Fencer: As long as my regular opponents continue you to play me, I won't have a problem with it. When the ones that want to raise their rating are no longer able to get any points playing me even if they win the game stop playing me, then I'll have a problem with it. I can just imagine what the guy that has played the best Chess player in world twenty times and lost all twenty of them would say if he was told that the next game wouldn't change his rating even if he somehow managed to win the game! He would just play the game for fun and bragging rights, right? If Bobby Fischer was dead he'd be spinning in his grave.

Let's look at Dark Chess's established ratings list. There's only 9 players over 2000. That's right, this ain't Backgammon. It was only a few months ago that I was almost 200 points ahead of the second place player. I can only play 9 players so many times. Some of these 9 don't play very many games or even play on this site any more. If you change it so the games won't count after a certain number have been played between us and if I play and win just half the games against any one of them the ratings will stay the same. When I use to win almost every game, it'd make this argument even stronger. Then we'll eventually reach the point where the games will no longer count in the ratings no matter who wins each game. At that time the rating list will become frozen. Is that what you want the ratings to reflect? Dark Chess takes a few moves more to play than Backgammon and usually takes longer for each person to make his moves as there's a lot less automatic and forced moves in a game of Dark Chess. If you put this scheme into effect in Backgammon and the trend to some of the tournaments now is to have a narrow range of rating points to be able to enter the tournament, which I assume is because of how many people play Backgammon as compared to Dark Chess, all the higher rated Backgammon players will eventually have played each other enough times that their games will no longer count for rating either. That'll go over real well. I've noticed how much more dynamic the rating list is in Backgammon. Myself is a good example. I was in the top ten just a couple of weeks ago, now I'm out of the top twenty. I've been playing Backgammon enough so that I've made some freinds with a few of the players that are rated similairly to me. There's plenty of other top rated players that have played thousands of games. I bet they've played a good portion of the top rated players more than 14 times. You make that change and a lot of games will no longer count in the ratings. Then just the new players will be the only ones able to climb up and down the rating list. Not much fun it that, is there?

I and a lot of others have come up with many ideas about changing the ratings to reflect current players and playing strength. I've never heard anyone suggest not counting the games between players. What's the point of even having the ratings if the games don't count? The way it's set up now gives a lower rated player more points if they win against a higher rated player and they lose less if they lose to a higher rated player. When anyone is playing someone close in rating points the win value of rating points is equal. This seems like a fair system to me even if it has some flaws as it is done here. It could also be modified in a few ways to accomodate the nature of playing the games on a turn based site as compared to playing it live. When one plays live, he plays one game at a time. On this site, it's possible to play hundreds of game at a time. This does affect one's current rating. I have seen how people try to time their wins and losses so that they may climb up the ratings list. Eventually their games catch up with them and it evens out. My suggestion is to leave the counting of the games as it is now, and work on a better numerical value for when changes do occur. Plus all those time rating things a few people would like added.

I still fail to see how making the games not count having any effect on the cheaters. Wouldn't they just open another account and carry on as before? In the Backgammon discussion board there's been some discussion about how to catch people using multiple accounts. The concensus seems to be that it'd be a hard thing to do and some methods create as many problems as they attempt to solve. Some people legitimately share computers, others have different computers but the same network access, ISP connection, or wireless hub.