Matchmaking Calculator site is now at https://major.ieb.im/
The Beginning
It all backs to 2019, when the 2019 IEM Katowice Major is using a innovative live Elo system to calculate matchups, I had some desire to know some “what-if”s and decided to look into this particular system.
By using some interpolations, a fairly good approximation of the system could be constructed, and it’s pretty accurate after 32 datapoints after day 1.
After that, I made a matchup calculator (reddit thread), and it soon got lots of attentions. At that time I was pretty new to frontend, and the UI is nowhere near appealing. But it works, and soon it gained some popularity.
The original calculator is now on Netlify — https://kato19calc.netlify.app
Source code available at https://github.com/iebb/Kato19EloCalc
StarLadder Major
Months later, when I started my first full-time job at a self-driving company as a full-stack developer, the Berlin Major came. As the StarLadder organizers reached out to me (originally thought it was some junk mail), the same formula is being used again — with the difference of the initial seeding methods changed from ranking each other to average relative HLTV rankings over a specific period.
As it’s an semi-official product, I also changed the site design and color schemes to make it more in-line with CS:GO and the StarLadder major theme, and a live score display is added. That formed the basis of the current all-in-one site, and much of the code is reused over the 3 recent Majors.
The switch to Buchholtz system
The previous seeding system has earned mixed views after those 2 majors, and ESL is about to make some modifications to address some problems. But the pandemic came, and all efforts were nullified as the confirmation that Rio Major isn’t going to take place, after a half-year postponement.
After 27 months, CS:GO major cames back as the world slowly recovers from the pandemic. During those two years, we have witnessed lots of dramas, ups and downs, and player transfers, but after all, the Major is back.
The Buchholtz system is announced shortly before the major, hours after the creation of my brand-new website. Fortuneately, there’s no need to change much of the code, besides the sorting function — using the summation of scores from the previous opponents, and it took no more than 2 hours to update the website.
Well over my expection, more than 1 million page views were recorded during the length of the Major, and I have received lots of Profile Awards and comments on my Steam Profile. I’m pretty appreciated!
The Future Plan
Looking forward to see you soon!
The technical details would be published later, as they deserves to be in a separate post.
