Skill Score Exposed

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Ask Bob - What Do You Know About Skill Score

From time to time I'm asked Starhawk questions. Today's question came from a couple of my twitter followers. "What do you know about skill score?"

Well, LBI is very tight lipped about skill score. This is because they do not want people to pad their stats to get a better rank. That said, by playing there's a few things you can figure out. This is based on my own experience, LBI can change the calculation at any time, and your mileage may vary.

Winning Team Matters

Being on the winning team matters, a lot. You can take on the hardest server, be the top player on the losing side and your score will go down. I don't know how switching teams affects this; however, when you join the losing team does affect your score. If you start a game, leave and your team loses, your score goes down.

That said, if you join very late and your team loses you do not lose as many points. Like I said, when you join matters, but apparently when you leave does not.

Top/Bottom Player

Being the top player or bottom player can enhance or reduce the skill score change. If you're the top player on the winning team, expect a big bonus. If you're the bottom player on the losing team, well that sucks to be you. That is of course scaled based on when you joined. Top player on the losing team doesn't see their score go down as much, nor does the bottom player on the winning team see their score go up much.

The server difficulty does seem to factor into this change as well; however, winning in a cake server seems to always produce a net gain, where as losing in a hard core server will cost you.

Starting Score

By default everyone starts out at 3000 skill score points. Over time if you don't play your score will degrade till you hit 3000 as well. While I'd like to say the number of points you win come from a player on the losing side, I haven't confirmed that yet.

Basically, if you're under 3000 points you need to find easier servers.

Ranks

There are several ranks people can obtain. They are percentage based so that means you can change ranks one of two ways:

1. Get people to join
2. Improve your score

Here's how things break down: (For checking purposes, estimate approximately 100,000 players).

• In the top 2% Blue Splat
• In the top 11% Star
• In the top 21% Diamond
• In the top 51% Circle
• in the top 76% Square

Note, if your skill score is simply 3000, that puts you in the top 51%. That means if you see someone who doesn't have a circle or higher, give them a break they've had some rough rounds.