About

Stat tracking and glicko2 ratings for TEKKEN 8. Inspired by ratingupdate.info, which more or less does the same thing for Guilty Gear -Strive-. There's also a TEKKEN 7 version for matches played with the c7 mod.

Data

The server queries the TEKKEN 8 replay API every ~60 seconds for the latest 999 ranked replays and saves them in a database. This uses the same endpoint that the game uses when you go to the "Online Replays" tab.

There are some gaps in the data from when the API query script stopped working. There may be more gaps in future. It's not possible to query the API for old replays, and they are usually deleted with new patches.

Check the footer and let me know if things look broken. The latest replay should never be older than a few minutes, except when the game server is undergoing maintenance.

Ratings

Ratings are calculated using glicko2, which is one of the most well-regarded and battle-tested rating systems out there. This is in stark contrast to TEKKEN 8's rating system, which is trivially gameable by cherry picking.

Each player gets a completely new, distinct rating for each character they play. Because of how glicko2 works, it will quickly (within ~10 games) reach a reasonable rating, so there's no need for anything like the in-game auto promotion of side characters.

Leaderboards

Ratings with a deviation lower than 75 can appear on the leaderboard. This is what lichess uses. Players must be assigned a region to appear on its leaderboard.

Limitations

These ratings are far from perfect. The main limitations are:

Ratings between regions can't be compared. Dominant results in stronger regions are harder to achieve, so top players in stronger regions are expected to have lower ratings than those in weaker regions.

Players with region Unknown don't appear on any leaderboard. I'm still reviewing if it would be sensible to have a separate leaderboard for these players.

People can plug to avoid taking losses. My data is limited to what the TEKKEN game servers record. Until they start recording disconnects as losses, this will continue being an easy way to get fraudulent ratings.

Regions

Regions are determined by match history. The details are complicated, but in short: your region is copied from the people you've recently played against. This process is done once daily. Players who relocate should see that change reflected after playing around 45 games.

The algorithm that assigns regions comes in two parts. The first part, which seeded the initial regions, was a guided design process.

What defines something as a region? The naive answer is to look at geography, but the purpose of these regions is to make it clear that there are distinct player populations throughout the world. Players in Oceania are not playing games with people outside their region. Meanwhile, Russia and Morocco are on different continents, but their players are still in the same matchmaking pool. So the definition: a region is a cluster of players who only play amongst themselves.

This definition has total ignorance of geography. It can be answered entirely by a good graph of who-plays-whom, which is data I happen to have available. However, it does require a judgment call on how tight the borders should be. If a cluster only plays 80% of its games amongst itself, is that isolated enough to call it a region? What about 85%? 90%? The goal is maximizing the number of regions while minimizing the porousness of the loosest region's borders.

The final judgment call was on whether Southeast Asia should be distinct from East Asia. As its own region, Southeast Asia only had 78% of its games played amongst itself. I compared this with Southern Africa, which is the worst case right now at roughly 91%, and decided 78% was too loose, which is why Southeast Asia is not its own region.

With the regions defined from a clean sample population, the second step is simple label propagation. For every player, whatever region most of their opponents are from is assigned as their region. Any currently assigned region has some stickiness to it, requiring high confidence that this is no longer the right region before unassigning it. This process is repeated until stable. This is also how regions are updated on a regular basis, based on your 50 most recent games. Each opponent can only count for at most 3 games, so having one regular rival doesn't throw things out of order. This step is, hopefully, tuned to be stable. Your region should not change regularly.

However, players who reside on the border of two or more regions may end up permanently assigned the "Unknown" region, or they may flip-flop between those regions and/or Unknown depending on who they were matched with this week. I have tried to minimize this, but it's a hard thing to dissolve entirely.

Because the regions are ignorant of geography, the borders may not be exactly where you expect from the names. For example, "Europe" includes some parts of northern Africa. The stylized map is my best attempt at reflecting how the regions map to actual geography, but it's imprecise. If you're not being assigned a stable region, or if the map is not tracking with what you're assigned, please let me know.

Who

This site is made and run by 6 weetbix. It's the brainchild of me and my lovely partner klaraz.

As you might expect from the name and URL, I also run wavu.wiki, which you should definitely check out (and contribute to).