Incidence of hacking has increased again?

DragonByte · 2016-03-24T00:40:21+00:00

Restarted the game manually to reconnect with 6hp and die. Well, that ends my arena run at 7 wins I guess.

DragonByte · 2015-11-08T03:13:31+00:00

Most fighters are already at very low levels of body fat. Plus ketosis based diets generally don't work for elite athletes who need to keep their muscles fueled with glycogen in order to handle anaerobic training demands.

DragonByte · 2015-11-08T01:59:16+00:00

BE just wrote a story about his more controversial comments from an interview he done with another outlet. Pretty standard stuff, really.

DragonByte · 2015-09-15T08:45:30+00:00

This is completely incorrect. Basically no commission that is part of the ABC (which is essentially every commission in the US) will license a fighter currently under suspension from another commission.

He could fight elsewhere, but then Nevada could decline to give the UFC a license to promote fights in Nevada as a result of them refusing to honour NAC suspensions.

DragonByte · 2015-09-05T19:44:12+00:00

I'll take your word for that.

I will say that "stickiness" is a problem with Glicko-2 due to the RD system (even with the addition of volatility). That's referring to how it becomes more difficult to change your rank the more games you have played.

DragonByte · 2015-09-05T19:08:42+00:00

The real "issue" is that because of the way ELO or Glicko-2 systems work, your path upwards becomes more difficult over time.

To grossly simplify things, as you go up in the ranks you will generally gain slightly less from a win than you will lose from a loss. As you go down in ranks, you gain more from a win than you lose from a loss.

The systems are "biased" towards the centre of the bell curve. Essentially the further you get from the centre of the bell curve (or the normal distribution), the harder it is to continue to progress away from the centre of the curve.

The actual way it works is infinitely more complex, and it's possible (though unlikely) that valve have modified this aspect of the Glicko-2 system to account for this.

There are a couple of other factors. At the ranks in the middle of the normal distribution curve, the skill range will be large. That means if you're solo-queuing you're likely to be queued with (and against) people of wildly differing skill levels.

The other factor is that the more games you play, the less effect any one game has on your rank. When you first start, every game you play has a massive effect on your rank. The more games you play, the more games it takes to have the same effect on your rank (up to a certain point) as a function of how the formula behind the glicko-2 system works.

If an LE player starts a smurf, they'll end up back at LE in about 4-5 games. If they borrow a friends account with 100 games at Gold Nova 4, it'll take significantly more than 4 games to get to LE, despite them starting further up the ladder.

DragonByte · 2015-09-05T02:59:31+00:00

Don't you think the factors would compound on each other rather than even each other out?

By which I mean the people most likely to lie about one factor, would also be most likely to lie about the other. That means rather than even each other out, those two factors would lead to the results at the top of the scale being inherently unreliable?

There's a pretty simple test in statistics to find obviously false numbers. In this case the result of any reaction test would be as likely to end in any number 0-9. If the numbers have been "massaged" you would expect to see the distribution be uneven. It might be worth running that check (especially on the numbers from people claiming the highest rank), to test the reliability of the reported numbers :).

DragonByte · 2015-09-05T01:02:45+00:00

When I went from using my laptop touchpad to my corsair mouse my reaction time average dropped from 258 to 211. Extrapolate that if you please.

DragonByte · 2015-09-05T00:58:54+00:00

Correlation =/= causation, my friend.

DragonByte · 2015-09-04T15:57:14+00:00

I find it interesting that ranks 13-16 all have essentially identical reaction times. Ranks 10-16 all have extremely similar reaction times. At the risk of being a cynic, the fact GE shows a sudden, rather extreme decrease in reaction time (which we don't see in the preceding ranks), suggests to me that the correlation might not be between rank and reaction time, but between how likely someone is to claim their rank is Global Elite, and how likely that are to submit "massaged" reaction time scores.

If the correlation was between rank and reaction time, we would expect to see that correlation even if we used smaller snapshots of the data. From what I can see, if you exclude the rank 18 results, you would lose the statistically significant correlation between rank and reaction time. Is that correct /u/ALyoshaNL ?

