Why is the starting ELO 1150?

It seems like such a random number to me.

2 Likes

technically behind the scenes it’s 1500, but we’ve implemented a system called “humble rank” which puts you one Ratings Deviation lower (the starting RD being 350) for unranked players for matchmaking and display only.

So, it’s because 1500-350=1150

It is kinda weird, but this was the compromise that was come up with on these forums cuz 13ks got really annoyed with the 1500 start point, but people wanted to be “true” to glicko by having it be 1500 behind the scenes anyway

11 Likes

The starting rating is an arbitrary number. It just gives a baseline around which the ratings evolve. One could choose any number and nothing relevant would change.

We therefore just went with the numbers Prof Glickman used in his paper http://www.glicko.net/glicko/glicko2.pdf

8 Likes

Everyone rises or falls faster under the current system than they used to. Stronger players do less unintentional sandbagging by starting at 13k than 25k, and the beginners fall to 25k so quickly that the starting point hardly matters. Previous to the current system, people chose their own starting rank, but the moderators (before my time) were overwhelmed by requests to adjust players’ ranks. Eliminating adjustment of rank was one of the motivations for implementing the current system. We now have no power to adjust ranks. By the way, the rating points are not ELO.

8 Likes

It’s explicitly the same scale as ELO, it’s a pointless to distinguish ELO scale and Glicko-1 or Glicko-2 scale, when the latter two are made to be explicitly comparable to the former.

2 Likes

As I recall, anoek said it was different from ELO. I’m not a techie, so I don’t know of my own knowledge.

1 Like

It’s different in terms of the calculations it does, but 1 glicko point = 1 ELO point for the sake of comparison between players

I think the distinction is you can’t compare it to chess ELO–that the same number doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing between the games.

You can’t compare two ELO scores / Glicko scores from two different pools of players.

But you can compare two players within the same pool: 100 points difference is the same difference in playing strength (based on % of games won) in ELO ranking as in Glicko ranking.

5 Likes

Yes, I agree, that is my understanding too.

This topic was automatically closed 91 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.