Ghost-Rating is an unofficial rating system developed by TheGhostmaker as an alternative to points. It intends to provide a more accurate measure of the ability of players, and also to give a better idea of how well people are doing compared to previously. The original version was developed in 2008, and based on the Elo used in chess, however the algorithm has been improved several times since then.
Most of this code was written by TheGhostMaker and Alderian, and is currently maintained (poorly) by ghug.
More info, and the ratings themselves, at http://tournaments.webdiplomacy.net/theghost-ratingslist
THESE ARE INSTRUCTIONS FOR RUNNING GR. PLEASE FOLLOW ALL OF THEM. GR IS SUPER SHITTY. IT'S AN AMALGAMATION OF A LOT OF CODE THAT DIFFERENT PEOPLE WROTE WITHOUT A LOT OF TIME ON THEIR HANDS. IF YOU FEEL INCLINED TO MAKE IT NICER, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO FIX IT. THANKS.
perl GhostRater_ghug_392431984329.pl ghostRatingData.txt Variantsfile.csv RemovedPlayers.csv [cat#] 6 0 1000000 0 [time]
Arguments are: command (perl) script (GostRater....pl) data dump (ghostRatingData.txt, extract this from the zip at webdiplomacy.net/ghostRatingData.zip) variant file (defines the variants and how much to weight them) removed players (we removed banned players for a while but that was weird so we stopped) cat number (defines which games to include, existing category numbers are hardcoded below) cutoff length (default six months) starting game ID (0) ending game ID (up this number if we ever get to a million games) starting time (unix time, 0) ending time (unix time, which is seconds since 01/01/1970 Use https://www.unixtimestamp.com/)
category numbers: Overall: 510 Gunboat: 318 FP: 82 Live: 494
This outputs a bunch of files called YYYY-MM.csv. Put them in a folder so they're not overwritten the next time you run it. You can test that you're doing everything right by checking past months against existing GR from the tournaments site.
GR must be run after midnight GMT on the first of the month in order to capture the last month.
There's a user named Leonard H. "Bones" McCoy, MD (ID 12530) who seems to have engineered himself to break everything. Just delete the comma in the data file. Nobody likes him anyway. There may be more too, so if this is the issue, just remove their commas as well.
python 1v1_elo.py ghostRatingData.txt 6 0 [time]
Arguments are: command (python) script (1v1_elo.py) data dump cutoff length (default six months) start time end time
Create a directory where you store GR data. It should be arranged as follows: ...dir/ Overall/ 2017-01.csv 2017-02.csv 2017-03.csv ... Live/ 2017-01.csv ... Classic/ 2017-01.csv ... Gunboat/ 2017-01.csv ...
Change line 12 of gr_clean.py so that the directory matches your new directory. All of this only needs to be done once. New GR should just be arranged in this directory.
python gr_clean.py
The program will prompt you for input. Enter the year and month (YYYY-MM) of the month you'd like to clean. This makes everything pretty and human-readable. You can also do this step with find/replace in Excel or similar if that's more your speed.
RemovedPlayers.csv - A list of players to not consider when running GR. Formerly used to remove banned players, but currently left empty. VarianstFile.csv - Settings for weighting of different press and map variants.
gr_categorize.py contains some useful tools for segmenting and processing GR data. Mostly useful for player of the year awards and the like. Hit up ghug; he won't remember how to use it, but he'll figure it out for you since he's friendly and he wrote it in the first place.
EIDRaS is an Elo like system for Diplomacy developed decades ago by some other people. Unfortunately, it's name is way worse than Ghost Rating. Check out these links for more information: http://www.stabbeurfou.org/docs/articles/en/DP_S1998R_Diplomacys_New_Rating_System.html and http://uk.diplom.org/pouch//Email/Ratings/JDPR/describe.html
Adapted for webDiplomacy by Yonni.