Leaving Hanabi when things are not perfect

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Wreckage
Posts: 287
Joined: 18 January 2017, 02:10

Re: Leaving Hanabi when things are not perfect

Post by Wreckage »

The points you've stated are valid. I have played other games like 6 nimmt, and as soon as you start someone says "I didnt realize it was this version of rules, I really dont want to play this". I will agree to abandon and let them leave. I have seen other players force them to sit there for 30 minutes or take a penalty because they accidentally signed into a game they dont like. If they dont want to play, let them go. This is where I was coming from.

I would like to see a reset of elo on Hanabi with an abandon penalty. Being able to turn ELO off is not a problem.

I would like to also have a minimum of +1 elo for getting 30 on very difficult. Right now if two players have 1000 elo each, their outcome is from -10 for a loss to 0 for a win.
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7decoeur
Posts: 32
Joined: 09 January 2012, 20:43

Re: Leaving Hanabi when things are not perfect

Post by 7decoeur »

Wreckage wrote: I would like to also have a minimum of +1 elo for getting 30 on very difficult. Right now if two players have 1000 elo each, their outcome is from -10 for a loss to 0 for a win.
Perhaps the ELO awarded should reflect a win whatever the final total may be in another effort to curtail those who abandon the hard games, i.e. < 3 red tokens means never receiving negative ELO.

In the rule book a loss is 3 red tokens, anything else is a win it is just the score/phrase that changes. In analogy, if the French football team is winning 1-0 in the 83rd minute against Italy but with four red cards each, they wouldn't abandon the match just in case another player gets sent off and the referee forces them to forfeit the match for lack of players. Even at 1-0, the team should still feel victory is in reach. Last week they may have thrashed San Marino 9-0, but a win is after all a win, and in football both merit 3 points regardless of the quality of the opposition.

I think we can all agree the skill/tactics shown to navigate a very tough deck that results in a 27 finish is greater than a walk in the park 30 game yet the 27 finish can result in -1 or something. Thus the system is kind of rewarding those who are too cowardly to step up to Italy sticking to playing the butcher, baker and candlestick maker of San Marino. I pity those who feel not obtaining 30 makes the game 'boring', they need to embrace the challenges the deck sometimes throws at them and learn to pride themselves on achieving those tricky 27s IMHO.
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pongueur
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Joined: 27 January 2017, 17:56

Re: Leaving Hanabi when things are not perfect

Post by pongueur »

Big +1 for doing something against ELO-abandoning. There are many possible ways to tackle this, though probably the simplest one to implement would be making "agree to abandon" count as full losses (-10).

Note: This is not about mechanically preventing intentional cheating (one could still chat one's way to likely victory), but about making it less "tempting".

Only downside I can think of is that it sucks in legitimate use cases of the feature:
- realizing one just started a game with incorrect settings
- someone having to go unexpectedly (though in that case the person can just take an actual abandon game penalty and be the only one to get -10, it won't hurt your ELO or karma too bad if it is indeed very rare for you to abandon this way)

It would be super extra nice to have a word from an admin about the feasibility of this :) (and if implementation is indeed the only blocker I'm willing to help out)



Now onto some ideas about making the ELO system better for Hanabi, i.e. changing it in a way that your ELO change really reflects how well you dealt with the given deck (respective to your supposed level of play), regardless of how hard the deck was. This is obviously much heavier to implement, so consider this more like a thought experiment / request for comments!

Out of scope: evaluate party ELO from individual players' ELOs. Currently an average, but could use more sophisticated methods. I'm just going to assume there is some notion of "party ELO".

Proposal: Instead of a fixed table of hand-tuned reference ELO values by game mode & resulting score, make the ELO system competitive. Assuming there were several teams who played the same deck you just finished (with the same game settings: difficulty mode & number of players), compare your team's result to that of all the other teams.
Your team's ELO change is the average (over all other teams) of the ELO change you would have gotten in a head to head match against them. If you scored more than team T, compute the ELO change for a win against T (and similarly for ties and losses).

Benefits:
- It does what we want: doing great on a very hard deck means you will beat most other teams, and thus will get an ELO boost even though your actual game score is low.
- No hand-tuning of ELO reference values.
- Previously ELO-excluded modes (like 55 cards 6 colors) can be naturally included.

