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A comment on Elo sucks – better multiplayer rating systems for smaller games (2019). Parent comment

Re:Elo sucks – better multiplayer rating systems for smaller... by _dps on Tuesday July 21, 2020 @04:10PM (#23910469)
> player skill is assumed to be normally distributed when that is just so demonstrably not the case

This is close but not exactly right, and the small difference matters. Elo does not assume that skill is normally distributed, but rather that "quality of play" in a single game is normally distributed around some average quality level for the player. Obviously this too is an approximation but it's a much smaller one.

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Re:Elo sucks – better multiplayer rating systems for smaller... by keeganpoppen on Tuesday July 21, 2020 @06:13PM (#23911550)
hmm, interesting. i did mean to say that this is a problem more in the context of games that add tiers/divisions to their ranked ladders, but i hadn't really thought about elo making assumption about the normal-distributed-ness of player deviation from their "true" skill level. does that not just fall out directly from the Central limit theorem (given the taking of large #s samples (game W/L observations vs. predicted P(win|my elo, their elo)) of means, etc.)?
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