Thank you for the thoughtful analysis Yaron.

I was a bit less empirically-focused in my posts. And I did overlook the fact that this was a suggested change of "display" rather than a system change. I think I'm just against wasting time with the display if the system is bad, so I jumped to conclusions.

And I hope Jed does respond with the RD accumulation rate for TFW... I'm curious.

In addition to the issues you list, experienced "wilders" playing under multiple accounts also represents an issue for the ratings system. For example, let's say Altren had 5 accounts that he played under regularly (but not against himself, of course). How would this affect the ratings pool? One human being would end up with multiple accounts with mid-high level ratings and mid to low RD (depending on how much they played) when they should have only one high rating with very low RD. In the wake of this, a lot of people would lose rating points and the average possible ratings of all players in the pool would be slowly driven downwards. Thus, any experienced player with multiple accounts could effectively be a "drain" on the ratings "pool"... and in the current system, there is still a lot of motivation for having multiple accounts (although I'm still much too lazy to do it myself lolz).

I originally posted this thread because, for users who sort the player list by rating, it is non-intuitive to see "similar" players not in a contiguous block (including yourself). I stand by that belief.

and, the ensuing discussion between Sunyaku and Yaron has been enlightening to follow. at this point, I'd like to endorse these two ideas in particular: