Whether I’m having a good or bad game in CS:GO, what I do is to look for the number
I’m doing better than anybody else on the team, and suddenly for that game, that’s
the most important thing. Got the most kills? That’s what’s important. Got the fewest
deaths? That’s also the most important! Highest damage per round? That’s the one
I normally use because I’m great at dealing 99 in 4.
But can you condense how good a person is, down to a single number? Exams do it. My exes
have done it! And HLTV has attempted to do it for your CS:GO skill level. Twice.
Back in 2010, HLTV created this blog post, stating that they didn’t think your K/D
ratio does a good enough job of representing how well you’re playing. Used as an example
of how KD ratio could be misleading, they compare a player who scored 13 kills in an
18 round game, against a player who scored 37 kills in a 30 round game. These players
appear to have the same K/D ratio, but with an average of 1.23 kills per round, the second
player is performing better PER ROUND than the first, who only managed .72 kills. So
to try and better represent how well a player performed in a match, they introduced a new
scoring system which they humbly titled ‘Rating 1.0’.
This was based on 3 things: the number of kills per round, the survival rate per round,
and the ‘impact’, which was measured by the number of MULTIKILLS you got per round.
Since more kills, more survived rounds, and more killing sprees are all good (when playing
Counter-Strike), the higher you get, the higher your HLTV 1.0 score.
It’s definitely more comprehensive than your basic KD ratio, but is it good enough?
It’s still based around how many kills you’re getting, and doesn’t account for how many
times you rushed in first, how many weapons you dropped for teammates, or how many times
you sacrificed yourself for the greater good. So to try and account for more styles of play,
and to give a more accurate representation of general all-round ability, they revised
this in 2017, with a new and more secret formula, known imaginatively as Rating 2.0.
They state that this improved rating was made possible thanks to more comprehensive data
collection on their website. They introduced ADR in early 2016, which takes into account
the average damage per round. And then there’s the KAST rating which calculates the percentage
of rounds with a kill, assist, survival or traded death.
And it turns out, these new factors can make quite a significant difference to players’
ratings. They’ve got a few examples on the blog post. Fnx’s rating increases by .31,
going from the bottom of his team, to being the second best! That’s a big difference.
Another they show is Xyp9x’s performance in a close game against virtus pro (you can
tell this is old). Although the old rating still put him top of his team, they didn’t
think it represented just how well he played, while rating 2.0 puts him well above everybody
else in the match. They think he deserved this thanks to his 1 vs 3 clutch, his 4 opening
kills and a map-high ADR and KAST- which happen to be the 2 new stats that Rating 2.0 accounts
for. I’m not going to discuss how accurate I
think these particular examples are, I’m sure that hltv’s in a much better position
to judge them than I am so I suggest you check out the blog post and match replay if you’d
like to know more. It would be interesting to know how they came
up with the formula behind the new rating system, and how they weighted each aspect
of it. Did they pick out examples where they thought the old rating was wrong, and devised
the new formula to make these cases right? Then how did they balance that against the
other ratings that they deemed WERE accurate before? Was it done methodically, or was there
a whole lot of botching and random numbers thrown in? Maybe we’ll never know.
They do mention that the average rating will be 1.0. But the example matches shown clearly
don’t average out at 1! So maybe ‘average’ doesn’t refer to the end rating, but just
to the individual components that make it up, based on what the average was across HLTV’s
site as a whole at that time. Something still doesn’t add up about it but that can be
a problem for somebody else. So while HLTV have been a bit secretive about
its construction, one thing we CAN know is the resulting formula. Rating 2.0’s exact
figures haven’t been revealed by the company, but a smart man over on flashed.gg known only
as DAVE believes he has cracked the code. I’ll let you check out the blog post for
yourself if you’d like to know the specifics, but in short he says HLTV did a pretty terrible
job of keeping the rating’s formula a secret, since they openly revealed the new variables
they account for, so all he had to do was to find the exact weighting of each of these
5 variables and he’d be able to replicate the HLTV 2.0 formula.
And it seems he’s managed it, as his calculations are never more than .01 off HLTV 2.0’s rating,
which he puts down to HLTV 2.0 changing its weighting depending on whether the player
is playing on T or CT side.
So let’s take a quick look at the numbers, just out of curiosity. Getting more kills
per round improves your score. Which you’d expect. Dying a lot will greatly reduce your
score- it appears that staying alive MIGHT be more important than getting an extra kill.
But as you’ll soon discover, it might not be as simple as that, since several parts
of the rating can increase with each and every shot you fire that connects with an enemy.
In fact, the rest of the figures here are a lot more difficult to draw conclusions about.
Because on the surface, since KAST is multiplied by a smaller number, you might think it’s
less important, but bear in mind the KAST number itself is a percentage rather than
a ‘figure’, so getting a KAST of 50% is about equal in rating to one kill per round,
but it’s not as simple as this since KAST itself is an umbrella term, partly consisting
of the number of kills you’ve dealt? It’s an abstract term and I think the conclusions
we can reach from this analysis are limited in their meaning.
ADR is interesting, though- since it requires 100 damage to kill somebody, managing that
every round would make this rating .32, which is just a bit less important than the .36
that you would get from a kill every round. I guess it makes sense that damaging an enemy
is less valuable than killing them, but remember that one compliments the other so these 2
ratings aren’t mutually exclusive. And on top of this, the impact rating itself
comprises of ANOTHER calculation which also factors in kills and assists per round. So
in just one shot, you could increase the value of several parts of the HLTV 2.0 formula.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a rating system for a game about shooting people comprises
of lots of overlapping measurements based around how you’ve shot people.
I’m not going to overthink this. Knowing what goes into the formula isn’t what we
should be obsessing about. Much like the meaning of life, perhaps it’s the question leading
to it that’s more important. So let’s ask: does the HLTV 2.0 rating better represent
a player’s skill level than V1.0 did? I’m going to say it does, simply because
the older and simpler methods are easier to exploit and have been shown to not necessarily
always corroborate with how well players are deemed to have played.
But HLTV 2.0 shouldn’t be seen as being perfect. Even they describe it as ‘just
one possible interpretation of what happens on the server’ -they say it’s always best
to also watch the match yourself if you want the most accurate assessment of a player’s
performance. I was sort of joking at the start when I said
that whatever I was doing well in was the most important value in that game. But there’s
some truth to that. When you’re the player that these ratings are based upon, you are
more acutely aware of the story behind the numbers. That 45 damage you did last round
doesn’t look impressive, but if you also managed to delay the plant by a few seconds,
or gained your teammates some valuable information that helped them to win the round, or you
dropped a weapon that was used to turn the tide of the battle, suddenly that 45 damage
you managed with a skillful pistol shot in an eco round can be seen as a bonus extra,
instead of what your performance that round should be based upon. And even Rating 2.0
can’t factor in all that.