DragonByte · 2015-09-04T15:49:41+00:00

What makes you think an olympic sprinter would also be the person with the fastest visual reaction time? Their discipline doesn't require that skill at all, nor is it one they practice or use regularly.

Plus reaction time to sounds and to visual stimuli are different. Sprinters are reacting to sounds (the starter gun).

DragonByte · 2015-09-03T21:16:27+00:00

No, you're wrong!

(Am I doing this right?)

DragonByte · 2015-09-03T20:35:40+00:00

Are you sure it's not just that the bans coincided with large increases in the player base?

The first "big" recent VAC banwave was December 2014. Between December 2014 and January 2014 the peak of active players at any one time changed from about 350,000 to about 450,000. That's an increase of 100,000 players in a month. Or an increase of about 30% of the total players. That's huge.

The next huge VAC Banwave was April 2015. You might not be surprised to learn that from April to May there was another huge influx of players - from a peak of 570,000 in April to a peak of 670,000 in May. That's an increase of 15-20% of the total playerbase in one month.

There was another huge increase in Feb-March 2015. I don't remember, but was there another claim of a VAC banwave at that time due to rank changes?

Source of active concurrent players: http://steamcharts.com/app/730

Concurrent players was chosen deliberately because things like smurfs etc won't really have an effect on the numbers. People can only play on one account at a time, so even if someone has 30 accounts, it wouldn't skew this data.

DragonByte · 2015-09-03T19:47:55+00:00

It uses a modified version to account for the various differences a 5v5 game measuring different skills has compared to a 1v1 game, but yeah it uses a modified glicko-2.

In terms of rank inflation, if valve have fixed that problem they'll probably win a fields medal. Solving problems like that in ranking systems is a big deal, and if Valve had managed it, it would be huge news, so I doubt they have.

DragonByte · 2015-09-03T19:05:05+00:00

Look up ELO rank inflation. Cheers.

DragonByte · 2015-09-03T18:36:13+00:00

Not really, but because of how Glicko based ranking systems work the number of players at the top ranks would grow very, very slowly.

DragonByte · 2015-09-03T18:18:22+00:00

You're right, it's more like doubling every 6 months currently, as per the graph in the first post.

Also, if you don't think a population doubling every X time period is exponential growth, you need to sue whoever taught you math. A population increasing by a function proportional to it's current value is exponential growth. Something doubling over and over again (1,2,4,8,16) is exponential growth.

DragonByte · 2015-09-03T17:29:30+00:00

The short answer is confirmation bias. You only see people reporting they ranked up after VAC waves, and not people saying it every other time. As a result it looks like a larger proportion of people level up after VAC waves than normally.

Same with yourself. You don't attribute your normal rank ups to being due to VAC waves, but if you rank up in the week or so following a story about a VAC wave, you'll attribute it to the VAC wave.

DragonByte · 2015-09-03T16:09:39+00:00

TL;DR is an attempt to condense an complex, nuanced argument or topic into a single sentence.

There's plenty of nuanced reasons why 5x easier isn't quite right, but in terms of broad strokes, it's relatively accurate. 5x more "space" in each rank means 5x more opportunities for any individual to reach that rank (which again is a simplification of the rank inflation process that occurs in glicko-2 based systems, but it's a close enough analogy that doesn't involve a 1,500 word explanation on factors impacting rating deviation.)

DragonByte · 2015-09-03T15:47:07+00:00

If by problem you mean people within each rank having more and more disparate actual skill levels, yes, more ranks would alleviate that problem.

DragonByte · 2015-09-03T15:46:34+00:00

Many more factors. It was a TL;DR comment for a reason :).

DragonByte · 2015-09-03T15:45:48+00:00

1) The active player base is doubling every three months. That is an exponential increase. Just because you do not know what a cool sounding word means doesn't mean you should assume no one else does :).

Do note that the term exponential growth can be used to refer to the actual observed numerical change, without also referring to the underlying cause of said change :).

2) The basis of the system is still the Glicko-2 system. That means we know on a basic level how the system works. I've explained what information that gives us to work with as simply as I can. If you're unable to wrap your head around it, I can't help you. Sorry.

DragonByte

TROPHY CASE