GR is supposed to take into account the quality of players you are up against. The way it does this is by calculating an Expected Result and comparing it to the final Achieved Result.
The Expected Result is a function of your rating relative to other players.
Right?

Now, I am in games which I started when I was brand new to the site and had no GR (so lowest GR). Those games have continued for many months but now I have a GR rating and a decent one.
So will my 'Expected Result' for that game
a) take my very low GR into account (which would be awesome since it would give me a good boost but maybe a bit unfair)
OR
b) my current GR (which would be kinda unfair since I started off much worse of player than I am now)

It's not an average.

I feel like an average would be more fair though. Or some other function of the start and end ratings.
Especially in my case when it is patently unfair to take either my start GR or my end GR as the baseline to calculate my GR gain from this particular game.

"Expected result is defined as a function of the seven players’ starting ratings"

quoted from http://tournaments.webdiplomacy.net/theghost-ratingslist

took me a minute to find. i bet you could've done this as well :)

Haha. Really sorry kasimax. I had read that page before obviously but must have missed the 'starting rating' part. My bad.
But don't you guys think that it should be changed?? Since games can go on for many months and GR at the start and end can be wildly different?
Though that is a question for TGM I guess in particular.

I'm guessing most Elo-inspired systems were not meant to handle non-sequential games? And like most systems, enough games over enough time will bring it to it's correct position.

Meh..

Benefits and disadvantages to all systems, so I say don't bother. Start seems to have the least incentive of prolonging games because it would benefit your rating in the long run, so it's the least abusable.

I'm not much of a ratings fan, so call me indifferent, but this type of system only works anyway when many games have been played. You already have a certain 'skill rating', it just takes the system time to identify where to put you. So it may be "unfair" for the rating of this one game, but in fact the system is meant to measure *a multitude* of games. In the end, it doesnt matter, except for a slight hiccup in a few cases.