I agree the visible rating can be misleading, as TheCJ noted — a single number hides whether someone is improving or just playing a lot of team games. League of Legends handles this by keeping a hidden rating behind the displayed rank, so LP gains tell you more about where the game thinks you really belong than the tier badge does. I checked that split recently with this LoL MMR Checker, which estimates hidden MMR from rank, division, LP and recent win rate, and it made the small-player-count point clearer too: with fewer games, that hidden estimate just takes longer to settle.

https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/17728/1/2011beattiemphil.pdf.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com   I asked chat gpt for more sources that could give me Middle Eastern clothing. The AI gave me that source above.   He gave me advice that I already knew from my experience: look at the helmets of neighboring civs and observe their clothing.

It will be available on Linux and Mac OS.On Windows too, obviously.  

@Genava55 your first post is clear and I agree with most of it, except what you seem to actually stand for, which seems confirmed in your second post. Yes, "settlement" can be ambiguous, but many times it's clear what's being said from context, or even explicitly explained. When that book says "small settlements", it's clear that they refer to a few dwellings and not to the size of a single one. You argue against thorps usually "being more than a single farmstead" by referring to my quote as an "isolated example", but use a couple of isolated examples to say there's no "sufficient basis for attributing to the authors a conclusion they do not themselves formulate", when they actually conclude: Which has been my point all along.   I wouldn't say an "unambiguous synonym for 'village'" is intended to be attached by current sources. As I've said many times, this association doesn't have to refer to a full-blown village, that might well be an exaggeration, it's just a matter of resemblance. When "hamlet or village" is used, what is meant is that there are multiple dwellings (or farmsteads, if you will), and not just a single one, and after all, all this kind of started when you said: Even when that might be an exaggeration and "hamlet is a very few dwellings" should be put in-between. The central issue is clear and I've mentioned it many times: are we dealing with a single farmstead or a group of them? I think it's clear most of the current evidence points to the group, and why it's no big issue that the current EE translation uses "hamlet or village", not in the spirit of saying thorps were proper villages, but that they were "small settlements" made up from a "collection of dwellings". Maybe Ekwall (who, again, died over 60 years ago) wanted to call all that just "farm", possibly "hamlet", but not "village", but taking that old sentence literally is misleading, considering what the current evidence tries to imply.   And still, all that is only half of the argument. You still have not commented on Celtic cognates of haimaz having no relation with any kind of settlement, while þurpą cognates are consistently more settlement-like, showing it's doubtful to think haimaz mainly referred to some kind of settlement early on, while þurpą likely did. I still think you got too focused on Gothic and later (we are still talking about OE thorps after all) instead of the bigger picture provided by both branches and explaining why the accepted reconstructions are what they are.

I do not think that an isolated example, removed from its immediate context, provides a sufficient basis for attributing to the authors a conclusion they do not themselves formulate. Other passages in the book show that their use of thorp does not necessarily presuppose a settlement composed of several houses or farms. A particularly relevant example occurs in their discussion of minor place-names in Leicestershire, where they observe that "at least one was a farmstead in the thirteenth century". The reference is to Thorp on le Toftis, identified in a source from 1278 as "a lost farmstead described in 1278 as a tillage". This demonstrates that, within the authors' own analysis, a place called a thorp could correspond to a farmstead or agricultural holding. It does not establish that every thorp had this form, but it does rule out the claim that the term necessarily referred to a group of several houses or farms. Upthrop provides a comparable example. The authors treat this throp as a distinct unit in a landscape containing several dispersed settlements. Drawing on the charter of 869, they describe it as a 'little estate' incorporated into a larger estate complex. That description is entirely compatible with a small dependent agricultural establishment and does not, by itself, imply a village composed of several households. This is consistent with their wider discussion of dependency. Some thorps recorded in the Domesday Book were classified as berewicks, meaning outlying farms or estates attached to larger centres. In another document, the dependent estates or appendices of Peterborough were translated as "þa þorpes". The category could therefore encompass subordinate agricultural or estate units, rather than only nucleated communities. The same caution applies to the linguistic evidence. The surviving record of the Old English word is extremely limited, and the authors explicitly acknowledge how little is known about its early form and usage. Nothing in their analysis establishes that thorp originally had to designate a settlement containing several households. Consequently, the possibility that it could initially refer to a single farm, agricultural establishment, estate unit, or even a building at the centre of such a holding is not excluded. The last possibility is not directly demonstrated by the evidence, but neither is it contradicted by the authors' argument. It is also important not to confuse the possible original meaning of the word with the particular historical form adopted by many medieval thorps. The authors' main concern is not the meaning of thorp at the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon period. Their analysis focuses primarily on the profound reorganisation of settlement and agriculture from the ninth century onwards, especially the spread of open-field farming and the movement from dispersed occupation towards more nucleated forms. This is the context of the 'thorp moment'. The term describes an intermediate stage in the reorganisation of the medieval countryside, when small dependent units or satellite settlements helped bridge the gap between earlier dispersed farmsteads and later, more concentrated village territories. As the article puts it, 'Þorps and þrops represent an intermediate stage in the nucleation process, as farming communities sought the best way to run new field systems from the developing centres of population.' The regular and sometimes nucleated layouts identified by the authors therefore belong to this medieval process of transformation. They do not prove that thorp had always meant 'hamlet' or 'village', still less that this was its only possible meaning in early Old English. A term that may originally have designated a farm, estate unit or agricultural establishment could later have been applied more specifically to the small dependent settlements created or reorganised during the thorp moment. Projecting that later medieval morphology backwards would turn the authors' historical hypothesis into a timeless lexical definition that they themselves never formulate.