I think the threshold analysis would probably be the best of those options. Income or army ratio may not work so well, as map position generally impacts whether or not I surrender at a given point(I have surrendered at times when I was ahead in income due to my opponents basically being in position to break all my bonuses within the next few turns.) Adjusting for opponent rating may not work well either, as top players may just have too few losses for you to get a validly representative sample.

However, the major issue in that case would becoming up with such a threshold.

@xbpty
It's all relative comparisons at this point.

It's all relative comparisons at this point.

I'm still right, though (as far as data go).

Edited 5/31/2016 22:56:13

Well, you stall the least relative to your opponents, based on this analysis. Opponent pool may have a significant impact here.

Another facet here is that you take 5 days to win and 2 days to lose, averaging about 13 turns for both wins and losses. So games where you win tend to have turns that take 150% longer on average, and that could be on your part or your opponents'.

Also it's not necessarily a positive thing to have a very negative rating- you could, for example, just be playing some games more quickly than you should be and losing as a result.

Edited 5/31/2016 23:03:42

[NVM misread shit]

Edited 5/31/2016 23:42:01

Stalhazi should get a gold medal for that. Would be good if you had a second list with expired games so we could see the all-time winners.

idk i think Ellhoir should get a medal for being the least likely to care if he's winning or losing.

It may be that everyone else around you is stalling even more so. remember all rankings are relative atm.

I agree with TBest, show some examples where I stalled because I am in top 10 of your list. I play slower when I lose for sure because I have less enthousiasm about the games I am losing. If that makes me a staller so be it, but you'll see checking my ladder games that I don't wait until my opponent have the rest of the map to surrender...

Maybe there could be a ranking that mixes ammount of turns taken when lose against the ammount of turns taken when you win, and cross those in some way with the ammount of time.

Bc I really don't think all of these are really stalling, I for once also take more time to play when I'm losing against when I'm winning, simply bc I want to think more. But I will never do that to gain any unfair advantage on the ladder and I will always surrender when all hope is lost.

I usually just play all my turns on games when I have less than a day left until boot. A bad habit, I know, but it has stuck to me since I had some crazy amounts of schoolwork that has kept me busy. I don't intentionally stall games to gain any sort of advantage, as I also surrender when I feel I lost.

I play slower when I lose for sure because I have less enthousiasm about the games I am losing. If that makes me a staller so be it

Like I said in the early posts, this rating measures effect, not intent. If you play slower when you're losing, that falls within my definition of stalling as you draw out your losses and delay their impact on your rating.

, I for once also take more time to play when I'm losing against when I'm winning

That's true for probably everyone. However, keep in mind that your wins are your opponents' losses.

If you're playing slowly when you're losing more than your opponents tend to, you end up with a positive percentage. Simple as that.

Edited 6/1/2016 02:37:52

Took a while until I found me O_o

Ctrl+F, young grasshopper.

@Knyte,

Wanted to get input from people like you and Buns again so I could figure out which potential confounding variables to weed out/etc. in the next step.

See, I wanted to give this istead of a sarcastic response, but then I started looking into what variables that was.... and that is a lot. Practically speeking, the following factor is what I would try to look into.

1. Rating.
a) Look at the avg. opponent rating for won and lost games. If the difference is too big, the data can not be used to determine stalling. If rating is close (within 100 points?) then the data is more relevant. This method has several obvious disadvantages, but might be interesting either way. At least it would show a difference for my case :p This works better on players who have been active in the ladder for more then a expiration period (5 months, continuously)
b) Look at the average time it takes a X rating player playing Y rating player to achieve Z result, across the whole ladder. Then compere it to any individual player to see how long time they take to loose, compered to the norm. Don't think this would work to well, tbh.
c) Only consider games that is within X (150?) rating of a players own rating, then do the calculations you have already done for win/loss time.

Armies, income

Use the same rules as Seasonal ladder does to determine ties, and apply to the last turn in every game. Compere avg. win number, with avg. loss number. Then rank players, based on the difference.


Anyway, just some ideas. All the methods listed above have flaws but they might be interesting nevertheless. Mainely, I see the challenge being how you include all metrics in one ranking way. As you see the Rating methods only accounts for time taken, blantetly assuming ther is some sort of avg. game comparison that can be made. While Armies, Income in my suggestion don't account for time taken, only turns. What I fear is that one might quickely have a small sample size if combining both.

Look at the avg. opponent rating for won and lost games. If the difference is too big, the data can not be used to determine stalling.

I disagree a little bit here. Wins against severely lower rated players and losses against much higher rated opponents could be discounted, but losses to low ranked players are the most likely games to be stalled.

I actively try not to stall.

As far as rating goes, perhaps it'd be viable to find for each team a function that best approximates how much time they'd take for a given player given their rating and use that instead of loss - win. Alternatively, find the functions l(r), w(r), and a(r) that reflect loss, win, and average times (respectively) given an opponent's rating, and compare those (this is a place where it would get tricky unless you force the functions to be in the same family). This would likely also require me to trim out a bunch of teams that don't have decent (10w, 10l?) sample sizes as well as outliers.

Using time taken is imho much more valuable than turns because stalling also involves taking longer turns, and the # of turns taken has no direct impact on your rating- stalling is only effective if you make the game take more time, not more turns.

I ignored opponent rating in the first run-through and assumed that the ladder's doing a decent job as far as pairing and rating goes.

Edited 6/1/2016 21:51:39

I love this data! Great job. I pride myself in being the highest rated player with the lowest stalling component, always playing every game at the same pace, and the current hottest player on the ladder over the past 3 months plus. Watch out, here I come....

I can't disagree with HotBeachBum here! That guy is no joke.