🌿ELO System Updates

[RicardoRix]

The penny dropped a few days ago.

This is one big huge misunderstanding. They didn't mean normal ELO, they meant Arena elo decay. Throughout the space on BGA this is the only mention of this idea. It's for the Arena leaderboard to stop potential parking at the top spot.

After all BGA's 'make a suggestion' idea, and please vote the suggestion, where exactly is the suggestion for ELO decay?
It's nowhere. It's a huge mistake.
The Pairings idea is also a more blatant mistake, where they just explained in the original post how they think it would solve cheating.

This is the first big decision by the new management after original 2 left. But it's the same as always, no-one on the BGA staff plays competitively. They don't play Arena. They are very much stabbing in the dark. They don't know really understand about ELO because they only play friendly games.

After 18 pages of forum posts in one week, and some extremely controversial decisions, it would be nice if they spoke. When Sourisdudesert made these kind of announcements previously, he at-least still communicated after the initial post.

If you somehow think that it's just an idea that everyone needs time to adjust to. I would suggest you make a poll to gauge what the real reaction is.

[h_illes]

That's no proof tho. Just your general opinion.

Yes it is proof. It is called logical reasoning. It's never too late to improve and educate yourself.

Common sense would say that they are just decreasing the K factor for consecutively winning against the same person.

Yes, I agree! That's why many have been suggesting it. The trouble is, it's not what's implemented right now. You don't seem to understand what is going on.

Edit: Seriously... most players here are strongly negative and start to echo chamber off of each other's posts... without reading the original post anymore.

That's pretty rich. You are the one who doesn't understand what's going on, and have not made any effort to make a logical argument. I suggest you dedicate some of the effort you put into writing to reading and comprehending instead. Or, if you are trolling deliberately - please stop.

[anykidrated]

The penny dropped a few days ago.

This is one big huge misunderstanding. They didn't mean normal ELO, they meant Arena elo decay. Throughout the space on BGA this is the only mention of this idea. It's for the Arena leaderboard to stop potential parking at the top spot.

[/i]

This seems contrary to what was posted in the OP.

→ ELO Decay
In the past, some of the strongest players refrained from playing as they could lose ELO, attempting to prevent losing their hard obtained current rank. This lead to situations where players kept their rank without playing anymore. We clearly want to encourage you to play to keep your rank. This will also help other players to be able to compete against the best.
Doing so, a regular ELO decay is introduced to slowly drop the ELO from top ranked players that do not play anymore. The decay will be -10% at the end of the Arena Season for all Strong players and above that did not play any ranked game, but this could be adjusted later (both scope and frequency). The decay will not move player from a rank lower than Strong.

Arena doesn't have ranks such as strong, he also uses ELO in the other context in the rest of the post, and if the decay happens once at the end of a season for players who didn't play, it's nonsensical for this to mean arena(because you won't be on the leaderboard if you hadn't played anyway)

Edit: Sorry Ricardo, I think you meant BGA community suggestions, not the OP suggestion. I misread.

[PilviTheCloud]

I don't know did someone say it already, scrolled through half of the comments.

We can see the ELOs of the player when we accept the game....

[h_illes]

Not in Arena.

[ChiefPointThief]

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

You were one of the first people to comment against the changes to coops when it was announced. You clearly care about elo as it pertains to you (hanabi) but you think others shouldn't care about the changes that affected them. Why would anyone want to participate in a game that at best all they can do is break even? If bga took a 5 out of every hanabi game and only allowed you to score a max of 29pts (meaning only allowing you to break even and not actually win anything) would you still participate?

These are two completely different things. I care about elo being displayed because then I can better assume the skill level of a player. But the actual number of who is good or bad, changes over time. But the calculations changes I do not care about. If everyone is playing by the same rules, over time everyone's elo will still be comparable. Maybe today I would think that 900 elo is an indication of bearable game partner but tomorrow it might be 800. Doesn't matter i nthe grand scheme of things. If power play and elo decay affect everyone equally, it won't really matter.

