Changes to Percentile Calculations
All across the Aiming.pro percentiles are used to determine the level you have performed at on an individual aiming drill or averaged across a playlist.
Many years ago we made a decision about how the percentiles should be calculated but we think it’s time for it to be changed.
What is a percentile?
A percentile is 1% of a population. What’s a population? It could be anything - people, cars, gamers, flowers, weather forecasts, etc.
Usually percentiles would be used to refer to a part of the population after it’s been ranked on a property. A common example might be looking at heights of people. If you order a group of 1000 people based upon their height the 500th person in (i.e the one in the middle) would represent the 50th percentile of ‘person height’. The 10 at the high end would represent the top 1%, or the 99th percentile of ‘person height’. Simple.
Why do we use percentiles to measure performance?
When the population is clearly understood, a percentile is a really easy way to understand how something compares to the rest of the population.
On Aiming.pro Switch Frenzy a good score is 500+, but on Back on Track is good score 800+. From the score alone you cannot know what is a good score or not, you need the percentile!
The end result is that a percentile will give you a measure you can compare across the site to all drills that you try. This lets you see if you are stronger or weaker in any aiming skill.
What’s changing?
Since the inception of the site many years ago we’ve calculated the percentiles for a drill based upon all valid attempts of that drill (where the score was over 0). So the population is all attempts. We did this because we wanted to assess all drill attempts on an individual basis.
We’re changing this so the population will be high scores only. We’re doing this because over the last couple of years we’ve moved much more towards looking at player’s best scores on drills. So we want to change the calculation to reflect the more common usage of the percentile.
I suspect this new method is how many of you would have expected the calculation to have already been done.
It turns out changing this calculation will make quite a big difference to the scores required to achieve certain percentiles. It’s going to make getting a higher percentile (when you are below 99th percentile) much easier.
This is likely due to the fact better players are more likely to be practicing a lot and putting a lot of results in with high scores, which then pushes every other drill down the percentile ranking. Below are a couple of charts for Back on Track and Switch Frenzy comparing the old and new methods. To read the chart, look up from a percentile value across the bottom and see what score is required. For Switch Frenzy 90th percentile required about 400 hits on the old method, but only 300 on the new method.
As a side note - it’s amazing just how much the score increases for the 99th percentile. Just shows what a high skill ceiling there is!
Hope that all makes sense, if you’ve got any questions get on Discord and ask them!
