Figuring out player skill levels

[causative]

Player skill levels are hard to figure out when setting up multiplayer games.  As a result, it's often tricky to set fair teams when you don't know everyone well.  Ratings are not always effective at telling the noobs from the good players, since some good players have low ratings as a result of playing against very good players or not playing rated much, and some mediocre players have higher ratings that they got from beating noobs.

I have a suggestion: an additional player stat, derived from rated and unrated games.  The stat would be the economy score at 10 mins, taking the median of their most recent 10 non-scenario games with low/med resources (rated or unrated, 2 or more players, excluding Migration and Nomad).  While not a perfect indicator of player skill, this would quickly allow you to tell who the noobs are, since their econ scores at 10 mins tend to be half the scores of good players.  The stat could be taken only from games where the player lost 5 or fewer units by 10 minutes, to weed out games where the player rushed or was rushed.

Edited June 30, 2016 by causative

[Alekusu]

Hi Causative, 

I think first thing to do would be to reset the ratings for every alpha. I didn't play since Alpha 18 and still rank 11 (I just connected yesterday)

 

PS: It's been a while but I feel like coming back to 0AD!