CAG Tournament Skill

There are many ways to judge the skills of a gamer. The most common is by using high scores and world records. Unfortunately most of these end up being focused on an individual game instead of general gaming skill. In addition they can be set under any number of conditions and sometimes represent historical skill rather than current mastery. To get a better understanding of how skilled a player is NOW, over a number of different games and in the heat of the competition we have come up with the CAG Tournament Skill (CTS) rating system.

CTS ratings are meant to be a general measurement of skill and they will fluctuate over time based on the strength of the competition you play against and your familiarity with the games. It opens the possibility of using CTS to have tournaments for players of different skill levels or to set initial seeding positions. The hope is that CTS will make competitions become more inclusive to gamers of all skill levels.

To ensure that the ranking list gives as accurate a portrait of general CAG skill as possible gamers are only listed on the list after they have submitted at least 10 results across a minimum of 6 different games.

What is it?

CTS is an ELO based rating system similar to systems used for other games from Chess to League of Legends and sports from tennis to equestrian. You gain rating points when you beat other players and you lose rating points when other players beat you. Everyone starts with a rating of 1500 and your rating goes up or down from there. If you're interested in the finer details the full math is described below.

Where do I find my rating?

Everyone has their rating visible on their user profile. Your current rating will be displayed in the very top player card.

The event history will also now include rating points won or lost during each event along with the number of rated games.

There is also a complete ranking list of rated players that can be found here.

The Math

CTS uses the standard ELO rating system created by Arpad Elo. A full description of the system can be found on wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system).

The CTS specific implementation details are as follows:

  • Divisor width is the standard 400
  • For a gamer's first 25 games the K-factor used is 40
  • For games beyond the first 25 the K-factor used is 20
  • If a gamer's rating is greater than 2000 the K-factor used is 10
  • Rating calculations are slightly different based on the tournament format:
    • H2H Tournaments: A head to head match is treated as a single game and the standard ELO formula is used.
    • All other Tournaments: A game is treated as a round robin tournament where gamers compete against every other gamer on a game. The rating changes from each matchup will be added together and divided by the size of the field. To give a bit more weight to events with larger number of competitors the divisor is multiplied by 0.8
    • Example for clarification: If a gamer competes against 10 other gamers and the sum of the rating changes is 80 then the final rating change would be 80/(10*0.8) = 10
  • Ratings are calculated and updated at the completion of each tournament, not each game or round.