Retiring Inactivity Decay in Favor of Inactivity Blocking

Today, we are announcing a major update to how player levels are calculated in our ranking system. We are transitioning away from Inactivity Decay and moving towards our modern Inactivity Blocking system to keep our skill ratings true, accurate, and fair.

🔍 Why Inactivity Decay was Introduced

In the past, players could play a single session, achieve a high rank, and remain at the top of the leaderboard indefinitely without giving active weekly players a chance to compete against or surpass them. We introduced Inactivity Decay (losing 0.1 Mu points/day after 14 days of inactivity) to push these players down.

⚠️ The Problems with Inactivity Decay

While decay solved leaderboard camping, it introduced two major side effects:

1. Rating Distortion (Match Inflation/Deflation): If a Level 80 player decayed to Level 60 due to a few weeks of inactivity and then returned, an active Level 70 player beating them would receive points scaled to beating a Level 60 player rather than a Level 80 player. This penalizes active players and distorts rating adjustments.
2. Inaccurate Skill Representation: Players don't lose their physical skill just by not playing at our club for a few weeks—many play regularly at other venues.

🛡️ The Modern Solution: Inactivity Blocking

Since we recently introduced Inactivity Blocking (marking players who haven't played in 30 days as blocked/inactive and hiding them from leaderboards), the leaderboard camping problem is already solved!

Because blocking covers the same scenario cleanly without distorting ratings, decay is no longer necessary.

⚙️ How it Works & The Toggle Flag

We have implemented a global configuration setting in the Admin Settings page. This allows the club managers to toggle inactivity decay on or off dynamically:

• Enabled (Default): Normal TrueSkill+ decay is active.
• Disabled: All active player levels displayed across the app (leaderboards, matchmaking, and player compare page) switch to using standard ratings calculated without decay.

Under the manager section, we have also added a Levels & Decay Comparison dashboard to visualize the exact difference between decayed and non-decayed levels across the active roster before making the final switch.

Keep hitting those courts, and enjoy the fairer matching system!