for casual users, game servers usually do some tricks to make rankings look more stable than they are, while maintaining a sense of fluidity at the same time. See the link in Improved OGS rank histogram (25k as the lowest rank discussion) for example.

  2. We probably want to restrict the list to recently active players, what ever this means. Probably drop players from the list if they don’t play ranked games for a while.

  3. Such a list will increase the incentive to some people to create accounts with artificially increased ratings. This will probably be some inconvenience the moderation team would have to deal with.

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