game design - Simplest most effective way to rank and measure player skill in a multi-player environment?

I know of the Truskill algorithm, it's quite complex but effective.

My question is there other algorithms/methods to determine a players skill for accurate measuring for multi-player competitive play?

Answer

I think asking for "simplest most effective" is an unrealistic requirement, but there are certainly a few good approaches. Rather than go into detail, I'll link to an article:

http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2006/01/ranking_systems.html

This covers:

• ELO


• an ELO variant by Days of Wonder


• TrueSkill (and glicko, which it appears to be based on or at least similar to)


• eGenesis Ranking (for Tales in the Desert)

On the whole you'll see that they're all pretty much variations on the same theme - you pick a starting or average value for a player, and then the values are used to predict the game outcome. The difference between the actual outcome and the predicted outcome is used to modify the scores for each player, and the process repeats with the adjusted scores. Since each modification to the scores makes the predicted result more accurate, the scores converge on their 'true' values. (This actually assumes that it's a game of skill rather than chance, that the skill in question is capable of being linearly ranked, etc.)