Being able to abandon games

[jgpaladin]

This is because Elo isn't supposed to go up forever, I've never seen a single Elo rating above 1000 in competitive games on BGA. Only cooperative games have such scores, guess why? Because you 1000-1500+ players are just cheaters who abandon bad games while only scoring the good ones.

You have 160 recorded games played of Hanabi on BGA with an ELO of 458.
22 of those games were abandoned, for a 13.75% abandon rate. Not that it seems to be helping you so I won't call you a cheater.
Oh, and from my scan of your last 50 or so games you seem to have as many 25 and 26 results as you have 29 and 30.

So please explain why anyone should think your opinion on how likely it is that a 1000 ELO has been earned matters even the slightest bit?

I'm as frustrated as anyone that there are a slew of Masters who really have no right to that title. But don't think that just because you haven't yet achieved the skill to get to 1000 that it's not possible to do so without cheating.

[Jkline]

It is, but assigning a rating to a "puzzle to solve", in this case an Hanabi game, and treating the game as a humans vs Hanabi match will make it work just as well for cooperative games.

The solution to the puzzle is to play games with a friend and cheat, which is why ELO isn't useful for cooperative games. If your goal is a high ELO, cheating is the best strategy, far better than playing Hanabi honestly. (Of course, cheating is useful for generating a high score in other games, but it's much, much harder to cheat your ELO up on a competitive game than it is in Hanabi.)

Another component to the puzzle is never to play with new players (behavior which shouldn't be punished, but also should not be rewarded)

If your goal is to have enjoyable games, you'll do better finding a different way to matchmake instead of looking at ELO.

[Jkline]

I don't care if you aren't good at Hanabi as long as I am not stuck playing with you.

Reasonable, as long as you don't expect me to go out of my way to make sure my ELO is a good representation of my skill level when measuring Hanabi skill isn't what ELO is for.

[jgpaladin]

I don't care if you aren't good at Hanabi as long as I am not stuck playing with you.

Reasonable, as long as you don't expect me to go out of my way to make sure my ELO is a good representation of my skill level when measuring Hanabi skill isn't what ELO is for.

I honestly have no idea how to respond to that. I don't expect you to do anything other than not be a lousy player when you join my games. I have literally no way to restrict the games based on ability other than ELO. So I set my games to Masters-only and still have to deal with people who don't know that a save is a save and there's no such thing as playing blind just because I clued ahead of you.

Granted ELO is clearly not ideal for cooperative games.

And yet, I have to ask how you expect me to measure opponents' skill levels if not by ELO until I have played with them a number of times? Until BGA implements a voting system where all of your partners get to rate you after every game, we're stuck with ELO.

And yes, if you have somehow managed a 700 ELO and don't really know what you're doing, then we're not going to have a fun time when you join my game.

[Stroom]

Every system CAN be abused. Now it is harder to do. People who would cheat games by straight up seeing their own cards some way would probably never play with those who don't, so it doesn't matter what their elo is. With abandon, those players were playing with everyone, ruining the games for others.

[Travis Hall]

ELO is for measuring the skill of zero-sum games, like chess. It's not meant to measure Hanabi skill.

Mathematically, the ELO-variant system used here for cooperative games works to measure skill (when not cheated). You can quibble about whether the constants are good at accounting for the relative difficulty of achieving particular scores with particular game options, and particularly quibble about which sets of game options should be lumped into the same rating, but the principle is sound.

And given it is the best measure of skill that we have, it’s what we will continue to use to filter players for our games. Nobody cares if you choose not to become a skilled player, and also nobody cares whether you like being filtered out of some games based on your rating.

[Travis Hall]

Reasonable, as long as you don't expect me to go out of my way to make sure my ELO is a good representation of my skill level when measuring Hanabi skill isn't what ELO is for.

Nobody asked you to do any such thing. Just don’t go out of your way to cheat the system, and the system will take care of itself.

Especially now that you can abandon as much as you like, and have that reflected in your rating.

[Wreckage]

I didn't realize this update happened. I started a game with friends with BP on, and one person doesn't like that setting. So we abandoned, or so we thought. But we noticed we lost 10 ELO. Hah, tough way to learn about this new change.

I totally like it. It's been a long time coming, and I appreciate positive changes when they happen. Thank you to whoever took the time to implement this.

As far as the ELO argument, having a counter that goes up each time you play a game sounds terrible. I also don't like when elo goes up forever into the thousands. It's much more fun to have possible gain/loss according to your outcome.

[ChiefPointThief]

I like playing to get a perfect score and I don’t play for elo. I view it as a puzzle (same as w/ reflection but luckily there is a solo mode for that game). I don’t see a problem with people wanting to abandon if they are doing it because the game is lost to them and not for elo purposes. The problem is your opponent may not feel that way. I could simply put “playing for perfect score” in the description box but many ppl join games automatically w/o even looking at the settings.

Elo shouldn’t be taken serious for this game anyway. Does it judge based off of the complexity of your settings? If someone has a higher success rate playing on basic settings won’t they still have a better elo than someone who fails more but plays harder settings? That doesn’t make them better. I view flams as “cheating” or easy mode if you will. Do you get less elo for playing with flams?

[Jellby]

Does it judge based off of the complexity of your settings?

Yes. viewtopic.php?t=4814

If someone has a higher success rate playing on basic settings won’t they still have a better elo than someone who fails more but plays harder settings?

It could happen, but that depends on what is the difference in rates and difficulty. Same winning rate at lower difficulty would result in lower Elo at equlibrium.

Do you get less elo for playing with flams?

Last time I checked, no, because the "bot" Elo scores were set before flams and black powder existed.