Just wanted to add a footnote to my previous post... 

To quote from the news post:

"This way high rated players and crown-holders may face bigger challenge to keep their positions."

The change made to the ratings system means that the real challenge to keeping our positions isn't from other players, it's from the system itself.

I completely agree with the idea of forcing players to put their rating at risk by playing. It does seem silly to just sit on a rating. But... I think it would be more fair to only take points away from inactive players. As in my situation yesterday... I played games against a high rated player and against a couple of players more than 1000 pts lower...  yet I was still penalized by the system. That doesn't seem fair at all.

Yep same here, i noticed this..

i notice this to totaly unfair say u go away for 3 days my 2000 rating would lose over 110 points.yesterday i played everyone low and high ratings lost alot of points after i went to bed of 8 hours playing wat a joke! i think if your gonna do this do it to those that dont play peep swith ratings not to ev1 either that set all ratings to 0 and start over just plz improve this nonsence i didnt pay for u to take my points back again or if ur gonna give me 32cents every day u will see how i feel.plz make up your mind wat ur doing flyordie and get this site back up to par! ty ...LEAF

having 2000 points means that you should win 99 times out of 100 against a player with 1000 points.

So if you played for 8 hours and still loose points, you really don't deserve those points...

Now we'll see indeed who is good who is bad.

Ty Flyordie

too vainsteins,
ur good too talk bad on us but i never saw u playing. I would like see u play to know who is better I see u at all place in this forum and the only thing u said its on bad way .
And u dont start new massage too I hope to play u soon too see how good u are.
ps. are you a subscriber?
                      The Terminator

nemesis,
 I agree with you but do you know how many pts we lost when big rating lose at 200 pts of diff?
a lot but if win get almost nothing is not because we refuse to play its a system of rating the problem i think should be---> if win game  get 10 pts if lost same peanality like this all player will play each other.

the problem is fly or die they dont understend that way.
happy new year and take care ur a good player but i dont see u often now see you soon;-)

It is true that top ratings will come closer to the usual rating values (0-700 for 8-Ball). However if you are better, your rating still remain larger.

"dshk", from your response, it appears the real motive behind the change is not to encourage the top rated players to compete more often, as stated in the "news" post but rather to knock down the high ratings to what you perceive to be a "normal" level. Since this is the case, just reset them to some arbitrary level and be done with it. I would support the measure of automatically reducing points for inactive players, but to take away pts every day regardless whether the player has competed or not is not fair. Forcing players to compete or lose pts, will encourage them to play more often and over time, the pts will equalize anyway by virtue of the mathmatics involved. I.e., there are fewer high rated players available for games, forcing us to play lower rated players... for every loss to a low rated player you have to win 20 or 30 games to get the pts back. All that's fine.. but if in addition to that, you take MORE pts away every day.. then it's like bailing water out of a sinking boat with a teaspoon... might as well let the thing sink.

One last thing on this then I am done... because you are going to do what you do... this whole thing also implies that all of us with higher ratings must have cheated to get them.. or at least amassed these points back when there were lots of cheaters to take easy points from. I can only speak for myself.. but I created this particular version of Nεmεsιs AFTER the big ratings reset, in which all the cheaters were reset to zero. So I didn't have a bunch of 30,000 point guys to pick on. I started playing people with few points and worked my way up... It took a hell of a lot of games to get over 2000. So while I have been and will remain a staunch supporter of FlyOrDie, I think some adjustments should be made to this latest attempt to make the rating system work. I suggest pts only be deducted automatically if a player does not play another rated player for some reasonable period of time.. maybe three days or something... As always, regardless of the outcome, I appreciate your efforts to improve the game.

i agree wit u nemesis, its stupid, i hope they change it, they'll lose a ton of business if they dont

if i payed for 20 bucks of gas last week for my car should i loose half of it after a week coz i dint use it this is outragious i payed for the rating and i shoulld have the right to play or not without worrying about loosin points

Dear Nemesis,

It is not true that all the "big cheaters" had been reset at that time, actually their score had just been taken down to a more moderate level, since we could not know who is really cheating and who is not.

And as a heritage from that era couple of players remained at some 2-3000 points without any considerable skill as well. So if you played them it was quite easy to gain that amount of points.  

I do not doubt that you are a good player, but having 2000+ rating is still a bit irrealistic anyway, and all of these because of the system earlier. Having such 2000+ rating means that according to your skill you should beat a player with 1000 points 100 times out of 100 matches, as you can read it in the help section:

http://www.flyordie.com/games/help/billiard/en/rating_billiard2.html

The new system will bring these people closer to the "mass", but I think it will be better for the so called "top players" as  well, since they will be more willing to play with others. Recently they mostly played amongst themselves, that's how their rating could stay that high.

The good players will still be above the worse players, only the difference will be less, which will hopefully bring the system closer to the original concept, that is, from the ratings one may know the winning odds of a given player against another.

There could be another consequence of this change, namely players will hopefully prefer use only one name then, which always should have been like this, since a player has only one skill level at a given game. Having multiple names with different ratings in a single game makes no sense for me. 

For those complaining about paying to take away their rating: you haven't paid to get your position in the top ten forever, you haven't paid to get more and more points, you've paid (amongst others) for a feature that is supposed to tell how good you are. Now, we are aware of the fact the system is far from perfect yet, but there had been changes of it in the past couple of times, and will probably be in the future as well. What we want to achieve with these changes is to get as close to the original concept as possible, that is, the ratings should represent the player's skill in the given game. Maybe your rating will decrease somewhat from now, but if you're good, you will still be amongst the best players.

FlyOrDie

Quote from The Terminator:
"if win game get 10 pts if lost same peanality like this all player will play each other."

That's another thing, it is simply something like a win/loss statistics. We are planning to add some stats like this to the "player info" in the future, but these data are inappropriate to determine winning odds, or reflect the real strength of the player. But they can still be interesting.

FlyOrDie

i say u just reset all the points
then we'll see whos good,whos not good 

While I may not be in complete agreement with the methodology, I do agree that when it comes down to it, as long as there is no easy method of cheating to gain points, the better players will no doubt rise to the top of the rankings. For those interested in rankings, it ultimately doesn't matter what the actual numbers are as long as they reflect the skill level of those ranked. Without question, there are players currently in the 600-800 range that are as good as most who have 2000+. I am also in favor of adding some additional stats... maybe like games played, overall win/loss percentage, average rank played against and the like. 

I also agree that the confusion, disagreement or whatever we want to call it, around the ranking system was created in the first place by people interested in gaining points without earning them, which was unfortunately made possible by the glitch in the provisional status. I am glad that we are moving toward a system that reflects skill levels more accurately (even if I don't always agree on how we get there ;-)