Platinum
Posted: Sun Mar 27, 2016 11:47 pmWhat is a platinum player?
There's a history.
For a lot of the game's history, there has been one player who stood out above the rest. When we were testing the algorithm on old IDL data (to design it, before the ladder's launch), it picked out Kiln as being untouchably better than his peers in 1997, and Birdseye as being the same way around 2000. We were a little uncertain how to deal with players like that. See, the plan was to group players into tiers in which anyone in a tier had a chance against anyone else in it, and where a win or loss against one silver pilot or another meant similar enough things that a record against silver was meaningful. But -- by the numbers -- that would have put Kiln or Birdseye in a tier of their own. We didn't want that. So at the ladder's launch, we had a 'Birdseye rule': if one pilot ever got far enough ahead of the pack, the ladder would ignore them and count the next best player as the top of gold.
We immediately ran into a problem: we had not one player like that, but two. Jediluke and DJCJR were a serious threat to each other, but untouchable by anyone else. We talked about creating a 'Dominator' medal to recognize a crazy efficiency against your own tier, but after watching them for a season, I became convinced we were seeing something more than that. I felt that they were continuing a legacy of standout pilots who were briefly in a class of their own, and that such an achievement deserved permanent recognition. Lotharbot agreed. Jedi didn't have much to say.
So the blue orb was born. The history up to that point had shown that players could be like that for a little while. Kiln and Birds had had reigns that lasted a year or less. I expected Jeds and DJ would be the same, that they would reign for a season or two, and then the ladder would go back to being a mass of contenders with no obvious champion, as most ladders had been for most of their history. The plan was to honor and statistically discount champions when they emerged and broke things, which would be rare. Neat.
Needless to say, it didn't work out that way. At first, some seasons, there were three masters active. At times, there were none. But over the last year or so, they've been unexpectedly stable and seemed to get more unassailable, not less.
How much do they contribute statistically to what? We ourselves struggle with that as we try to understand what they are and what they mean. They never seem to break the ladder quite the way we're expecting, or to do it the same way twice. Still, we've more or less used Masters as a 'Birdseye Rule'. Throughout the seasons, when we find someone is so good at the game that the algorithm just can't handle them, we flag them as a master which tells it to ignore them and go on to the next pilot. Sometimes it turns off their contribution to other things than just the tier boundaries. It depends on what they're currently breaking.
Now, master was the original official terminology, but nobody -- not even me -- uses it anymore. People started referring to gold pilots in general as masters of the game (which I don't think is wrong), and it slowly dawned on us that what we were calling "masters" weren't pilots dominating for a season, a fluke of the state of the game -- the pilots we had were truly ahead of everyone else in a stable way, a way we hadn't seen before, and they remained so even as the game changed and the times changed. A genuine separate class. We started calling them 'diamond class' behind the scenes, but we didn't want to make that an official designation. Still, we felt it was true.
That's sort of a new thing, by the way. We've been calling them diamond behind the scenes for a year or so now, and everyone has started calling them platinum in the last few months. But when we first created the orb, they were much less so. They were extraordinary gold pilots, but definitely mere mortals. Season 1 masters put together long strings of solid victories over their peers, and it seemed they were never truly in danger of losing except when they played each other. Season 6 masters lose a lot more, but also have this weird tendency to hold pilots otherwise considered godlike to, like, 4 or 5. To do arbitrarily evil things to arbitrarily awesome opponents. This is both new and frightening
. And Mark's recent run as TheBreakr suggests that we may not be challenging him enough to even see what he's capable of on a regular basis. They are clearly at least a separate class at this point, but what are they really, and what do these scores even mean? How does competition even work at that level? I dunno. I have no idea what's going on up there. I am one of the pilots in the best position to judge, and I can only react to this phenomenon with shock and confusion. I lived through Birdseye . . . this is something else entirely. I don't know what it would be fair to call it.Anyway, over time, we've had to separate masters out more and more, limit what certain victories meant statistically and so forth, but we have always been reluctant to discount them entirely. The official definition of gold has always been 'serious threat to the very best' and we don't want to dilute that. But of course, I think many of us don't feel like a serious threat to Jeds or Mark, and behind the scenes it isn't engineered to require that. So what it really means is, "Serious threat to the best . . . yeah okay not necessarily Mark. You can be an outside threat with him." Sometimes I wonder if we're even that anymore. We don't want to water down the definition of gold, but requiring regular victories against Jeds does seem a bit unreasonable.