The actual implementation isn't really explained well but people get very defensive without any mathematical analysis, whether it actually becomes worse or not... Not by individual games but rather by the overall system. If you only play games with a handful of players, then your elo calculation does not become comparable to the whole elo system. You are meant to play with a variety of players.

If you have 2 groups completely separated from each other and they play the game differently, one group's top player and another group's top player might end up with the same elo... but you can not compare these elos with one another as one group could just be playing on a different level. But for individual elo calculations, they might have the same score. Now if those 2 top players would play, you might see that actually there is a skill difference and the player in one group easily defeats the other group's top player. Similar things happen when you are used to playing in real life and suddenly play online - much more variety in games and more developed strategies.

You are completely contradicting yourself. You said it is MEANINGLESS and then stated reasons why it has meaning to you. Also you didn't answer my question. Do you like being put into situations in which it is impossible to win? Because that is what bga is doing to strong players right now.

Something doesnt feel right about this. I just finished a Carcassone game, we were both expert level players and I got +0 elo because it was my 6 consecative win vs my opponent. I hope you fix this. why would I play with him again if I can only lose...

At least you have 600 other expert+ players unlike us poor niche game players

[ChiefPointThief]

→ Red Thumbs for competitive play
One last thing that is going to be changed in a few weeks will be the impact of the Red Thumbs.
You can currently give a Red Thumb to any player with which you had a bad game experience. This prevents you from competing against them in ranked games or the Arena, but not in Tournaments.
This system can, and unfortunately is, used to prevent some players from competing against the best players. Considering that the Red Thumb system is being abused this way, on purpose or not, we will update the way Red Thumbs are impacting the matchmaking for the next season.

The system can as is used in the other direction: to prevent playing against very weak opponents.

Matchmaking is broken and this is a mitigation.
The Arena system thinks a 200 ELO player with 30% win rates (in a 1vs1 game) is an "Elite" player. The outcome cannot be a surprise to anyone, any half good player will wipe out this "Elite" player in a totally pointless game. Twenty minutes of life wasted.

At least you could reduce this issue my red thumbing weak players. Not anymore apparently, FML.

Looking at lower ranked players, I certainly have some people that I have an overall high % of wins against, but due to the fact that there is some luck in the game I happen to play I obviously am not expected to just always win. Pulling up at least one name I can easily recall: https://boardgamearena.com/gamestats?pl ... me_id=1225 -- I'm at 35 wins out of 51 (~68%) games, but in our lifetime of games I've LOST 67 ELO. I'm even less incentivized to play against weaker players because that loss will be higher given the change as implemented (since I'd gain less ELO during win streaks, and then the inevitable losses will take away the same amount of ELO).

The focus on competitive format for this site should be shifted towards tournaments instead of arena. You can't dodge players in tournaments. You can't have a way higher win rate, head to head match up, play 4x as many games, go against tougher opponents, and still lose the competition to someone like you can in arena. Also being able to filter by elo instead of leagues would help arena as well.

About the power leveling thing tbh you could just look at some leaderboards to find cheaters. When I saw an account w/ over 500 elo in no thanks it caught my attention considering it is a heavy luck base game and it was over 200 elo above 2nd. Each of their games had the same account in it with ridiculously low scores. Same w/ bang. Whenever I see an account in the upper 300s+ you can go to the game history and see they played against the same account in each game. Some of these players make it even more obvious by having the dummy account quit games that they still can't win even when cheating. If I'm understanding correctly in the new system these players would still get points vs the other accounts they defeat just not the dummy account correct?

[Osnofaac]

Just a few notes.

Power leveling, doesn't make sense in ARENA. You can't handpick players.
I don't even feel this is a problem, imo. When players apply such tactics and get to noticeable elo levels they get reset, e.g.: https://boardgamearena.com/playerstat?i ... 432&game=1
this player plays 99% of its carcassonne games against the same player and got 3 elo resets after being detected (reported, I imagine). typically these cases don't go unnoticed and get corrected. I don't see why others should be penalized because of a few players. In carcassonne it is common for people to play non-arena games and end up rematching a few times as practice/small competition. I've seen some high level players doing so, I've done it too.
There are players that don't like playing ARENA just because you have to go through a lot of low elo players, whilst in casual games you can filter out elo levels or even because they don't want to deal with the grind.

