Nice work and some thoughs
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Nice work!
Not using JavaScript sorting made it easier to link sorted tables from other pages. Also, with a melee database reset, getting rid of battles with retired bots may change the rankings. And you put %wins scoring. =D
But I miss some kind of Condorcet ranking. PL was the only one we had, and the one Combat was doing best.
Also miss some kind of statistical ranking. Elo was what we had and allowed fun statistics like problem bot index, specialization index and that non-working JavaScript diagram. Mirror bots and ram bots will lose some of their appeal without those statistics.
I tried to raise a RoboRumble server in App Engine a long time ago, but they didn´t allow me into the free tier. :(
My %Wins is a bit of a cheat. It is just 1 point per PL win, divided by bots in rumble. I prefer it to PL because it is not dependant on the number of bots in the rumble. So if Combat was doing well in PL, it should do well in %Win.
I'm still not using my Backend for anything, so I was thinking that once a day I could use it to generate some sort of pseudo-problembot stats stuff. ELO/Glicko is nice, but it is really designed for being good approximations when pairings are missing. In our case, the pairings are fairly easy to fill, so that isn't a problem; APS tends to converge to the same ranking order, and it isn't full of voodoo that makes it difficult to comprehend. It is also possible to correct APS easily if results get lost due to being in memcache =)
One ranking idea I had an idea for was doing a The Best Bot calculation (get a point for being the best against any competitor). It would increase my number of database writes in the only reasonably robust/non-batch way I can think of, which is what is holding me back at the moment. I could use a Backend for calculating it once or twice a day, I guess, or make it expire once every 6 hours and be triggered by a page load. It needs n*n runtime. Maybe I can fit it into the regular rankings calculations.
The hardest part is getting the rumble to stay in the free tier. I think it will be limited to about 6 melee clients in total, or maybe 12 1v1 clients instead (less pairings per battle in 1v1).
