
A rating system for asymmetric multiplayer games - luu
https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2015-11-18-rating-system-for-asymmetric-multiplayer-games/
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anonymoushn
TrueSkill (as tuned for some Halo games?) has the unfortunate property of
player ratings becoming essentially immutable after a player plays a large
number of games. This is alright as long as you can guarantee players won't
get better or worse at your game over time. Elo-like systems and the TopCoder
rating system do more to allow for players changing dramatically in skill
level over time.

TFA doesn't mention how victory works in Terra Mystica. Can all players win?
Can 2 out of 5 players win? Who knows.

Edit: It looks like TM is a point-scoring game? So you are rated in 1v1
matches against each other player based on how many points you got. Can you
tie?

Edit again: Yes, you can tie, but it's unusual enough to not matter much. Good
thing this isn't chess!

I'd be interested in seeing these systems generalized to a game like Shadow
Hunters, where there are 2 teams with shared win conditions, some other
1-person sides with their own win conditions, and winning doesn't necessarily
mean other people lose.

One asymmetric board game site gives each player a separate rating for each
side. So you can be 2500 with Zane but 1500 with Troq in Yomi or something.
This works pretty well for games with a small number of sides, like 14 or 20
or 70. It becomes pretty useless if you try to generalize it to a game with
10^3572835 sides like Hearthstone though...

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jsnell
So it's definitely true that players will have different skill levels with
different factions. But even with 20 factions I'd be worried about getting
enough data on for individual player/faction combinations to converge to the
real values. That's especially true if the game doesn't allow a player to
specialize in just a couple of factions, but realistically will be playing 10+
different ones. Maybe the thing to do would be to have three components
instead of the current two; generic player skill, faction power, and faction-
specific player skill.

One thing I do is track how much games with each faction contributed to each
player's rating. But that's just for amusement value, there's no feedback from
these faction breakdowns to the ratings as a whole.

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anonymoushn
That is a concern if the game forces you to play a lot of sides. In Yomi you
can pick your side, so most people play just one or two, and the people who
play a ton of sides also play the game a lot. In Terra Mystica you need a
minimum of 5 to get pack the side-picking part of the game I guess. Shadow
Hunters would have a worse version of this problem, since your side is
assigned at random out of 20 possible sides.

