Changes to rating - Who to contact?

[N_Faker]

As for your comment that 'no game is without luck', I would disagree. Consider first a game like Chess or Hive, where both players have all the same abilities and setup and the only luck element is who takes the first turn. You refer to the 'first player benefit', but these games have not been solved - so why do you think the first player would have a benefit? It is true that many people suspect that white has the advantage in these games, but if they are solved it may be found that perfect play results in a win for black, or even a draw. So if it is unknown which side has the advantage, and the game space is too large for a human to ever solve/remember, is it fair to say that the decision about who is chosen to play first introduces a 'luck' element into the game?

I said "If setup/1st player benefit is counted(as luck) then no game is without luck." don't just pluck parts of it out of context.
Arguing that some games do not have 1st player benefits is fine and all, but I'm talking about the games that do. And that such a benefit shouldn't be counted as a luck factor for the game.

Well, faction and location selection is pretty important, since I think some are markedly better than others. And which factions are chosen and where they are setup drives the course of the whole game, so I'd say a 1 is fair.

Faction selection/Dwelling placement in relation to the initial game setup and opponent selection are strategic choices, there is no luck here, nothing is hidden or random.

You can also make the argument that any game with non-simultaneous action choice has a degree of luck, in that you do not know what your opponents will do between your turns. The more people playing in a 'take turns' game, the more the gamestate at the beginning of your turn will be a matter of luck since it is impossible to predict the actions of all those players.

You may claim so, I will not.

Regarding the initial reason for the thread though: these are ratings, not measurements. You will disagree with many, but they are impossible to standardize anyway, so it is probably best just to ignore them. I'd suggest boardgamegeek for better ratings (or really, anything about games other than playing them), as theirs are at least an attempt to poll the community and not just one person's guess.

What are ratings but measurements? "...it is probably best just to ignore them." Why didn't you?
You may wish to ignore the inconsistencies in the stated 'game ratings' on this site. Others may want to have them changed so they are more accurate, at least in regards to other games on the site. Of course they are subjective ratings, I gave my suggestion as to Een's request.

[Daggerheart]

Many of the ratings seem wrong. That makes me wonder who did it? It was one guy?? Make discussion thread about the ratings instead and correct the rating based on a more sensible judgement. My already given examples prove my point.

[Een]

Many of the ratings seem wrong. That makes me wonder who did it? It was one guy?? Make discussion thread about the ratings instead and correct the rating based on a more sensible judgement. My already given examples prove my point.

Ratings are set by the individual developers implementing the game. They have been defined progressively over the course of the life of the website.
So yes, of course, some of them must be wrong or incoherent between themselves.

Discussing the why and the how and the who doesn't really make anything better though.
Listing what seems wrong and proposing new values as I suggested would be more useful. But hey, this is the internet

Also, those ratings are just an indication and shouldn't be taken as a life or death type of thing

[veme]

I said "If setup/1st player benefit is counted(as luck) then no game is without luck." don't just pluck parts of it out of context.
Arguing that some games do not have 1st player benefits is fine and all, but I'm talking about the games that do. And that such a benefit shouldn't be counted as a luck factor for the game.

I didn't include that entire sentence in my quote but that does not mean I took it out of context. This is how I parsed the meaning of your original claim:

"If setup/1st player benefit is counted(as luck)" means to me 'If we include any benefit players derive from being first player or from setup in our calculations'; "then no game is without luck." means 'then all games have at least some luck'.

I then granted your conditions (counting first player benefit and setup advantages as types of luck), and provided two examples of games (Hive and Chess) that have no setup advantage, and where the existence of a first player benefit is uncertain - and thus would arguably have no luck even given your conditions, arguably refuting your claim. And then I gave one example of another game (Rock, Paper, Scissors) which has no setup or first player, and thus definitely refuting the claim as I understood it.

If you really meant: "If a first player or setup benefit counts as luck, then no games with a first player or setup benefit are without luck" as you seem to be saying now, then:

a. Why didn't you say that? This is a claim about a subset of games, which is quite different than your original claim about all games.
and
b. Of course this is true; if X is luck and game has X, then game has luck. I wouldn't have even responded if this is what I thought you meant with the original statement since it is pretty much a tautology.

Faction selection/Dwelling placement in relation to the initial game setup and opponent selection are strategic choices, there is no luck here, nothing is hidden or random.

