I would strongly encourage anyone with questions and confusion regarding the ranked points system to look here: Microsoft’s Xbox Live TrueSkill Ranking System
(The FAQ Section under Leaderboard and Matchmaking have a lot of good information for those interested in understanding why you get the points you get)
Here are two applicable snips from an FAQ in the above link regarding the TrueSkill Algorithm and explains why the poor matchmaking system in FH4 causes poor results in the points system, making the grind to GrandMaster extremely difficult (there just isn’t enough quality opponents to play against and the game does not create “fair” lobbies because it has to just take the first 12 people and throw them in a lobby together regardless of their individual TrueSkill scores):
Q: Well there must be a bug in the system because I jumped into a 4 person race with 3 lower ranked individuals, won the race and my position in the league I was in dropped about 50 spots.
A: Surprisingly, this is not a bug and it happens when players with very small σ but widely varying μ get matched together (thanks to rugdivot for figuring this out).
So, what is going on here? Between any two games of a gamer, the TrueSkill ranking system assumes that the true skill of a gamer, that is, μ, can have changed slightly either up or down; this property is what allows the ranking system to adapt to a change in the skill of a gamer. Technically, this is achieved by a small increase in the σ of each participating gamer before the game outcome is incorporated. Usually, a game outcome provides enough pieces of information to reduce this increased uncertainty. But, in a badly matched game (as the one described above) this is not the case; in this case, nothing can be learned about the winner from the game outcome (because it was already known before the game that the winner was significantly higher ranked than the other gamers he has beaten). So, conservatively speaking, the winner’s skill might have slightly decreased! Note that this can only happen if the gamer is not matched correctly so that he can “prove” to the TrueSkill ranking system that his skill has not changed.
Q: A couple of days ago I managed to get into the top 350 (in PGR 3 online career) after winning probably 25 of 30 races and that brought me up about 120 spots. Now tonight I have had 5 races: 2 wins,1 second,5th (got spun twice) and a 4th on one of the Vegas tracks. Because of this pathetic record (that is how the TrueSkill formula sees it) I have gone down 115 spots. How is it fair that 2 bad races basically dropped me down almost as many points as 25 wins out of 30 races took to gain all those places ?
A: There are two reasons that can cause this problem (although the latter is probably more responsible for this “phenomenon”):
- Ranks displayed in PGR 3 are the position in the total leaderboard. That means, if you are rank 659 then there are 658 gamers with a higher skill (estimate) than you. This number can vary without a gamer actually having to play a game; for example, if some (legitimate) “Gotham star” gets to the top 100 players in the world whilst you are not even racing, then your rank goes down to “660” without you doing anything wrong. This “rank” can never be guaranteed to be “stable”.
-Roughly speaking, the change in your skill estimate depends on how “surprising” the game outcome is. If you happen to be (among) the player(s) with the highest skill in each of the games you played, then the 25 wins were not surprising and hence none of these games provided a significant increase in your skill estimate. However, if coming 5th was a rather unlikely outcome in the game were you actually did come fifth, then your skill needs to be adapted significantly. Another way of seeing the issue is that TrueSkill does take the strength of the opposition into account. One cannot simply compute the win ratio and equate this with skill; if all wins happen in the (sometimes) unavoidable unbalanced games then a win is not really testament to your (even) high(er) skill!