Difficulties / Inconvenients:
- This only works if many teams play the same deck. One way to achieve this would be to store played decks, alongside with the players who played them and the results they got. Then when generating a new game, instead of a randomly generating a deck, randomly pick one from the storage for that game mode (that the players haven't played).
Side note: Some new decks do need to be generated some times or the very active players might dry out the well. Possible simple solution: very rarely (say: 1% of the time), do generate a new random deck instead of picking from the storage. Exceptionally for that game no ELO is awarded. If the chance for that is 1%, then decks in the storage will each have 100 plays on average (more plays => higher quality ELO scoring), and players shouldn't dry the well unless they play more than ~1% of the total volume of games for that mode.
- This system might give negative ELO rewards on perfect results to high-ELO teams on very easy decks (everyone wins so you tie with a bunch of teams with much lower ELO than you).
Fix #1: on perfect score, simply never give out a negative ELO change even if the above mechanism should lead to it. [introduces some small amount of ELO-inflation]
Fix #2: Only score you against similar-ELO teams. This is best accomplished by splitting the storage: a stored deck becomes specific to a relatively narrow ELO range. [has the added advantage of making ELO-scoring more fair and accurate overall, not just fixing the perfect score corner case]
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ollyfish2002
Posts: 299
Joined: 29 January 2015, 09:32

Re: Leaving Hanabi when things are not perfect

Post by ollyfish2002 »

hello
I had a very simple and mathematical idea to solve this problem :
if 5s or 2 cards of the same colour are in the discard and a player requests to abandon, this player will see a message that he and only him will receive a elo score equivalent to 3 red tokens.
Analysing the discard should not be too difficult to program. Message and the elo point penalty should not be complicated.
The only problem I see is finding the developer.
What do you think of this ?
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barakeel
Posts: 13
Joined: 30 January 2015, 20:20

Re: Leaving Hanabi when things are not perfect

Post by barakeel »

@ollyfish2002

Probably too complicated, I prefer the option proposed by pongeur.
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Cedroc92
Posts: 22
Joined: 29 May 2015, 21:44

Re: Leaving Hanabi when things are not perfect

Post by Cedroc92 »

+1 for me to this proposal.
1. make a special rule that mutual agreement to leave a Hanabi game also results in an ELO penalty of 10 points. That way it's not interesting to leave the game to preserve their ELO.
There are many many players with very high Elo, because... they often leave the game.

For example, look at this very short game !
https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=52386644
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postmans
Posts: 55
Joined: 25 September 2016, 17:27

Re: Leaving Hanabi when things are not perfect

Post by postmans »

I'd say to each their own fun, as long as I'm not forced to leave as well. I don't understand why you would leave after losing a card or having a bomb, that's when the game starts to become fun, finally some real challenge! But if others like to play another way, why should I try and stop that.

If others find joy in boosting their ELO to unrealistic levels, we can just let them.
I know only 2-3 players who ever got above 1000 (and only really short all those times) without abandoning games, so basically you can just ignore any ELO above 1000 since you know it's boosted. Or even better, just ignore any ELO after masters level, it's just too random to be trusted, I've seen many players above 800-900 who could barely complete a finesse or reverse.

The other side. If I start a game I don't want to abandon it, I don't like to boost my own ELO, I prefer to have a fair one myself. So if I refuse an abandon reuqest I believe that should be respected as well. If the reaction is bombing out the game I think we can validly use the "quits a game in progress" report reason which seems to fit well.
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Recyclops
Posts: 32
Joined: 02 April 2019, 00:16

Re: Leaving Hanabi when things are not perfect

Post by Recyclops »

This is my first time visiting the forums. I came here to post this exact thing, and decided to see if anyone had posted anything similar. I do not understand it. I find it happens with the higher ELO players the most--they want to abandon a game (even if you can get a near perfect score!) and will start bombing if you refuse. What's the point of playing?
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afet
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Joined: 23 November 2014, 07:47

Re: Leaving Hanabi when things are not perfect

Post by afet »

I too am annoyed when someone suggests to abandon whenever things are not ideal. This makes the game less interesting and ratings artificially high. I almost always accept the abandon request, because otherwise I would not find anyone to play, and also what is the point of forcing someone to finish the game when they don't want it. I am also often annoyed when people start criticising each other; everyone makes mistakes, it's part of the fun to figure out genius moves from blunders. There should be an option where players agree not to abandon except emergencies and not talk except niceties.
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marny
Posts: 3
Joined: 01 November 2019, 19:53

Re: Leaving Hanabi when things are not perfect

Post by marny »

Nearly 2 years have passed since this topic was started and nothing has changed. I believe that today's Hanabi ranking doesn't reflect any real skills of players here. In my opinion it is hard to break 1000 elo barier, unless you play only with people you know (and you know their style of playing) and when you abandon games in hard situations or some misinterpretations. I don't care if someone is tuning his elo. But I am really angry when I can't play 3 games in the row, because 3 players one by one want to abandon game. I would propose another solution: no ranking for Hanabi on BGA.
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