Elo

Elo in Town of Salem
The Elo rating system is a system that places players of a similar skill level to face off against each other while playing ranked games. The system was initially created by Arpad Elo as a method to rank chess players, but has since expanded to many other competitive games. Since Season One (released September 2017), Elo is called rating. The two terms can be used interchangeably.

On December 4th 2017, it was announced that Season One was over. Between the two seasons is what is known as "offseason", where you will not gain or lose elo whilst playing ranked. Season Three is currently in session.

Players may check their current Elo by completing a Ranked game, exiting to the End Game Lobby and viewing the top-right of the screen. You may also check your Current Rating and Season High Rating by clicking Play on the home screen and then Ranked - they are just above the "Join Queue" button. Lastly, you can check your Season High and Career High rating by using the "Statistics" tab.

There are six tiers of Elo:

How the Elo system works
Each player starts off with an Elo of 1200 - the Silver bracket. Your first ten games in Ranked are called Placement Games. These Placement Games are worth an estimated three times the normal amount of Elo gained/lost, but you are not shown how much after each game. After your 10th game, you will be placed in a bracket with a specific Elo.

If you played during Legacy Season (before June 20th 2017), you will have a shadow Elo which is near the bottom of the bracket you finished in (i.e. if you had an Elo of 1753, your shadow Elo would be 1600 as this is the lower end of the Platinum bracket). Note that the shadow Elo for Silver is 1200, and suspected to be around 900 for Bronze (not 1000 and 0 respectively).

Winning games will cause a player's Elo to rise, while losing games will cause the player's Elo to fall. Draws do not affect a player's Elo. There are three factors which affect the amount of Elo gained or lost: Master players have a K factor of 10, Diamond players have a K factor of 18 and everyone else has a K factor of 25.
 * The player's faction (and more specifically, the winrate of that faction).
 * The Elo difference between your Elo and your opponent's average.
 * A K factor, which essentially limits the extremes of how much you can gain or lose per game.

The exact formula for calculating Elo gain/loss is not known exactly (more precisely, the Elo difference factor), but it takes the form:

Elo gain for winning: K factor × (1 - winrate of your faction) × (Elo difference factor) Elo loss for losing: -K factor × (winrate of your faction) × (1 - Elo difference factor) Disclaimer: This formula is not 100% representative of the real algorithm used but should give you some idea of how it works.

The Elo difference factor is a number between 0 and 1, where 0.5 means the Elo difference between you and your opponents is 0. Above 0.5 means you were playing against higher Elo opponents, and below 0.5 means you were playing against lower Elo opponents.

For example, a 1535 Elo player who is Town and beats players who are on average ranked higher (assuming town winrate is 49%) would gain:

25 × (1 - 0.49) × (0.6) = 7.65 = +8

If they lost the same game, they would lose:

-25 × (0.49) x (1 - 0.6) = -4.9 = -5

This makes sense - playing against higher Elo opponents gives you more Elo on a win than a loss would take away if you lost (especially with a winrate <50%).

The winrate of Town in the new rolelist is not currently known, and the actual Elo difference (assumed to be 0.6) could be different. Note that Master and Diamond players have a reduced K factor, meaning they gain and lose less on average, making it quite hard to fall from the higher ranks - especially Master.

Tips for Elo gaining
Elo gaining is dependent on other players, and thus if you end up in a game with smart players, your chances of them helping you out and also the chances of them countering smart players in other factions increase. It also becomes easier to win with Town. So, in Ranked, if you played with generally smart players, you should stay in the lobby.
 * On the contrary, if you were just in a game with people you know like to gamethrow, are known to cheat, mess around too much and don't play seriously, or make tons of mistakes, then wait out the queue twice or go play another mode before returning to Ranked. This does not mean don't ever have fun in this game or that if you make mistakes you are a terrible person, but Elo hunting requires focus and attention.
 * The longer one plays for, the better a player becomes, especially if one plays for long times at once. While some players may not be able to play a lot, it is true that playing games with 30 minutes in between each game is less likely to produce good Elo results than playing those games right after another.
 * If you know you aren't very good if you haven't played a game some time earlier in the day, play a game of Ranked Practice before going into Ranked.
 * Stay focused. If you need to do something, do it first and then come back to the game so you don't become distracted. Remember to do even boring things that you must first, because as time wears on you'll be distracted and stressed about the responsibility.
 * You shouldn't ever leave a game unless you have zero chance of winning, such as you are outnumbered by evils or have no chance to survive. This is because some roles have the ability to turn the game around or at least force a draw, such as a, , or.

Current Leaderboard (Classic)
The game only has the top ten Elo players currently, but is working on making a full leaderboard. Here are the top 10 players currently in terms of their highest season rating in Classic Ranked (it can also be found in the statistics page of Town of Salem):

1. raytrout (2904 Elo) (no change)

2. ItsyourboyLeodat (2866 Elo) (up 1)

3. Flashmob (2864 Elo) (up 15)

4. Scrappydoo (2812 Elo) (up 83)

5. marlonxxxxxx (2804 Elo) (up 1)

6. thebestcanadian (2795 Elo) (up 23)

7. tazar (2779 Elo) (up 9)

8. Shazzbot (2759 Elo) (up 13)

9. Konstantina21 (2746 Elo) (no change)

10. Maltagerr (2743 Elo) (up 23)

Last updated August 20 2018.

Season 1 Elo Bug
In season 1, there was a bug in the algorithm that calculated people's ELO. Although the exact details of the bug are not known, a BMG developer explained the issue on June 5th, 2017, a day after season 1 ended. He explained in a post on Steam that "In our latest pass on the ELO algorithm we noticed something off. Really off. The amount of ELO people were losing was calculated incorrectly. People were losing the amount of ELO they would have won, had they won the match....As a result of this miscalculation there has been a Rich get Richer, Poor get Poorer dynamic that has developed." The bug was fixed during the offseason of season 1 and there has been no reported ELO bug since then. You can read the full report  here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/334230/discussions/0/1290691937728170057/.