Re:Elo sucks – better multiplayer rating systems for smaller...
by asdgagbiobnio on Tuesday July 21, 2020 @10:34PM
(#23913368)
You don't have to formally quit the game to stop playing. I played one ranked chess tournament in high school, quit for ten years, and then picked it back up. What would you do with my points?
If you choose to delete them, that means that everyone will have constantly eroding ratings unless they keep playing.
That seems like a simple problem to fix. When somebody quits, just subtract 800 points from the remaining ranked players, scaled accordingly such that their relative win probabilities remain the same.
Of course, the other issue is if the number of active players increases over time. In that case, it's not so easy to fix unless you start scaling down the number of starting points given to new players.
Perhaps a better thing to do would be to construct a model of the rating inflation over time and use that to correct for historical comparisons. It's still not particularly meaningful though, because you have no way to measure actual skill inflation.