How to Create Challonge Community Ratings

Ratings (replacing community leaderboards) are a much stronger tool that enable communities to rank the skill level of their community in a game or activity.

If your looking for information on how to assign or add tournaments to a community rating, view this article: https://kb.challonge.com/en/article/adding-or-assigning-tournaments-to-your-community-rating-1ms41mk/

Ratings are only available for Challonge Communities. If you're hosting as an individual you this feature will not be available.

To create a new rating for a game or activity, head over to your community. Click 'New' > 'Rating'



Next, fill out the information regarding your rating.
NOTE: The game/activity inputted on the new rating must match the title of the game/activity you'll be using this rating for.



PRO Community Advanced Settings

Note: These settings are only available to Challonge Premier Subscribers. If you'd like to upgrade to Challonge premier, you can do so here: https://challonge.com/pricing

Challonge Premier Subscribers each get 1 free PRO Community license with their subscription. This unlocks further settings and greater control over your community ratings.

Starting Rating - ELO ratings are based on a numbered scale. As a PRO community, you can change the default rating to be higher or lower for first-time players. It's from this numbered rating that first time player start and must climb up from.

Defining a K-Factor - In the simplest terms, a K-factor is the maximum amount of ratings points a player can win or lose from a match. A participant may not win or lose the "maximum" amount of points allowed by their K-factor in every match since there's other factors involved in the equation: difference in rating points between opponents being a big one. Typically, K-factors change as you move up or down in ratings as we'll explain. As a Premier Subscriber, you'll have access to edit and modify 3 unique K-Factors in each of your ratings: 'New' Player, 'Normal' Player and 'Pro' Player. If you really want to dive into how ratings scales work, there's a great Wiki Page on it.

'New' Player K-Factor - In this context, 'New' just means new to this rating. It has nothing to do with their individual skill or experience in a game. Typically with ratings and ELO systems, new players gain/lose more points per win/lose than returning players in their first few (can define below) matches. This is so the system can accurately place them at their true rating level quicker. It's always recommended that a "new player" K-Factor is higher than a "normal player".

'Normal' Player K-Factor - Once a player has played a defined number of games (see below), they'll no longer have the potential benefit of a higher K-Factor. This is the K-factor that the majority of your returning players will participate in. Again, it's the maximum number of rating points they can earn/lose by winning or losing a match.

'Pro' Player K-Factor - Many rating scales choose to employ the smallest K-factor for their 'Pro' (highest rated) players. For example, this would protect those players from losing a ton of rating points if they have one bad match against a much lower rated player.

Number of matches to play before a 'New' player becomes 'Normal' - This setting defines how long a player is considered 'New' to your community rating. Looking back up at K-Factors, the larger this number, the more matches they will have (by default) a higher K-Factor.

Rating needed for a player to be considered 'Pro' - This is the numbered rating required for a player to be considered 'Pro' and gain access to the Pro K-factor on your rating scale. The number value of what this should be highly depends on your community's size and frequency of tournaments. If you have hundred of players each week and a dozen tournaments, it's likely your best players can climb up the ratings pretty quickly! In this case, you may find that you want your Pro rating higher than the default. On the flip side, if you're a smaller community that hosts fewer tournaments, players have less opportunities to win more matches. You might want to lower the Pro rating for your community. As your community grows, you an always continue to adjust the threshold for the Pro rating to scale with your community.

Now that we've defined each of these powerful settings enabled by a Challonge Premier Subscription, here's what it looks like on Challonge:


Click into each field to adjust the values. When you're done, Click 'Save Changes' below.

With your new Ratings all set up, you're going to want to create (or add some already existing) tournaments. We have another helpdesk article dedicated to that here: https://kb.challonge.com/en/article/adding-or-assigning-tournaments-to-your-community-rating-1ms41mk/

Updated on: 06/06/2024