Wall of text to hopefully clarify MystWalkers questions:
Yes. The percentiles give you something like a ladder. They show you, how many players in this pool have a lower rating/rank than you have. Don’t how good you are, only how many players are weaker (in this pool).
Your rating is compared to all player in the corresponding pool.
They won’t know any better than they know now what the meaning of the numbers in the breakdown tables are.
There are 2 ways to do that.
- The proper would be to recalculate the percentiles each time a rating is calculated. This would require that the server look up all roundabout 250000 users sort them by rating, and then sum weak → strong.
This is more an issue of load on the server than a programming one (but it has to be done).
To lower the server load, one can update the percentiles only once a day/weak … - You can do it in an approximate way. Like we do the mapping rating → rank, we can find a formula witch maps the rating to an assumed percentile.
One would do this by calculating the percentiles now (for each breakdown separately). Then one would look for a function, which reflects the current rating → percentiles. This function will be used to calculate the percentiles from now on.
Please Note again. This would be only an approximation, but users looking at their breakdown chart could hardly tell the difference.
S_Alexander made a histogram showing both rank and percentiles for the OGS user base (only overall rank I guess). You can use it to get an estimation, how the percentiles would look like for different players.