Ultimately with Paddles, we want to help you track your progress over time. One way to do this would be to include a timeline of your win/loss ratio so you can see how your W/L has changed from week to week. The problem is that, as you get better, you won’t necessarily win more because you may start playing against better opponents which actually means you’ll win less. So your progress looks like it’s getting worse instead of better.

To combat this, we could use the opponents’ skill level as a way to measure how weighty the win was. For example, if you crushed a n00b, it wouldn’t mean as much as if you managed to skillfully beat an opponent that’s better than you. The problem with that method is that we don’t always have opponent data. The goal with Paddles is to let you compete against yourself, removing the incentive to manipulate your stats. So we can’t let the other players be a variable in the “progress equation."

Since we don’t always have data on the other players, you need to be able to get a sense of progress against your own previous effort. To do this, we need a way for users to track how difficult the match was, similar to Strava’s “Perceived Exertion” rating or Whoops “Stress” rating.

And now we can! We just launched "Effort," a way for you to track how challenging a match was for you. Effort is then calculated along with outcome (win or loss) and margin (how big was the point gap between the winning and losing team) in order to generate a progress score for each match.

Stay tuned - over the coming weeks, we'll add more modules to your Stats page to visualize your progress over time and correlation between effort and your wins.