Why change the existing reputation system?
The main flaws were, by order of importance :
- Complexity : The reputation was represented by no less than FIVE numbers (green thumbs + red thumbs + number of leaves + number of overtime + number of recent games), plus the "grade" ("mortal", "angel", ...). This made it really not possible for a beginner on BGA to understand if a player had a good reputation or not. Even for a regular player, it forced you to calculate "green/red" or "leave/number of games" ratio to have an idea about a player's reputation.
- Dissuasive for beginners : a lot of beginners were getting red thumbs / overtime just because they were slow - which is understandable for beginners -, and were immediately given a red warning "this player is slow" when joining a table.
- Innapriopriate use of red thumbs: a lot of you were complaining about receiving red thumbs for weird reasons ("because I beat him", "because I didn't say hello", "I don't even know why!").
- Lack of memory : The system was only considering the 60 last days. So a player who quitted plenty of games 3 months ago can get back with a clean reputation.
How are Karma points working exactly?
- Karma points are always between 0☯ and 100☯.
- New players on BGA start at 75☯.
- Each game you finish without any overtime: +1☯.
- If you finish a game, but went over the time limit during it: +0☯.
- The first time you leave a game in progress on BGA : -0☯ / warning message (tolerance for beginners).
- Each other time you leave a game in progress on BGA : -10☯ (-20☯ if you already left a game less than 3 months before).
- Not showing up at a tournament game : -4☯.
- If your Red thumbs represent more than 10% of the thumbs you received : alert on homepage + Karma cannot go over 60☯.
- If your Red thumbs represent more than 20% of the thumbs you received : alert on homepage + Karma cannot go over 30☯.
Why is this more appropriate for beginners?
- Way more simple to understand who has a bad reputation and who has a good one.
- Tolerant on the first fault.
- No more "red thumb shaming".
Why this is at least as efficient as the previous system?
As a regular player, you have to quit less than 5% of your games to keep your Karma in an acceptable range (10% for a non-regular player). This makes this new system a little bit "stricter" than the old system, but the old system wasn't displaying any warning before the 10% quit ratio, which was quite high :/
To be 100% sure of that, we started computing the Karma one month ago without displaying it, and made some statistics: 93% of you have a Karma above 75☯, and less than 1.7% have a Karma below 50☯. As you can see, most of you have nothing to fear from this new system
What are the levels associated to Karma?
100 : "Perfect"
90+ : "Excellent"
80+ : "Very good"
75+ : "Good"
65+ : "Average"
50+ : "Not good"
25+ : "Bad"
<25 : "Very bad"
How can I filter games by green/red thumbs and/or quitting ratio?
You can now filter games by Karma (ex: only accept players over 75☯).
Among those of you that were using a reputation filter with the old system, 85% were choosing ">90% of green thumb + <10% quit". This corresponds to the 75☯+ filter.
For the extreme minority of you (3-4% of created tables) that was filtering only on "thumbs" or on "quit": sorry, you cannot distinguish between the two anymore. But in our opinion it makes no sense to have this distinction anymore: having a rude/impolite player at your table is as annoying as having a "quitter", so please just set up a Karma filter to get rid of both of them in one sweet move
How can I see how many green/red thumbs a player received?
You cannot anymore, and they cannot see yours.
Green / red thumb was designed to be a private and subjective opinion on another player: if you want to remember that this player is nice, give him/her a green thumb. If you never want to play against that player again, give him/her a red thumb. That's it, and this is your personal opinion on him/her: there is no need to bring shame on a player by showing to everyone he/she got a red thumb.
However, the previous system was helping us to identify the "really bad guys" thanks to their high number of red thumbs. We did want to keep this "wisdom of the crowd" aspect so we introduced the following: the players who have really too many red thumbs in regards to green thumbs have now a special "warning" message on their home screen to encourage them to change their behavior, and in addition their Karma cannot go over a given value (which will make their reputation bad, regardless of other factors).
I prefer the old "number of leave / number of overtime / ..." system!
By placing your mouse over the Karma reputation bar, you can get back these informations.
Please understand that we needed to "hide" a little bit these informations that are quite difficult to handle at a glance for the majority of players. We also made sure to set up a very easy access to these "old" informations, for those of you who prefer to calculate the reputation by themselves or just want to see the details.
Where are the "grades"? mortal, angels ...
They are not needed anymore. Now everything is based on Karma. For example you need to have a Karma above 80☯ to speak on the general chat.
Why are you always changing so many things on Board Game Arena?
At first, because we take into account your feedback. A lot of you were complaining about unfair red thumbs, or a reputation system that was not dissuasive enough for quitting players.
And second, because we need to make BGA a more welcoming place for beginners.
Changing habits is difficult, but we prefer to move forward, even if facing negative feedback can be hard for us. We know we are going in the right direction, because 90% of you would be horrified by the service we had 2 years ago - and 99% would be horrified by the service we had 4 years ago
To conclude: this new system is probably not perfect either, but we are confident this is a progress and we hope you'll help us make it even better in the future.
UPDATE (October 20th) :
24 hours after the introduction of the new reputation system, following your feedback and the data we collected, we made the following minor adjustments :
- 1. The "double penalty" is now applied if you left a game less than 1 month after another game (instead of 3 months, which was a little bit harsh).
- 2. We introduce a special penalty for tournaments games : -4 when not showing for each tournament games. This has been introduced to take into account your remarks that "not being here at a tournament game" is less dramatic than quitting a game in progress. Note than quitting a tournament game in progress remains a standard "leave" penalty (-10 or -20).
- 3. Now you can see the Karma losses for each penalty on your profile (in your reputation details).
- 4. 10% red thumb rate limits your karma to 60 (instead of 70). 20% red thumb rate limits your karma to 30 (instead of 40). These players were not penalized enough with the new system, so we decrease their "maximum karma".
- 5. You can now chat when your Karma is over 30 (instead of 50). Chatting is a very basic website function, so we only want to restrict it to the worst players only (less than 0.5%).
- 6. We decide to give a "second chance" to players that have a really really bad reputation (below 50) by raising their reputation a little bit, and give them time to handle the new system.
- 7. We decide to give a +10 reputation bonus to players that registered before Septembre 1st this year (almost all players), as a transition measure, considering they should have started at 85 instead of 75 when we secretly introduced Karma one month ago.
