Why am I not gaining points?
If a player's League Rating is negative, then we just show that as 0. So, if a player's League Rating is really -200, and you gain 50 for winning, rather than showing "-200+50=-150" it just shows "0+0=0". Behind the scenes, you are moving up and down, and if you win enough, they'll reach positive numbers again and get above 0. There is no way of knowing how negative you are so it might be a lot of wins before you get positive again.
How are events scored?
- If you leave/disconnect from a match early you will be penalized, and more points will be deducted from your ranking than if you stay and complete a match. You only lose the points when the Adventure you left finishes, so the punishment is delayed somewhat.
- Team Skill Rank (the number shown under your team name on the first screen of a Ranked Team Adventure), which is an average of the skills of you and your team is factored against the Team Skill Rank of your opponents (you don't actually get to see their number, but can guesstimate it from the opponents individual ranks). The difference in Team Skill Ranks between the two teams help determine the points awarded for a win and deducted for a loss. For example, if your Team Skill Rank is 2,000 and your opponent's Team Skill Rank is 500, you will be awarded fewer points for a win, but if you get beat by that same team you will lose a lot more points because you were the "favored" team. If you are on a "Favored/Stacked" team you will win less for a victory but lose more in defeat. If you are on an "Underdog/Weak" team you will win more for a victory, but lose less in defeat (I have even seen cases where a losing player still gets awarded points when their team was significant underdogs playing against a highly ranked team).
- Having fewer players is not an advantage, in fact, it's a very slight disadvantage due to the fact that you're less likely to come first (on average) if you have fewer players on your team compared with the other team, and first gives a bonus 50 points. This is because the scoring system boils down to ‘which team has the lowest average finishing position' which intuitively you can see, doesn't favor bigger or smaller teams. Any perception that it's an advantage to have fewer players comes from a tendency for players who disconnect to be less skilled players.
- If you are still qualifying for a League Rating (X / -), you actually still do have a score that is going up and down with each win and loss/disconnect. Even though the lowest score shown for a player is Rank 20 / 0 points, you can actually have a negative score if you lose or abandon games a lot more than you win. You don't actually know how negative you are as the number stops at 0, but you can deduce that if you have more losses than wins you will be Rank 20 / 0 (and the more losses you have vs. wins, the further negative your score will be and the more wins you will need to get back to a positive rank score).
- Individual in-game performance does not affect the number of points awarded or lost following the completion of a match. It doesn't matter if you individually get 1st or last every race or if in Playground Games score the most/least flags, hold the king the longest/shortest, survive the longest/shortest, or infect the most/least players. All that matters is that your TEAM wins or loses (and the factors listed above).
- You get Influence/CR in the same way as regular versions of the events, so more of it for Skills/Finishing Position, in the case of Playground Games scoring flag/healing teammates all gets you CR and Influence, you just get it all at once at the end.
Check out the TrueSkill article here:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/trueskill-ranking-system.