I know we basically already decided to go for the new system, but gamerman felt the need to clear up some things that are wrong in his opinion. And I do too.
Your old spreadsheet only had no formulas, because you did everything manually. I could do the ELO system completely manually too, it’s not high math. This stuff is taught in high school.
But once you try to autmate it, you will need formulas. In fact that’s exactly what I did with the old PPG-system and Google Sheet immediately alerted me, that there are circular references. I had to enable iterative calculations and limit the loops to 50 calculations, since there are, in fact, infinite loops.
This is done with File -> Settings -> Calculations.
Without that, the spreadsheet would give only errors.
You can check out my automated version here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_agqROzXQHWdmmiCJXGs3oFARJ29euk6MHPXoQ-0wlI/
I already showed it to you multiple times, but I can try it one more time, this time a bit more detailed.
The cell with the Tier ranking (A) looks at the PPG-cell (B)
The PPG-Cell (B) is just total points © divided by number of games.
Total points looks at all the individual points a result has awarded. Let’s say there are 10 results for a specific player, so total points looks at 10 different cells, we can call them R1-R10. Now you just added these points manually and it’s almost impossible to determine which summand refers to which specific result. But even manually all of these 10 summands depend on the tier of the opponent.
So R1-10 look at the cells with the tier of the different opponents, let’s call them O1-O10.
O1-10 looks at PPG (B1-B10).
PPG (B1-B10) look at total points of these players (TP1 - TP10).
But in these cells TP1-TP10 are obviously summands that include the result against the original player so all of these look at cell A.
And there is already the loop.
All of that because you want to cover the very specific case of a newcomer being a tomato or a god.
I do admit that this very specific case can be covered with the old PPG system a tiny bit better. The Elo-System has the K-factor for that very reason. I mean look at Adam, he is not even a god (since he lost 1 game) and still climbed to #5 with only 7 games. 2 of the 6 wins are against low level players and 2 other against medium ones.
In your extreme case, god would crush even elite players and climb to #1 within 4 (FOUR!) games.
The one downside with the current system is that the established player would still lose points to a newcomer that might be a god. (or gain some against a tomato). There is no beating around the bush, the first 2, maybe 3 games are not covered by this extreme case.
jkeller (the current #1) would lose 68 points against a newcomer.
Axis-Dominion (the new #1) would still lose 62 if he lost against the new god.
jkeller would reclaim #1 and if he lost again, would lose 51 points.
With the 4th win against then #1 Axis-Dominion, the new god already is #1.
So for 2, MAYBE 3 games there is an argument that the established players would lose a bit too many points. However, as I already said, that’s the absolute extreme case and I wonder if this ever happened.
The old PPG would treat these 2-3 games a bit more fairly but sacrifices soooo many things for that (I already listed them all).
Concerning the playoff qualifications:
We can just use 6 games played the last year as a requirement.
The more recent games (the last year) always has a much much much bigger impact on the ELO rating.
If you are a top10 player on Jan1 but perform poorly during the year with at least 6 completed games, there is no chance you keep the ranking and you WILL drop out of the top10.
On the other hand, even if you are far from #10, you can easily climb to top10 if you perform accordingly.
I just showed you how fast you can get to #1.
So just takes the best 8 (or how many playoff spots there are) that have completed at least 6 games this year and voila: You’ll most likely have the 8 best AT THE MOMENT, which automatically also means best 8 of the year.
