Given it's an anon gunboat game, I think other players would appreciate a sitter over getting a 10 day extension suddenly forced upon them by the Mods with no prior warning.

That said, if all else fails, that is definitely a possibility.

Let’s train my knowledge of US geography a bit, I’d take over for you.

(gameID=41200) Apparently, you're not reliable enough to take it....

You could work some mod magic if you wanted...

Even by using mod tools I cannot work around the RR rating of the game :(
Anybody else?

If GOD can't do it with 83% RR, I'm right out at 79%...

[off topic] The newest RR rules are very bad, penalising wrongly. I take it for myself, I have some four or five deadlines missed out of thousands phases played total (~99.9% rating); counting ast year only, the proportion increases to two out some four hundred (near 99.5% reliability), but my RR is 89%, given one of my missed deadlines was in a game I was a replacement, thus had no "excuse" for a single fault, I went CD and replaced quickly -because I took a dying power and made it guaranteed in the final draw -before I had a chance to enter order for the next phase ( I don't even know if I was allowed to continue). Furthermore, the new scheme is so evil that, for that game, in which i considered my performance superb, I was penalised in Vpoints as well, since it counted me as a defeat, even if I was not the original player, and I was the responsible for the points earned to my replacer.
ODD

The current system could do with some tweeking - I agree from the point of view of someone who has missed phases in a game and had it taken over.

On the flip side though, how any abandoned spots are actually current? A quick check right now and I see none - no open positions on any games. If you take the view of the meta, then that is a fantastic outcome!!

So - yes - some tweeking around the edges of how much you get penilised for missing phases and CDing might be in order, but I'd be hesitant to do too much because I wouldn't want to upset the balance too much towards abandoned positions being left open.

In my opinion there are just two main problems, which I believe are unintended features: first, you NEVER regain excuses as a replacement player, regardless of the game settings. And second, as CCR pointed out, the standard loss prevention for a replacement player doesn't apply if they goes into civil disorder. These two issues can combine into the disastrous result CCR described, adding significant unintended risk to taking over open positions for lengthy games.

Other than those minor issues I agree that the system is in great shape. In most cases, open spots in all public games are filled before the start of the next phase.

I started in a game, where there was some glitch and I got dropped, but asked the Mods and was reinstated. I went out to a winning draw with twice the centres of the next player (4 or 5 finishers from around 15) and I lost vpts!

So these are the two or three teaks needed.

At least---
didn't we have a mathematician - or at least @Mercy iirc - looking at the progressiveness matter of the system? (the issue with the number of players, that made a win in a 35 player map count as ten or twenty instant solos in a standard map!?)

I gotta say, that part of the system doesn’t bother me at all.

If you solo on a 36-player map, you’ve defeated 35 other players. If you solo on Classic, you’ve only defeated 6. So, at the very least, a 36-player solo should be worth ~6 times more than a Classic solo.

However, this doesn’t consider the increased difficulty of achieving a solo in a large variant, even as the strongest player. On this site, 619 of 1284 Classic matches have resulted in a solo victory – roughly 48%. On the other hand, only 3 of 34 Europa Renovatio matches have resulted in a solo victory – roughly 8%.

In other words, in addition to defeating 6 times as many players, the top player has to overcome solo odds that are 6 times worse than Classic. So, it’s not unreasonable that a Europa Renovatio solo would be worth 36 times more than a Classic solo.

Of course, this is not how the rating calculation works in practice. The Europa Renovatio gV (92.68) is only 40% higher than the Classic gV (65.95). If we simplify the math by assuming WTA scoring, and that every player starts with the exact same rating, a Classic solo is worth 65.95 * 6 * 0.5 = 198 rating points, while a Europa Renovatio solo is worth 92.68 * 35 * 0.5 = 1621 rating points – roughly 8 times more. If anything, this seems to undervalue the difficulty of achieving a solo in a 36-player game.

It’s also worth noting that all 3 Europa Renovatio solos occurred in gunboat games – no one has ever successfully achieved a solo victory on this map when their opponents were able to communicate.

@CCR Yes. I was asked to look up the current code on Github and suggest changes, but I can read nor write that programming language, but that didn't work.

@Chuttbugger You fail to account for the fact that if you win 8 Classic games in a row, your increased rating from the first games will cause you to gain much fewer points in the next games. Additionally, since a lower rated player gains more points from winning than a higher rated player, and winning an Europa Renovatio game counts as 35 simultaneous wins, not wins in a row, this means in many cases that the lower your rating was initially, the higher it will become after winning the game.

That is an excellent point. Still, I refer back to my statement that it’s not unreasonable for a Europa solo to be worth 36 times more than a Classic solo due to the reduced odds of a solo occurring at all, in addition to the extra players. Of course, I’m sure not everyone agrees with me.

The bigger issue is the second part of your point - the fact that you can end up at a higher rating if you started at a lower rating. In my original example, I showed that a solo win for a 1000 rated player against 35 other 1000 rated players would be worth 1621 rating points, shooting them up to 2621. I did the math for the same situation if the winner had started at 1272 (arbitrarily chosen from one of my past games so I could identify the exact Re of 1272 vs 1000), and in that case the solo would only be worth 1135 rating points, and the player would end up at 2407.

In other words, if you know you’re about to solo a large game, you should quickly go lose a bunch of other games first to drop your rating before winning the big one ;)

Hypothetically, you could alter the system so that the rating increase is calculated as consecutive wins against each player, starting with the lowest rated player and moving up. Of course, in the interest of fairness, each defeated player’s rating change would need to be calculated the same way it is now, otherwise the lower rated players could actually be punished more heavily. This would lead to an interesting effect of having a net negative rating change across all players in these situations.