Today when I opened Lichess I was surprised to see I had the top 100 trophy for Atomic. Not that I haven't gotten it before (I did a few times), but now I am only rated 2061 in atomic. Normally that would place me around 125th, but I'm actually 94th!
When I started playing atomic, the top 100 rating floor for Atomic was around 2150, a few months ago it was around 2100, now it's nearing 2050!
There are 2 reasons why this is happening:
1. More high rated players are becoming inactive, and thus they are removed from the leaderboard after 1 week or more of inactivity.
2. A phenomenon I've observed recently that I'm going to call "rating destruction".
Say you have a community made up of 10 players, each with a rating of 2000. Another player who knows how to play just as well signs in, and being provisional he quickly reaches 2000, but in doing so takes 10 rating points from each of the other players. Then the new player becomes inactive or closes his account, and you have the same community as before, except they each now have 1990 rating. 100 rating was destroyed.
Of course this is overly simplistic, but it demonstrates the concept. All that's different is that the community is much larger, and that the interactions are more complex, but the result is the same. Nowadays it is a very common practice to make a new account to play in a variant you're good at, use the advantage provisional rating gives you to get to a rating much higher than your strength, and then stop playing. There are many accounts which have 20-30 games in a single variant and are now inactive.
This phenomenon affects the rating pool slowly, but over time its effects become visible. It was once possible to get 3000+ ratings in Atomic and Antichess, but now the maximum rating is only around 2500-2600. And top 50 Atomic no longer requires 2200+ rating, but only a little over 2150.
The question is, what can we do about this? The main problem is variants are losing players and gradually becoming less popular because very few chess players ever decide to try out variants. We need to find a way to bring new players, otherwise variants will keep declining.
Please post any thoughts or ideas you have here, they will all be appreciated!
When I started playing atomic, the top 100 rating floor for Atomic was around 2150, a few months ago it was around 2100, now it's nearing 2050!
There are 2 reasons why this is happening:
1. More high rated players are becoming inactive, and thus they are removed from the leaderboard after 1 week or more of inactivity.
2. A phenomenon I've observed recently that I'm going to call "rating destruction".
Say you have a community made up of 10 players, each with a rating of 2000. Another player who knows how to play just as well signs in, and being provisional he quickly reaches 2000, but in doing so takes 10 rating points from each of the other players. Then the new player becomes inactive or closes his account, and you have the same community as before, except they each now have 1990 rating. 100 rating was destroyed.
Of course this is overly simplistic, but it demonstrates the concept. All that's different is that the community is much larger, and that the interactions are more complex, but the result is the same. Nowadays it is a very common practice to make a new account to play in a variant you're good at, use the advantage provisional rating gives you to get to a rating much higher than your strength, and then stop playing. There are many accounts which have 20-30 games in a single variant and are now inactive.
This phenomenon affects the rating pool slowly, but over time its effects become visible. It was once possible to get 3000+ ratings in Atomic and Antichess, but now the maximum rating is only around 2500-2600. And top 50 Atomic no longer requires 2200+ rating, but only a little over 2150.
The question is, what can we do about this? The main problem is variants are losing players and gradually becoming less popular because very few chess players ever decide to try out variants. We need to find a way to bring new players, otherwise variants will keep declining.
Please post any thoughts or ideas you have here, they will all be appreciated!