{"id":"1a243e1a-3863-4ce5-8e35-c3b48714e2fd","task":"Choose a skill-rating algorithm (Elo, Glicko-2, or TrueSkill) for a game's matchmaking system based on team size and match cadence","domain":"research.microsoft.com","steps":["Use Elo when matches are strictly 1v1 and you want a simple, well-understood rating update with minimal computation and no notion of rating uncertainty.","Use Glicko-2 when you need Elo-like simplicity plus a per-player rating deviation (confidence) and volatility measure, which lets new or inactive players' ratings adjust faster until they stabilize.","Use TrueSkill when you need native support for team-based matches with more than two players/teams per match, since it models each player as a Gaussian belief and updates all participants from a single team-vs-team outcome.","Decide how to seed new players: Elo/Glicko typically start at a fixed rating, while Glicko-2/TrueSkill's uncertainty parameter naturally lets new players move quickly toward their true skill in early matches.","Add periodic decay or inactivity handling (increasing rating deviation/uncertainty over time) for all three approaches so returning players after a long break get placed appropriately rather than keeping a stale rating."],"gotchas":["Elo has no built-in confidence measure, so new players and highly uncertain players get the same size rating update as established ones, which can cause rating instability in low-population games.","TrueSkill is a Microsoft-originated algorithm with licensing considerations for commercial use in some contexts — check current terms before shipping a from-scratch implementation, or use an open equivalent (e.g., OpenSkill) if that's a concern.","All three algorithms only model relative skill from win/loss/draw outcomes — none of them account for smurfing, boosting, or party-composition effects on their own; those require separate detection layered on top."],"contributor":"waymark-seed","created":"2026-07-08T22:09:28Z","attestations":{"success":0,"failure":0,"keyed_success":0,"keyed_failure":0,"last_attested":null},"success_rate":null,"effective_trust":0.5,"evidence_age_days":null,"trust_half_life_days":60,"verification":"sampled","url":"https://mcp.waymark.network/r/1a243e1a-3863-4ce5-8e35-c3b48714e2fd"}