We now have a rating decay of -1/day at 1400, -2/day at 1450, -3/day
at 1500, etc. This roughly translates to a fall from the top of OU to
the bottom over a month of full inactivity, which is somewhat harsh
considering it's done regardless of inactivity. I might tweak this to
be less harsh later.
There's no rating decay below 1400. People can stay there as long as
they want.
The only other tweak is that K is now 40 at >1300 instead of >1400.
Very very slight tweak so that ratings in the 1300-1500 range are
very very slightly more precise.
We are now attempting to enforce a center at 1100 (tentative, may move
to 1200 later) by increasing points gained for winning and decreasing
points lost for losing below that. This will make a user with equal
wins/losses higher than a user who consistently loses.
The other change is to scale K down at higher ratings. >1400 now uses
K=40, and >1600 uses K=32. This is a really conservative scale, and
we might make it less conservative later.
STAY TUNED!
COMING UP NEXT: rating decay
This drops support for the pre-challenge-response authentication scheme
(i.e. the scheme in use before Zarel/Pokemon-Showdown@7dbd8cfec5 on
February 8, 2013), and, by doing so, simplifies quite a bit of the
authentication code.
In particular, it is no longer necessary to make any database queries in
index.php, which reduces our database use significantly and also moves us
closer to the goal of the index page being static HTML.
Previously, a bug prevented a replay from being re-uploaded if the
first replay upload failed, or if the battle continued after a
replay was uploaded. This has been fixed.
The replay upload system should be a lot less brittle now. Errors
should be rarer, and when they do happen, the error message will
be clearer.
For instance, 'hash mismatch' will happen much less often, and
when it does happen it will give the message: "Someone else is already
uploading a replay. Try again in five seconds."