Elo decay
what is the need? If players don't play for long periods or never again, after a while (30 or 60 days?) they no longer show up on the elo leaderboards, it remains sort of a personal achievement for them and not something the community sees.

some of the measures feel like BGA is using a bazooka to kill a fly.


An implementation suggestion that would be rather interesting for competitive players (imo) would be to allow to filter out low elo levels in ARENA. Imagine the option of allowing to filter out elo levels up to 499 (or let's say, 299), playing only against 500+ elo (or 300+).
When you're a high level player, these low level games are not so interesting and the reward of winning those is residual - now with the powerlevelling thing it can be even more residual because many times you have consecutive wins against low elo players. when you do happen to loose, it is a huge score and elo drop. The high reward has allways been on the weaker side (as normal) but we are reducing the already rather limited outcome for more "skilled" players. This filter would only make the life harder for players, if they choose so.
Nowadays, you can filter by arena rating level (bronze, gold, etc) by indicating willingness to play away from your rating or not but not by elo. I filter in such a way to only play my rank (highest rank) and still I get players with elo <200 sometimes, it goes to show that the current rank levels don't allow those players to be filtered out. Either the game gets more ranks, however there it can be frustrating for low elo players or allow players to filter out low elo players and have a more competitive and rewarding outcomes of their games.

[Stroom]

You are completely contradicting yourself. You said it is MEANINGLESS and then stated reasons why it has meaning to you. Also you didn't answer my question. Do you like being put into situations in which it is impossible to win? Because that is what bga is doing to strong players right now.

Thanks for taking my words out of context again. Context matters.

Look what I originally replied to:

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.

The context is that he is afraid of losing elo so that's why he's not playing. In that sense, it is meaningless. Play for fun not imaginary points

In the sense of roughly knowing whether someone might be a good or bad player, it has some meaning... But this is a different context. But it never guarantees that the player actually plays up to his normal skill level. Maybe he just woke up or has been drinking. Maybe it's someone else playing under his account.

Playing only to get that little bit of elo and stopping playing in order not to lose it... No matter what system you have, players are gaming the system intentionally in order to get to the top. At the moment you just climb the ladder and you know that you can mostly only lose by playing... so you don't play until someone actually threatens your #1 spot. With decay, you are forced to keep playing. With powerplay, similarly players have been abusing the system.

Sure, their solutions might be a bit weird and they should adjust them... but every single user here has ONLY said that these changes should be removed. No-one has proposed any ways to fix these issues.

Glicko. Reducing K factor, not just removing the gained points.

[Stroom]

That's what we're arguing against lol They are *not* using the common sense fix of K factor. It actually goes 3%, 11%, at 5 ws something like 40-50%, at 6 100% (% being reduction of rating gained). You do lose rating over time. There is no fixing this short of having some alts around 100 rating to slam losses into.

Edit: The % loss is how much less rating the winner gets in a winstreak. The loser still loses the full amount. If it was K factor instead, there would be much less complaining(that being said, a 100% reduction in K factor for a 6 winstreak is insane)

But... if you have player A intentionally losing to player B, what to do then? Also, why do 2 players keep playing each other and how does one player constantly win over the other in the first place? If the elo rating would already be sufficiently different then the % loss would not even register much. And at evenly skilled elo rating, the other layer should win at least once in a 4-5 games so the % loss would not have to turn that ugly...

Sure, I can agree that only reducing the win rating by a % and not doing the same to the loss is stupid. But overall, this is not that big of a deal. It has quite minimal effect. When the season ends and new one begins, you start over, right?

Still, your loss is just a marginal amount, IF you keep playing with the same opponent and ALWAYS winning against them. And for a normal arena system, you should be playing with everyone in the first place, not with a small group of opponents.

So... let's just ask them to only change the calculation. Not to completely remove something that in general seems like a good idea to stop the system abusers from transferring elo points from one account to another.