Challonge Ratings
About Challonge Ratings
Challonge Ratings are based on the Elo Rating System. They denote a player or team’s skill level for a specific game or activity in a Challonge community.
How to Enable Challonge Ratings
A tournament must satisfy three requirements in order to activate the Challonge Rating System:
- The tournament must be hosted by a community.
- The tournament must be labeled with a game.
- The tournament must include Challonge users or teams, not just basic text participant names.
To create a new rating for your community, click + New > Rating
Have questions? We have a whole helpdesk article dedicated to this here: https://kb.challonge.com/en/article/how-to-create-a-challonge-community-rating-xjihi4/
The Rating Scale
For non-PRO communities, ratings start at 1000 and typically range between 0 and 2850. By default, a rating greater than 2400 is considered “Pro”, but remember, it’s relative to players within the community, so don’t let it go to your head!
If you’re a Challonge Premier subscriber, and you set a community to be PRO, you’ll have greater control over your community ratings settings. These settings can be accessed by clicking Edit > Settings on one of the ratings. More information below.
When you play a rated match, the outcome's effect on your rating depends on several factors. In general, however, these three scenarios explain changes in rating:
- If you're expected to win and you do, you and your opponents ratings won't change much.
- If you're expected to win but you don't, your rating will drop considerably and your opponent's will rise considerably.
- If your rating is similar to your opponent's, any outcome will moderately affect both players.
Why Ratings Require a Community
Ratings describe skill level among a group of people relative to each other, and on Challonge, communities are the logical way to partition these groups of people.
To illustrate this, imagine a local ping pong bar in New York City and a professional table tennis training facility in Beijing. If the New York players never face off against the Beijing players, there’s no way to compare skill levels between the two locations. In fact, a 2500 rated New York player might be worse than a 800 rated Beijing player.
Moreover, gameplay standards vary between groups of people. One group might play on old arcade machines with broken buttons, whilst another plays on emulators with brand new controllers.
Technical Specs
The Challonge Rating System is configured with the following default settings for communities across Challonge:
Starting Player Rating: 1000
'New' player K-Factor: 25
'Normal' player K-Factor: 15
'Pro' player K-Factor: 15
Number of matches to play before a player becomes 'Normal': 10 matches
Rating needed for a player to be considered 'Pro': 2400
PRO Community Upgrades through Challonge Premier
In a PRO community, you can change these settings to better fit your community:
- Starting rating
- 'New' player K-Factor
- 'Normal' player K-Factor
- 'Pro' player K-Factor
- Number of matches to play before a player becomes 'normal'
- Rating needed for a player to be considered 'Pro'
Assigning Tournaments to your Community Ratings
Good news! We have a whole helpdesk article dedicated to just that! You can find it here: https://kb.challonge.com/en/article/adding-or-assigning-tournaments-to-your-community-rating-1ms41mk/