For many years, players of Age of Sigmar have played competitively for the hope of being crowned champions of Grand Tournaments across the world.
Many of these players also regularly use varying methods to compare their skill levels to others. Whether through ITC rankings, BCP Rankings or the Honest Wargamer’s Player Rankings. All of which are great ways to compare and contrast players skill levels.
But, there is another method, recognised throughout the world and used by multiple sports, esports and games. First introduced for use in Chess, it is the go to rating system for many.
Thanks to @aidapaul and her work on giving us access to A LOT of data in regards to Age of Sigmar (and other gaming systems) matches. We’ve been able to analyse more than 100,000 matches and give each player involved an Elo rating!
What is Elo?
No, it doesn’t stand for Electric Light Orchestra. In fact it doesn’t stand for anything as it’s not an Initialism. Instead it’s a player rating system named after it’s inventor Arpad Elo.
The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in zero-sum games such as chess. It is named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-American physics professor.
The Elo system was invented as an improved chess-rating system over the previously used Harkness system, but is also used as a rating system in association football, American football, baseball, basketball, pool, various board games and esports, and more recently large language models.
The difference in the ratings between two players serves as a predictor of the outcome of a match. Two players with equal ratings who play against each other are expected to score an equal number of wins. A player whose rating is 100 points greater than their opponent’s is expected to score 64%; if the difference is 200 points, then the expected score for the stronger player is 76%.
A player’s Elo rating is a number which may change depending on the outcome of rated games played. After every game, the winning player takes points from the losing one. The difference between the ratings of the winner and loser determines the total number of points gained or lost after a game. If the higher-rated player wins, then only a few rating points will be taken from the lower-rated player. However, if the lower-rated player scores an upset win, many rating points will be transferred. The lower-rated player will also gain a few points from the higher rated player in the event of a draw. This means that this rating system is self-correcting. Players whose ratings are too low or too high should, in the long run, do better or worse correspondingly than the rating system predicts and thus gain or lose rating points until the ratings reflect their true playing strength.
Elo ratings are comparative only, and are valid only within the rating pool in which they were calculated, rather than being an absolute measure of a player’s strength.
Well for a start, we’ve included every one dayer and GT that isn’t either a Teams or Doubles tournament since 1st January 2022. All of our matches have been pulled from Best Coast Pairings, Stats and Ladders and Ecksen.If you’ve attended any singles events using these systems, then you’ll have an Elo rating. Whats more, we’ll also show your ranking both in the World and in your Country., the number of games you have registered, your wins, your losses and your win rate.
Time for an image, what do you reckon?
These ratings will carry on into 4th edition and hopefully beyond! They’ll be updated on the release of each new battlescroll, so keep an eye out!
A Quick Disclaimer
What we aren’t able to do with ease, is track player name changes, there fore if you have changed the way your name has looked across these systems over time since January 2022, you may find that you have an Elo rating for each way that your name is presented. If this is the case, reach out to me either in our Discord server, or via email at thewoehammer@gmail.com.
If you also share a name with another player, then there is a possibility that your rankings may be shared! Again, if you suspect this is the case, just reach out and let me know and we’ll go through your tournament history to make sure the correct data applies to you.
Test
We tested how accurate these rankings could be by predicting the winners at the first three rounds of the Dallas Open yesterday.
Across all three rounds (148 matches), we correctly predicted 74% of the winners. In matches where the difference in elo ratings between players were 75 or more (72 games), we predicted 86% of those matches correctly.
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