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Players are better ranked by interpretations by a human, not statistics generated by a machine. Statistics can be used as evidence that can be used to express an interpretation, but they are absolutely not the interpretation themselves, and I think a lot of people don’t understand this.

I could go on for days explaining all the various variables I could think of, but I’ll give you one example. A Demoman has a bad K/D Ratio, his team loses, and he doesn’t do much damage. This is all statistics can pick up. What statistics can’t pick up is that the Demoman’s sticky traps cost the opposing team a lot of time to capture certain points, that the Demoman had little to no protection, that the Demoman was not healed in the right situations, that the Demo had perfect rollouts, that he had great comms, that the Demoman was prioritized by the enemy team because of his annoyance to their objective etc etc etc. There are so many essential elements to determining how good a player is that cannot be interpreted by simple statistics. As I said before, statistics can be used as evidence to support a theory that a player is of a certain skill level, but the thing is, people are treating them as if they’re more important than human interpretation, which is ludicrous.

I’m not vehemently against the idea of a statistics based system in TF2 at all. I just feel that the ethos of it being a ranking system gives the wrong impression and that the ethos of the project should be modified to support the ethos of it being evidence of whether a player is good or not, not the conclusion of such an interpretation.

(this post was much shorter than I was expecting actually, probably because I didn’t explain all the various examples that were swirling around in my mind).

Quoted from Gentleman Jon

[…]
I’m sorry I should have been clearer, I’ve applied secrecy because I know it’s potentially vulnerable and because I also know that I’m using stats in a way that has not entered public discourse, so secrecy is an excellent way to preserve their efficacy. I shouldn’t have abbreviated this to “this process”.

I’m not sure why you would attribute a desire for personal glory to this failure to anticipate your criticism, I’ve been trying to get something implemented in the background for at least 6 months, and running the site is nothing but a headache.

Have you ever considered collecting necessary data plugin-wise?

My little suggestion for the site :

Add a “log-in through steam” button, with which you can check your score just by clicking on your profile, so you don’t have to copy and paste your community number every time you want to check your stats/ranks. It could also have the function of checking your friends stats/ranks aswell.

Just my little idea.

Quoted from Kuferl

I haven’ touched the matchmaking for quite a while, but for 6s we’re using this system, atleast for calculating each persons rating.

I should point out that this is an early version lacking some of the improvements that have been made over time =D

Quoted from RTC

Players are better ranked by interpretations by a human, not statistics generated by a machine. Statistics can be used as evidence that can be used to express an interpretation, but they are absolutely not the interpretation themselves, and I think a lot of people don’t understand this.

Cmon, everything people do, a machine can do too – it’s just a matter of time and resources and it just happens that there are still things that are cheaper done by humans and interpretation of statistics IS NOT one of those things.

Like I don’t even think people are creative – everything is a remix of something. We have started with nature and ended with remixes of remixes of remixes and that may be why we cannot imagine how colors people don’t see would look like or another new taste, like some of us don’t even get existing taste like umami and cannot imagine it by itself.

PS. What Jon provides is not just summarized statistics, the whole ranking is an interpretation of all those various stats and parameters visible on the players’ pages, but not exclusive to them. There are various things in the logs people don’t seem to notice one of them being player’s positions for example :]

Oh btw. RTC a lot of what you listed is in fact reflected in the logs, you just need to look better, something people might not be as good in :D

Quoted from torden

Nice job with this!

For inspiration, check out Ashenfelter’s algorithm for the future value of fine Bordeaux wine. It beat the human counterparts by a landslide.

Link for reference: https://www.betterment.com/resources/investment-strategy/behavioral-finance-investing-strategy/human-vs-algorithm-investing-a-lesson-from-wine-country/