Ouch, lots of questions, this will be my longest post
dansan wrote:* What are "TrustedSkill" and "EstimatedSkill"?
* Which one is used for balancing?
"EstimatedSkill" is what is called "mu" in TrueSkill papers: the most probable skill of the player based on his results only. "TrustedSkill" is what is called "conservative skill" in TrueSkill papers: mu - 3 * sigma
The estimated skill is the one used for balancing, because this is the one which adjusts quickly to players results. Also, the results of games balanced using estimated skill allow to quickly fix these estimated skills in case of estimation errors.
The trusted skill on the other hand is the one used to build leaderboards because it takes into account the uncertainty of the estimated skill, so it prevents lucky newbies to be in top 10 after a few matches for example.
dansan wrote:* Where does the bot get his information from or what matches are taken into account?
All SPADS autohosts automatically send the results of all games played on official lobby and longer than 2 minutes iirc. Then, at SLDB level, only games which aren't too uneven (3v1 will be filtered out for instance), and which aren't draw FFA or draw TeamFFA are rated.
dansan wrote:* In !status: is the value in <-x> the the lobby-rank equvalent of the TS?
The <+-x> modifier was indeed the delta between current lobby rank and actual skill-rank equivalent of the player's estimated skill. However, I realized these ranks are too different and all these <+-> pollute !status output more than they help understanding balance. So finally I changed this behavior in SPADS 0.11.2 by adding a dedicated "Skill" column. Also, that way the chrank and ip rank values are still visible in the Rank column of !status output (even if they aren't in use when skillMode is set to TrueSkill). Skill values shown in this new "Skill" column are rounded to the nearest skill-rank if the user's privacy mode is enabled (enabled by default for now). And in this case, a "~" is added to show this is a rounded skill. Anyone can disable his privacy mode by saying "!set privacyMode 0" to the bot "SLDB". Then, his real skills will appear in !status output.
dansan wrote:* Do chranks stay local to the autohost, or get propagated to SLDB?
They stay local.
dansan wrote:* "inactivity penalties" and "particularities of RTS games" sound great!! I'm curious - can you shortly explain what it does?
Basically, the inactivity penalties are applied each month to all high-skill with low uncertainty players who almost didn't play in the month. These penalties are quite light however, because the goal is not to really penalize them but actualy modelize their lost of skill and the increase of their skill uncertainty. Players recovering from inactivity periods should be able to recover their original rating quite fast thanks to this uncertainty increase. This system also prevents old inactive players to stay in the top part of the leaderboards, while not playing anymore.
What I called "particularities of RTS games" encompasses multiple problems that I found when I evaluated the results of the first rating engine runs. I don't think I will remember all, but for example default TrueSkill gives way too much importance to the death order of losing players in FFA/TeamFFA, which isn't that important in RTS games. A side effect of this is visible
here for example on your site, where "tritio33" who lost a FFA just got +15.7 TrueSkill.
dansan wrote:A plugin interface for spads is awesome! Allowing more people to code on/for spads will make spring even more fun!
I found the motivation to implement this plugin interface mainly thanks to vbs' efforts to customize SPADS code, and your efforts to make this integration easy at replay site side, so thanks
![Wink ;)](./images/smilies/icon_wink.gif)