Ladder Ranking Modes

Tournamatch comes out of the box with three different methods to rank players or teams on a leaderboard. Two common methods available are points and ELO rating, and a unique third method is what I call “Rung-Up”. At this time, only one method may be used at a time, but expect a future update to permit having support for a combination of each with a default sort preference.

The points rating method is the most straight forward. When you setup a ladder in the administration panel, you may enter a number of points for wins, losses, and ties. Depending on the result of a match, each player or team gets points accordingly. While you can enter 0 points for a loss, I recommend using a value greater than 0 and less than ties. Competitors will always be rewarded for their activity and quickly rank higher than inactive participants.

ELO rating uses a complicated formula similar to chess or other club play. In general, the better player you defeat, the more points you will be rewarded. Defeating a player with a lower ELO than you rewards fewer points. Similarly, losing to a high ranked (relative to your ranking) results in very minor point loss and losing to someone ranked relatively lower to you causes you to lose the most points. Using rating is advantageous because competitors are not rewarded equally for wins. With points, each win is worth the same. In reality, a win over a novice should be less difficult and should also reward fewer points. ELO is great for encouraging competitors to compete against similarly rated individuals. The biggest criticism of ELO is rating inflation/deflation and inactivity of highly ranked players attempting to protect their rating.

The third rating method, which is unique to Tournamatch, is Rung-Up. Rung-Up is a system for ranking players which encourages competition by not penalizing a player for playing in a match. It doesn’t penalize players for competing because you can never lose rank by a loss. If a lower ranked opponent defeats a higher ranked opponent, he moves up. How much he advanced on the ladder depends on the matchup – we’ll share specific examples in another post. Any other outcome results in no change to either player. Even if the higher ranked opponent loses to the lower ranked opponent, the [higher ranked] loser does not lose ranking. It sounds odd at first; but, the reason we don’t want to penalize the loser is because we want to encourage activity. Using this ranking mode, there is zero penalty for a loss. Similar to ELO, the drawback to Rung-up is inactivity of players at the top attempting to protect his or her ranking.