As many of you have already noticed, yesterday I rolled out a brand new ranking system. The new ranking system has been rebuilt from the ground up. It seems that the games have become much more popular than I anticipated and the ranking system was really holding things up.

The new ranking system calculates your score for the games that were generated in the last 30 days. Your average time and moves for older games are then added to the score. Additionally, only people who have played a game in the last 30 days will be ranked. Although keep in mind that I plan on tweaking this a little over the coming days.

Not only does this new system help to relieve the stress of the server, but it also evens the playing field for everyone. A new member is expected to play over 770 games just to compete with existing players.

I realise that many of the regular players are those who have been here from the early days (over 2 years ago!). I thank you all for being such devoted fans, even through our numerous server changes and slow-downs. I hope that the new changes continue to give you the challenge you crave with a new range of competitors who are not scared off by the sheer volume of games required to play.

I would love to get everyones feedback and opinions about the ranking system. Although I want to keep everyone happy, the biggest limitation I have right now is server capacity. With that said, every suggestion and comment will be considered, but ultimately the server has a final say.

I like it a lot and not because as I write this I'm ranked #1. I believe it will generate much more competition because each current game now counts for much more of your score. I think we could see the leaders changing quite a bit.
It took me a year to get in the top 30 and a new player now would have to play a year's more of games then I did to get there too.
The only change I would like to see is to base scoring on rankings for each game instead of actual time and moves. This would give time and moves equal weight in the scoring. Because there's much more variance in time then in moves, I think it still gives the faster people an edge over those who get lower scores.Whatever you do stick with this system for a little while for people to really get a chance to see how it works.

Fizzbut has summed up all the points I was thinking of making - spot on.

I made a slight change to the ranking system: The current days game is not counted towards your ranking until the next day. As the latest games are weighted higher now it seemed a little unfair for early birds (or those of us in bed when the game generates) to be ranked highly all day until the rest of us play the current days game.

With that said, you can still go back and play older games to increase your average *and* get a better score on active games.

Fizzbut: You would actually be surprised, the average game is finished in 166 seconds with an average moves of 154. So it's pretty even. However, a faster player will always have an advantage as they will have worked out a way to finish the game using very little moves. This means they will get the time rank and the moves rank.

I will keep working at it though. For now I will be trialling this new system. I am pretty confident in bringing it back to hourly updates. If anyone notices slow-downs or outages please leave a message here.

I like that old games are factored in some, however I was wondering if your taking the average of all those games it means each time the rankings are updated all those scores have to be recalculated. Could that still slow things down.
My point about moves versus time is that the faster players average times are down around 80 seconds and potentially lower where as the best average moves is around 140. This is because there's a greater limit to how low you can go in moves versus time. Now with Sudoku and Mahjong moves have little significance to the playing of the game and I assume your using the same system for all three.

Fizzbut, I'll see how the rankings go on Solitaire and if it works well I will be moving it over to Sudoku and Mahjong.

As for your concern about speed, it is significantly faster (thus that's why I've done it). It's just a simple Database call, whereas ranking each game individually is quite an intensive process.

I feel a new player should have to play many games before being ranked ahead of an established player.When I came onboard my ranking was quite far behind the leaders.I worked hard to get near the top,playing all the old games over and over to improve .Part of the fun of our "addiction"is trying to catch the experts.There should be no quick way to do this.Everyone must pay their dues.That means playing all the games...no instant gratification! Regardless, I think we all agree we love this game and thank you for doing such a wonderful job for us.

Adam if this works better then everythings fine with me. I was just trying to give emm who I think had the best lowest moves average a boost up.
Norm, there will be plenty of fun trying to catch the leaders still.

Norm, I completely agree. But with that said, as time progresses, a newcomer is expected to finish more and more games. I am trying to work out an even balance. If 30 days is not longer enough I might increase it.

Like I said, I'm trialling it at the moment and I really do appreciate everyones feedback

UPDATE: The moves are weighted higher than time now (2 to 1). Hopefully this will help to boost the ranking for those who compete for moves. I will be playing around with this ratio over time. Feedback is greatly appreciated

Great job Adam!
Quick question about previous unplayed games. I no longer get message that all easy,med.,hard,ect.. have been played. It sends me to a previously played game. So do I have to search for missed games manually?

Thanks a million!

Nevermind. I found the active games list which shows any missed for the month.

Thanks again!

I love that the moves are weighted higher. It seems that will be more fair. It takes a special skill to figure out how to shave off moves.

That being said. Love your site. I better get back to work/play if I have any hope of getting back my #9 rating. The new method shifted me back to #36. Just a little more insentive for me. I am glad you are finding methods to ease the load on the server.

I just went to the new rankings and noticed that I am listed with a game of 12 seconds. I can definitely say that I never finished a game of 12 seconds ever !! Please delete it. Thanks, Mom

I noticed that when I beat my best time but didn't match my best moves that the number of moves that I used to get my best time was shown on the stats page. I had to beat my best time using the lowest moves in order to get my lowest moves to register. Is this by design or mistake? Before your lowest moves were registered no matter if it came with your best time or not.

From my experience, often lowest moves doesn't yield the fastest time because of the autofil. Usually it's faster to bring cards down especially near the end in order to exhaust the dogpile faster.

Fizzbut: Are you experiencing that issue with the new ranking screen or was this an issue you previously had?

I noticed it happened on June 28th game, so it's with the new system.

Adam, it just happened again. My lowest moves don't show on the statistics only the moves I got with my fastest time.

@fizzbut: I just had a play around with the rankins, let me know if you notice it again

Hi Adam, I played 660 games, found myself # 113 while I was cca # 52 in the previous ranking system. Is it possibele with the new system? My times were never good, but my moves weren't bad, finding great challenge in lowering moves. Thanks for all you are doing for us.