Getting into gold isn't a specific skill level, right? It changes. The definition is "threat to the best", so it depends on who the active best pilot is and how good they are. That's by design and as it is supposed to be. I would say it has also gotten harder over time, which is also both expected and okay. Really, the whole ladder has! Silver these days is a lot tougher to get into than it used to be, and you see it in that pilots who were solid silver take a year or two off, shake off some rust, come back . . . and immediately get demoted. The community improves! But gold in particular has been brutal. Around season two or three (when masters were counted closer to full weight) gold was insanely, noticeably much more difficult than it had been at ladder launch. There was a widespread impression, during the time I was working toward it, that (subjectively speaking) I already had the skills -- but in terms of actually being a regular threat to the best, it turned out I had months of training to go. The line had moved up! And quite a ways.
Anyway -- what I'm getting at is that making gold gets harder each season. But we've found we've had to limit the impact of the masters on where the line is more and more each season, just to keep it somewhat in the vincinity of stable. Just to require you to improve as fast as the community does. Diamond seems to improve faster than that, and the lead Mark and Jedi have on the community at large is much bigger, statistically, than the lead Jedi and DJ had on it at launch. It is so large that I no longer trust the algorithm to give anything like an accurate estimate in their case. Are they a separate class? Yes, and then some. I don't really know what they are. I don't know what numbers would be meaningful. They are legends that will be judged by history, I guess.
I don't think we've ever communicated any of this very clearly, and I suspect some folks have always wondered what the blue orb was for. Well, there you have it. They're the Birdseyes and Kilns of the era, at least as far as the statistics are concerned, and something a bit more than that. They are the people who have significant undefeated gold seasons, or who run up unreasonably long gold streaks, or who everyone just assumes in advance will be the finalists in the tournament. By the numbers, those who beat others so hard on average that victories against them are celebration worthy for pretty much anyone. People who, if we were to anchor gold to them, would basically be the only pilots in it. Legends and grandmasters and, to be honest . . . something kind of new. At least, historically speaking. I don't entirely know what they are.
That is how things stood when, at the recent town hall meeting, someone asked, "Is the blue orb basically platinum class?" and I said, "Yeah, pretty much". Long story, short answer.
But I guess people started calling it that. Which is evidence that the community independently is seeing this phenomenon, rather than learning about it from talking to admins: we've always called it diamond. Anyway. That is how it stands. Originally, the statistics said they were in a class by themselves. In the interrim, we flagged the statistics to ignore them. Over time, as they got further ahead, more people started to notice. Now nearly everyone sees it that way.
Which I think means we need to rethink how it works. What it is now is kind of a half measure, designed for a different situation that the one we found ourselves in, and it shows. It has only recently become clear to us that this is a stable class which ought to be treated like one, and that is slowly becoming clear to everyone. People talk about "non-platinum gold records" these days, or "streak broken, but by a platinum pilot", or getting a "platinum dark horse". It all implies that you can't take a gold record at face value, and that beating these pilots deserves (missing) special recognition. This is all true, and a problem. And a conundrum. We really don't want to make a separate class for just one or two pilots, a class that might disappear when people retire. There won't always be a master in residence. There wasn't for a while a couple years ago, when Mark had retired and the pack had caught up to Jedi somewhat. So defining it is a tricky business. Still, these sentiments aren't fundamentally wrong, and the system probably could be made more fair.