I heard someone mention that older games will become less valuable. Does anyone know how long it'll take before a game's influence on you rating becomes negligible, or does anyone have a formula for it?

If I think I'll improve on these templates with practice, is it worth playing the ladder with an alt and then switching when I've improved sufficiently, so I don't don't get easy losses weighing against my rank as Green?

If you want to do pretty well pretty quickly, than yes.

@ Green: I answered your question in this topic already:
http://warlight.net/Forum/Thread?ThreadID=35330

Copy-paste:

@ Green: there's no closed-form solution for this, but basically every game changes your rating when it finishes (the mean goes down when you lose, up when you win, the standard deviation goes mostly down unless the result was very unexpected). At that moment, you can only give the influence of the most recent games, the influence of all previous games has already been lowered and cannot be traced back anymore.

Your new rating (mean) is used for the next game. Since the only thing that counts in the future, is the new mean, it does not matter anymore how you got that mean.

Since the mean is always adapted by the latest game, the influence of games is technically exponentially decreasing, this implies that in theory any more recent game has more influence than any less recent game. (in practice, a win against an opponent who is much stronger will always have a bigger effect than a win against an opponent who was weaker.) It is possible to simulate this actually, Fizzer has developed a tool for this:
http://blog.warlight.net/index.php/2012/01/trueskill/

Based on my simulations with TrueSkill, the most recent games really make the difference. So depending on why you call "neglible", this actually happens pretty quickly.
Example: if you lose against a weak player, your mean (and rating) drop quite steeply. Winning against 2 players of your previous mean will be enough to put your rating back where it was. (Whereas in BayesElo those 2 players and you would each still have a slightly lower rating.)

i am guess everyone including me starts from 0 points, not from 1500..

edit: i see.. it was the mean that was being tweaked, not the rating. Disregard then.

Edited 3/24/2014 21:13:01

When a player joins the ladder for the first time, it will say their rating is 0.

But the only thing this number affects is matchmaking for your first game (it will try and match you against the lowest rated player who's available at the same time.)

The first time you finish a game, TrueSkill runs assuming your rating is the default (2000 mean, 500 standard dev)

thanks for clarifications Fizzer and Math Wolf :)

Yeh, sorry for making you post twice Math Wolf. I posted a moment before I read it (I should have edited my post I guess).

Thankyou for clearing that up, I'll download the tool you posted and run some experiments.

Guys I have an idea crazy enough it might work. What if the real time ladder was advertised under multiplayer? There would be "My Games", "Open Games", "Real Time Ladder", "Tournaments", ect. That way, all players could see it.

And if a player has not unlocked RT ladders yet, it would say "You have not unlocked this yet" on the page. That way newer players will have a motivation to level up! Then they could unlock the feature :D

Opinions?

Edited 3/27/2014 11:33:50