It wasn't hypothetical, ATC asked me in google chat to change the current RR formula (which I wrote to replace the inefficient one it replaced) to start only counting CD's that happened in the last 2 years or the last 20 games, whichever was more games.

I spent several hours figuring out the best way of doing so (my job is sql optimization so this is right up my ally), posted the 1 problem I ran into and was curious how people would think it best to handle the 1 problem point.

But as I said, since in the span of 24 hours ATC no longer wants to discuss implementation and no longer seems to want the change asked for last night that I wasted my time working on I'm no longer interested in helping.

It is intriguing to see so much discussion of a tiny edge case that affects very few players, when the major irritations that affect everyone don't get addressed. We have constant disruption to long games by idiots taking over a CD country that has only one unit (or even *zero* units!). Why not fix the easy, widespread problems before tackling the more complex, harder ones?

All right. The part where the formula was already settled and being worked on was previously unclear. Thanks for the response.

Play higher stakes games. You'll fix the problem pretty quickly.

ATC you need to be nice to jmo. He knows over 100 ways to kill a multi with his bare hands.

Woah hey. There's obviously been some misunderstanding here. I apologise, and I'll contact you privately, Jmo.

Software dev is fun!

Did jmo say he was taking his ball home and not play with us anymore?

Volunteers are vital. Let's encourage where possible.

Okay, glad we had that private conversation A_Tin_Can, it convinced me you're an even bigger asshole then I previously thought. Your ego is astounding, have fun talking down to members.

damn. Someone got their period.

jmo, let's shoot for "Well at least you can be civil in public chat", or is that too unreasonable?

Oh yeah ssorenn, what do you call insulting a person who spent years helping the site make an awesome ranking system as well as various other contributions to the site behind their backs? Sorry but I have way too much respect for everything Ghostie did for the site over the years from tournaments run, to code contributions for Kestas, to the GR system to not call out someone who casually dismisses and insults them.

"The problem is we get armchair solutions from people who don't know what they're talking about
And it makes the discussion inaccessible
Look at Ghost's bullshit post
He's trying to make himself sound clever by using big words (incorrectly!)
And most of the forum can't tell."
-A_Tin_Can on gchat

This is all getting a little bit unfriendly and a lot off-topic. Perhaps we should go back to discussing RR, and how to avoid more great players like myself being excluded from 2WL's tournaments.

You didn't need to share. I was fucking around.

+1 this if you can appreciate the irony of publicly talking down to somebody who contributed to the site, to tell them they shouldn't privately be talking down to somebody who contributed to the site.

It's not irony, it's just stupid.

I think we all need to take a chill pill. A) this is a volunteer run site, not a job, no ones careers are on the line here. B) while all past volunteers contributions should be respected, change should not be avoided. C) having dialogue about any of the changes especially dialogue between the past devs and current devs is going to be vital to figuring out the "best" course of action. .... So gentlemen if we could end the visceral bickering and return to the healthy debating and discussing we were committed to then maybe just maybe we can have get back to husiness:

#CommanderByron4Prez2016

You have my vote.

Thank you JMO for looking at this... you wrote:

"CD's are held in a table. This table contains a record of all CD's and a new record is added every time a CD occurs in a game. This records includes the user, the gameID, and the turnID. It does NOT contain a date.

The problem is with CD's for cancelled games. Normally you can join on other game tables to find when game with a CD in it ended. But when a game is cancelled all records are removed from those other tables and only the single record in the CD table remains.

So with that in mind, you cannot apply a X time period filter, and applying a past X games filter can only be done based on when the games STARTED by doing an orderby gameID.

So how do you make a formula that is limited in the duration without letting people off free for CD's in cancelled games?

Going forward I'd propose adding a datetime column to the table, but for now I can't think of a good method except running a 1 time query that will add a boolean column to the CD table. Then running a script that will say all CD's that happened in games that started more then 1 year ago are no longer counted if the User has since played X number of games.

Now that 1 time query will be very processor intensive, but that's the best I got. Anyone have a better solution?"

My question is: would it be do-able and a reasonable alternative to identify the last uncancelled gameID to occur more prior to the first day of the month X months ago, and ignore all CDs with gameIDs earlier than this number?

And yes, I am a programming idiot, and very much appreciate those who are not, and donate their time to doing what I cannot.

Doug: Yes, that's exactly right. We can always produce a conservative estimate for when a game was cancelled by looking at the finished times of the games that weren't cancelled with higher IDs. These finished times can't be before the start time of the cancelled game.

There's another edge case, which is that some CDs have no associated game ID (such as CDs where the member returned to the position before anyone took it over). As far as I'm able to tell, figuring out when these were is impossible, and moving forward will require a change to the way CDs are recorded.

Neither of these issues are major, though, and as I said earlier I think it's worth designing any reliability rating overhaul without thinking about the implementation details. This way we'll get a system that is sensible, rather than one that is restricted by the current limitations of the system.

Leth: Whatever change we make to RR hasn't yet been decided, though I think it's clear that some kind of time cutoff or decay is necessary.

Kremmen: What are the other pressing issues that you see that we're not addressing? Fixing RR is important because games with CDs are a constant frustration for members, and clearly the current system isn't working very well - it incorrectly reports reliable players as poor reliability, and still lets some recently unreliable players through. We're working hard to keep the site improving, and if there are pain points that I don't know about - well, I want to know about them.