Board Game Arena

My forum access has been restored, so I can finally write this myself.

Thank you to everyone who supported me in this thread. It meant more than I expected.

The accusations were never backed by any evidence. I think that says enough.

Collusion to game the elo system is a punishable offense. If you see it, report it. No amount of tweaks will eliminate it. That's the theory, but in practice a lot of obvious cheating reports go unanswered and unrelieved for months, if ever. That's exactly the point of this proposal — make it struc...

Fair point on variance across game types — that's true and probably unavoidable. But that's a different issue from what I raised. Complexity/player-count variance is just natural noise you can't game. Opponent selection is different — it's a mechanic someone could exploit to inflate their Elo, not j...

Cigma, you're right that ELO rating doesn't affect the arena results. But the thing is, all players participate in the ELO rating - both arena players and play mode players - but under different conditions: arena players can't choose their opponents, while play mode players can. That's why, in my op...

I don't know if this is the case in all games, or if it's just an imperfection in Mountain Goats' rating system, but here the rating is calculated across all games indiscriminately — with no distinction between invite-only matches and games where the opponent was matched automatically. And on top of...

Why not just have rated games disallow players to choose their opponent? I'm not a fan of playing Arena for two reasons that are tied to each other. One is the rating resets each format, which I don't want to do on a game-to-game basis given how many different games I play. Another is the league sy...

In Mountain Goats, there are two modes: Arena and Play. In Play mode, you can either invite friends directly, or wait for automatic matchmaking — but even with matchmaking, before the game starts you can see your opponent's name and choose to either accept or decline the match. In practice, this isn...

Hi everyone, I'd like to propose an idea to the moderators and get the community's thoughts on it: what if Elo rating only applied to Arena mode, and was completely removed from Play mode (games with friends)? The main reasoning behind this is that Play mode currently allows for artificial Elo infla...