🌿ELO System Updates

[Stroom]

After six games against a particular opponent I've got 0. Next game I had to expel them. I played with them a lot (and liked it), but less than 1% of my total games, my win rate against them is 64% (so I'm a bit stronger, but not drastically). Now BGA essentially forces me to stop playing against them. This is not good at all.

So, I have to have a list of people I play against a lot, and expel them from my tables? Not fun

BGA guys, this feature is well below shippable quality, seriously. Stop gathering feedback, revert this.

You can still play against them... Elo is a meaningless metric. You don't have to play only to gain it

[Meeplelowda]

You can still play against them... Elo is a meaningless metric.

If you were an alien coming down to observe humans using BGA you'd think ELO advancement is a fundamental human right....and can be converted to Bitcoin.

[6element]

You can still play against them... Elo is a meaningless metric. You don't have to play only to gain it

If Elo is meaningless for you, it is totally valid opinion, but I suggest you to leave this discussion - your opinions regarding how to tweak Elo are meaningless.

[Scops]

Two hours ago power leveling has not been removed yet. And due to this feature I had to expel a decent opponent from the table twice, because I already played against them a few times in a row. This is sad and goes directly against "we're here to have fun playing games".

Indeed... my bad... definitely still there

[marick]

One night a week, I play ranked games for a few hours against (only) my real-life friends. Not power-levelling, just playing for fun, but we play with ELO enabled.

Won't this change lead to us (collectively) losing ELO by the last game of the night?

[wombats111]

We need a different fix for power leveling. For multiplayer games like Agricola, top players will be facing/beating some of the same players each game. This will cause overall degradation in ELO. More importantly it will cause random losses in ELO bases on who joins your arena games.

[Travis Hall]

Yes, so the higher ranking casual players are going to have naturally learned some basic conventions, even if they don't know that's what they're called

This is very true. I’ve read multiple accounts of how groups have independently developed what is called finesse here while playing in their isolated, face-to-face games. nik592, I’d bet that you, too, learned some conventions over the course of your 20 or so games with your friends. At the most basic level, a convention is just what you learn about what your partners do when you play, and nobody plays a game 20 times without learning something.

I think the biggest conflict between these casual players and competitive players is caused when they try branching out into multiplayer games once they've reached Expert or even Master rank. Unfortunately, rather than starting out at Apprentice/Novice, they're now locked out of many low ranking games due to their ELO from 2p games.

I’ve advised a number of these players that they should go and play at lower-ranked tables to learn the basics of the Finesse convention. Some day someone is going to take offence and report me for insult, but it’s actually serious advice to help them improve at the game. Hanabi skill is developed in layers; you need to learn basic techniques before you can learn advanced techniques.

Currently the only options for Masters to mentor those up and coming Experts are to either invite them individually, or open the table to ALL Experts, which is too large a range to be of much help for the players at 675-699.

I actually do host a lot of games for coaching up experts. 5-player masters-only games can take quite a while to fill, so 4-player expert+ games are much easier to get off the ground and I often don’t care to sit around for 20 minutes hoping for a game. It doesn’t seem to greatly penalise my rating. (But I will give a private red thumb to players who show they are not willing to learn.)

Ahh. Yeah, I'm sorry you experienced that so early on. That "Expert" player was definitely at fault for joining a game with Apprentices and being upset that they weren't at the same level of knowledge & understanding.

I’m pretty sure this player was an example of the third type of player we commonly see on BGA. There’s serious players, who play to improve their skill (and want a rating to reflect that skill, which is useful in finding partners/opponents of similar skill), and casual players who don’t care much about playing well but also not about their rating, and then there’s a group that plays for a high rating but doesn’t care to put the effort in to get it through improving their skill. They use a variety of techniques to boost their rating beyond just “play well in many games”.

Playing with low-rank players - the lower the better - and quickly abandoning any game that shows any sign of not going well was the most favoured technique for artificially boosting rating. It’s not now, because abandoning no longer lets them leave the game without losing ELO rating points.

And frankly, that change has taken a lot of the heat out of the community as far as I can see. At least for Hanabi, I’m not sure why the admins thought that more was required, at least so soon.

[Slartibartfst]

Adding my voice to the general dissatisfaction with some of these changes. In particular, I feel the ELO decay and power levelling is a negative impact on my particular BGA experience. I play with a small group of people, and sometimes we don't play a particular game for a year, don't see why I should be punished for how I use the site.

[Stroom]

You can still play against them... Elo is a meaningless metric. You don't have to play only to gain it

If Elo is meaningless for you, it is totally valid opinion, but I suggest you to leave this discussion - your opinions regarding how to tweak Elo are meaningless.

Your original claim is pointless. Other players are playing with the same constraints as well. So overall, it will even out and the rankings are still comparable. Elo is not a score that is supposed to increase indefinitely. It is a very rough approximation of your skill. Just play the games and let it rise as your own skill level increases... not by gaming the system by avoiding players who are always beating you or playing only weaker opponents who you are more likely to beat.

[DrBwaa]

It seems a like you're trying to keep an Elo leaderboard, while pretending that players will suddenly stop caring about their Elo if you add enough frustrating ways to lose it. Several of these changes outlined here seem to have been designed with no thought given to what incentives they create, or how they affect anyone other than the bad actors ostensibly being targeted.

Power Leveling
This strikes me as a complete non-solution to the stated problem. Bad actors with multiple accounts will simply make more accounts to streakbreak against. It discourages them not at all, while artificially deflating Elo for a huge number of users. Remember, users who care about their Elo won't suddenly stop caring - they will adapt to the new incentives you're creating.

• The top players on most leaderboards tend to primarily play each other. This is how any competitive game works. This change creates strong reasons for top players to avoid each other as soon as they win a game or two. This is obviously not desirable, nor a good experience for anyone.
• All multiplayer games. If I come in third in a four-player game, I am clearly not "power leveling against whoever came in fourth" but I will be penalized in my next game against them anyway. So now it's "better" for me to kick out anyone from my table who I "beat" recently. Imagine being the player who came in fourth in this game, suddenly getting booted from every other table you sit at.
• Games with small communities exacerbate the first two points. This seems to me like the most obvious flaw. If I'm a strong player of a relatively small game, or I tend to play at a low-traffic time of day, especially a multiplayer game, I'm very likely to play the same opponents over and over, and the problems get worse.

Elo Decay
I truly don't understand the motivation behind this one. Arena is already the short-term competitive mode, again this is just artificial Elo deflation - which will make for worse games on average when strong players come back from time away, with Elo ratings that simply are not accurate.

Red Thumbs
I'm extremely worried about this change, because you have made no mention of either any details, nor what tools you intend to give players to keep bad actors out of their ranked games. The Karma system is notoriously simply to sidestep, not that there are any meaningful karma gates available to players in competitive modes anyway. Red Thumbs are the only meaningful tool that players have, to keep quitters and otherwise negative players out of their games. You've given no specifics, but the other changes make it hard to trust that you've considered how normal players are using their red thumbs to improve their actual experience on the site. Ranior's post on the first page sums up my opinions very well in this regard. You have so many suggestions for improving the actual experience of playing a game here. Let's see some action on any of those.