Advanced player rankings in a RISK game website. Sweet ideas welcome.

[chrisofutah]

So I have a risk website. I'm not going to link to it just yet because I want to make it awesome before I fully launch it. People can register and play games against each other and what not. That was pretty easy. Ok.

 

Now I'm sort of stumped.

 

I want to have a really advanced ranking system to rank how good players are in relation to each other. I can see in my mind how this would work sort of... I just can't figure out how to translate this into code.

 

So the simplest form of this system would be: Player A beats Player B so the rankings are:

A

B

 

Now say Player A beats Player B and Player C beats Player A so the rankings are:

C

A

B

It is inferred that C is better than B because A beat B and C beat A.

 

Now I think I could make a system when it's that simple pretty easily, where it gets harder is what happens when I have things like:

 

A beats B twice. C beats A once. B beats C once.

What would I do in a situation like that?

I want to factor in something like how should I say "intertia" maybe.

So if a really highly ranked player loses once against a low ranked player it doesn't automatically mean the low ranked player is better than the higher ranked player. Or say two people have been playing games against each other and one beats the other 80% of the time. I want that to be reflected even though the one who won 20% of the time may have won the latest game or something. Do you see what I mean?

 

Anyway, I know this is really random and I probably haven't explained it very clearly, but any ideas are welcome, I'll be checking this thread on and off today and the next day or two.

 

P.S. something else I was thinking about is maybe since like 5 people can play a game at the same time although 4 of them will lose in the end, they won't lose at the same time, there will be an order to their loss, so i don't think you should punish the first and last ones to lose the same.

 

Anyway, thanks a lot! I think figuring things out like this is fun which is why I got into programming, but I'm just not sure how to express this idea in code just yet. 

[TheFilmGod]

Ever heard of halo? What about world of war craft? No need to reinvent the wheel. Simply do your research.

[chrisofutah]

Thanks for the tip! I found this thing on how halo supposedly ranks and I'm looking into how I can apply this to my situation.

 

http://www.bungie.net/Forums/posts.aspx?postID=14414600

 

Hmm... I also found an interesting Wikipedia page on a method of ranking chess players relative to each other...

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system