GosuGamers patch - Improved rankings

The newest chapter in our line of major improvements here at GosuGamers are the rankings. The overview page has gotten a lot richer but we have also revisited our ways of calculating the points in our rankings.

Starting with the new changes in how the rankings are displayed, if you visit the non-section specific rankings page, it will look the same as it did before. But if you visit the rankings for a specific section, the new changes are noticeable. On top of the rankings list, there is an option to toggle between regional rankings. The main window is split into two parts: the left where there is the rankings list with position, nationality, name, points and change indicator for each team.

Selecting a name in the left hand list will toggle the detailed information open in the right part of the box. Clicking the team/player name at the top of the newly opened right box, next to the team picture, will patch you forward to the full team profile where you can find players, most successful heroes, VODs and such. Note that if you visit a section with player rankings, the full profile is not as rich as those for teams. The player profiles are to be revamped at a future point.

Going back to the right side ranking details, newly added are the regional rankings. In the case of Team DK, for example, they are displayed as first in the world ranking as well as first in China. Win rates and match statistics are listed below. One of the new entries amongst these is the current win rate which is based on the 20 most recent matches only, giving an indicator of the current shape of the team/player. The other new value is current streak, displaying how many matches the team/player won in a row. Note that draws are ignored when it comes to the streak, a draw will neither break nor add to the streak.

Further below is a graph displaying recent matches and how they have affected the rating of the team, followed by a list of the matches and their results. Hovering a match will display which tournament the match belongs to, when it was played and how many points were lost or gained after it. Below the list of matches is a new field where the introduction part of the matching GosuWiki article is automatically loaded up to a certain number of characters.

More volatile rankings

Now, you may have noticed a change in both ranking positions as well as the ratings themselves for both teams and players. This is the other major change we developed.

Rankings are now made more volatile in general as rating changes now are larger for every match, thus the overall rankings changes will be happening faster. This means that wins and losses now have bigger effect and it will be more difficult for teams/players to stay on the top, which was previously possible due to the smaller increments of rating fluctuations.

Every match will continue to yield/take away points depending on the RI (ranking importance) of the tournament. The RI value is between 0.00 and 1.00 and is determined by factoring a number of variables such as prize pool, offline/online competition, competing teams/players and format of tournament among others. The new formulas will render the RI slightly more important than previously when calculating the points won/lost for a match.

Reliability factor and automatic points decay

Also implemented is the so called "reliability factor", or R. The default R is 1.00 and will be rendered lower the farther team's or player's matches are from one another. For example, if a team only plays one match a week, its R will be lowered but it can grow if said team goes back to a more active schedule.

Working in similar fashion is a decay system which straight up changes a percentage of the points for every day without a recorded match, kicking in after a set number of days. The decay will decrease the rating of inactive teams above 1000 rating while increasing that of inactive teams below 1000 rating. Both R and the decay system work in cohesion to change ratings for inactive/less active teams or players towards 1000.

To keep the rankings more current, all teams with no match recorded in the last 60 days will be automatically hidden from the rankings. Their rating will still be counted according to decay but the team will be unranked until the inactivity is broken.

The picture to the right shows the reliability factor for a particular match as well as at which points the system has calculated decay (the red downside arrows).

NOTE: We are still calibrating the ranking importances of League of Legends and Hearthstone, they may come to change slightly over the next days.

Other patch notes

On top of that there has been some minor changes, usually not mentioned in news but rather in the development forums. However, we will use this opportunity to list them here this time around.

There is now a spoiler-free option in our VOD-section. In the list of filters, checking "First game only" will only show the first game of every series in the list. By only showing the first game, visitors will not get partially spoiled when they see three games in our VOD list for a best-of-three match.

The default font size in news and feature articles have been increased from 14pt to 15pt for a better reading experience.

Per default you get an automatic message sent to you every time someone replies to a comment posted by you. You also get an email whenever you receive a private message (the auto-responses included). Both options can be turned off at your user settings.

You can now search Rankings for both Name and Tag instead of just Name as previously. You can check filter "Show Unranked" to also view unranked teams.

For Dota 2, we have added the Leaderboard (MMR highscores) at the left side of the Rankings page. They are automatically updated once a day. Not that they are at an experiemental stage but will be improved as we find and solve glitches.

As always, feel free to write your feedback in the comments below and thank you for visiting GosuGamers!



Previous updates

New and improved rankings

Visual update for GosuGamers

New and improved VOD index

Introduction to match ticker

Introduction to team profiles