Yes, it's due to the TrueSkill service being unavailable.
The normal skill value formats are documented in
the post announcing the functionality (in the "Skill values" paragraph), but it's true that there are also following additional formats which weren't documented yet:
- The "TrueSkill degraded" format: "#<skillValue>#" (example: "#28#")
This format is used when the autohost is configured to use TrueSkill for skill values but the value couldn't be retrieved from the TrueSkill service yet. This means the skill value is actually a skill value estimated from lobby rank (directly or through IP rank or chrank).
- The "plugin skill" format: "[<skillValue>]" (example: "[12.34]")
This format is used when the autohost is configured to use values provided by a plugin for skill values (this can be an alternate TrueSkill database, ELO, Glicko...)
- The "plugin degraded" format: "[#<skillValue>#]" (example: "[#12#]")
This format is used when the autohost is configured to use values provided by a plugin for skill values, but the plugin wasn't able to retrieve the skill value so it provided a fallback value instead, eventually based on the lobby rank but not necessarily.
These alternate formats should be very rare (AFAIK there is no skill plugin for SPADS yet except the Zero-K plugin which retrieves the Zero-K ELO values, but this plugin no longer works since new Zero-K infrastructure).