Who goes first is random, and assuming some factions and/or starting locations are better than others (which almost must be the case given how many there are and that they are asymmetric), a benefit is conferred on a player through the vagaries of luck.

You can disagree all you want; I am am not sure I even agree with this argument or the argument that more players in a 'take-turns' game should count as adding more luck, but the point of my original response was not necessarily to convince anyone of a particular view. It was to point out that the arguments are there, and that they can be cogently made, because...

What are ratings but measurements? "...it is probably best just to ignore them." Why didn't you?
You may wish to ignore the inconsistencies in the stated 'game ratings' on this site. Others may want to have them changed so they are more accurate, at least in regards to other games on the site. Of course they are subjective ratings, I gave my suggestion as to Een's request.

Ratings are not measurements, and you even noted the crucial difference in your own comment. A measurement is an attempt to quantify something as exactly possible by using a a standard reference. A rating is a subjective impression.

We get far more agreement when we ask people the dimensions of a boardgame's first edition box (unit conversion aside) than when we ask people how much luck is in that boardgame on a scale from 0 to 5. This is because length is clearly defined and we have standardized units with which to express it, while luck means different things to different people (and many of these different perspectives can be quite rationally defended) and there is no standard 'luckstick' I can hold up next to a game to see how much it has.

There is no such thing as making a rating "more accurate", you could simply make them more acceptable to larger groups of people, and if that is the goal, it should be done as a poll like BGG (or just copied from there) to save the admins and everyone else a lot of time. Why anyone would want the folks here making this site's features overlap more with BGG's instead of spending that time fixing their myriad problems or adding more games, is beyond me though.

Finally, regarding your question about why I didn't ignore the ratings - I did and do ignore the ratings. All I said about any specific rating was that I thought 1 was a fair luck ranking for TM on here; if pressed I would probably rate it a 0 myself, but I would almost certainly never get into an argument about what rating it should have.

A philosophical discussion about what constitutes 'luck' in the context of a boardgame and how to quantify such a thing, on the other hand, I find hard to resist - and this type of a discussion would also be the necessary first step in any actual attempt to standardize the ratings (i.e., make them more like measurements).

[N_Faker]

Before even proposing changes, definitions should be set for the various stats.

Would it be possible to add search functions based on the stats?
There is already a category for Complexity, but does it even use the stats?

[Daggerheart]

Before even proposing changes, definitions should be set for the various stats.

Would it be possible to add search functions based on the stats?
There is already a category for Complexity, but does it even use the stats?

Yes of course, I agree... the site must define the different ratings well. My opinion after this is that the top 10 % of the players, or something similar,could make a vote and this would be the updated values.

No matter the details... at least we agree that the current system is not good...

[N_Faker]

Sorry for unintentionally tickling your fancy.

[Liallan]

This is a juicy conversation that really wants to draw me in, but that's how I end up wasting a lot of time that I don't really have. Maybe later...

But I really have to agree with the general idea of not worrying about this too much. We can already see that people are never going to agree on exactly what luck means or what degree of luck exists in a game, and if these terms cannot be quantified in some way first (which is obviously not going to happen), then I'm not sure of the point. Except if Een is willing to change some of the numbers, and a few people can come to some general agreement that what is currently posted is "just way off," then I see no reason not to change them, though I doubt I'd want to follow just one person's opinion on a given game. That is, if some people consider luck should be 3 and others think 4, then either one of those would be better than 1 or 2.

But I think it would also be difficult to get enough people to discover this thread and voice some opinions, though I'm totally content to continue posting here after looking at some games. If even a few of us do that, we might accomplish a little bit. (And if I don't know a game very well, I would say so, so it can be taken in context.) Polling the top 10 players may sound like a good idea, but do they care? We can't assume they do.

There are many who argue that luck is something independent like rolling dice. That's a single event in a game that comes out based on probabilities alone. But I could counter-argue that over the course of a game that has a lot of dice rolls, it should sort of even itself out. (Except we all know it doesn't always work that way - it's a pretty small sample.) And that randomness is a different thing, like the same set of cards, which are always the same, shuffled up in various ways. I would agree with that, but randomness can create luck. If there are particularly strong or weak cards, for instance, that can indeed create a lot of luck. But, well, I promised myself I wasn't going to get off on the discussion of what luck is because I have food getting cold....