[SUGGESTION] WHR for XonStats (Replace ELO?) => Leaderboards Return

WHR = Whole History Rating
I was playing Zero-K for a bit, which uses the rating system. So from my observations:

• a player's WHR rating can change without him/her actually playing, due to other players' activity
  
• if you lose against a player that later on goes to win matches, either your WHR increases slightly or WHR losses minimize
  
• if you win against a player that later on goes to lose other matches, your WHR decreases or doesn't change depending on rating disparity
  
• returning players (inactive) only play a match or two to return to where they were
  

So this means unlike ELO, farming points off of easy wins doesn't work; additionally WHR is less predictable since it can fluctuate based on other players' activity. It also doesn't seem as prone to overrating players that only play with an isolated pool of players.

In ZK, it seems to work normally for teams and 1v1's, but the losses or gains for FFA are massive.

Thoughts?

Thanks, I'll take a look! I always had an academic interest in algorithms for rating. This isn't likely to make it into XonStat, though. My reasons for removing the leaderboards were much more about how people acted with it in place versus the actual rating system itself.

Even without showing the ranking, I think we can still somehow utilize some kind of point system to gauge player skill levels. For example, in shuffleteams.

That's true, and one of the reasons why Elo is still left on the actual player records. It's accessible via the player_info view which has a JSON endpoint (example). Since the game doesn't know about the player ID of the players on the server, there's  a hashkey-based view for that as well (these two), which comes in JSON or text-only. I think that we've just never written anything server-side that uses these for shuffling.